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This article first appeared on the Foundation for Economic Education site. No one should be shy about the need to love entrepreneurs, startups, big ideas, wanting to make a change, and striking out into the world to fill an identified hole. There’s a lot of risk involved in that. But risk and its subsequent reward can coexist with human decency. In fact, in the interest of long-term sustainability, it’s absolutely necessary. Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now Ideas and innovations, plus initial capital, are amazing and transformative. However, the company culture that goes along with this truly does matter. If you get this wrong, you risk everything (like, really, everything ). Our new world of social media and public, instantaneous judgment – for better or worse – has decided that. In other words, you can’t found what the New York Times has dubbed a “bro co.” and expect to be unaccountable to customers, employees, and investors forever. Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Uber Travis Kalanick wears a helmet as he speaks at an event in New Delhi on December 16, 2016. MONEY SHARMA/AFP/Getty What is a bro co.? It’s a startup that feels more like a frat than a business. A place where culture is as important as profits, where success is more important than sustainability, where ethics and morals are as spuriously followed as they are in any given group of young men suddenly handed tons of money via Kickstarter. It’s fairly easy to spot. You probably know a couple people personally involved in one. I do. But these companies seem cool and you can’t quite pin what your feeling of uneasiness is based on, so you shrug it off and assume you’re just being cynical. But you’re not, and as woke employees on the inside could tell you, you’re correct. You can identify a bro co. on its surface by its baseball hat-wearing execs who don’t really know what they’re doing but look good doing it, its jeans-and-screen-tee-wearing men (and don’t forget the flip-flops) who seem to have known the execs since their first kegger, the lack of women other than the necessary token employee who’s probably in charge of social media, the absence of old or minority employees, the borderline alcoholic tendencies of those employed, and the general feel of immaturity and harassment. What’s the Problem? Okay, this seems a little sketch, but doesn’t necessarily mean failure. So why not run a company this way? Because eventually a company founded to make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, while drunk as possible, will be unable to stagger on. Companies like these tend to flare up and die out quickly if the leadership is not replaced with more mature counterparts. They seem totally awesome when they’re new, but eventually the unsustainable contracts, dubiously legal activity, high turnover rate, increasingly poor public image, and bad money management become too much, and the bro co. implodes in a cloud of hops and blame-gaming. There are a lot of small bro cos. that failed before they really made it big (sometimes money runs out faster than you think). One of the biggest bro co. flare-ups just happened a couple months ago in the Bahamas: the infamous Fyre Festival. Rapper Ja Rule and his 25-year old business partner decided he wanted to do what all the cool kids were doing, aka throw a music festival filled with celebrities. With zero experience and apparently no knowledge of the existence of weather, their festival dissolved into total chaos as soon as its first guests arrived, and it only got worse with time. But there’s another big one now in the news: Uber. The Uber Frat First of all, employees “are asked to subscribe to 14 core values” – culture on par with business success. In mid-February of 2017, public accusations of sexual harassment started coming out. Former employee Susan Fowler wrote about her year-long time at Uber and described being harassed by her manager, the resulting lack of HR action, and her experience with management’s attempts to shush her because the manager was a “high performer.” Over the course of her year at Uber, Fowler met other women in the company who said they had also been harassed, often by that same manager. There was no reaction to any of these instances except against the women themselves, and a few higher-ups – all with accusations against them – apparently leaving of their own volition. When Fowler joined Uber, the employee demographic was 25 percent women. When she left, she calculated it to be 3 percent. For a company the size of Uber, that statistic barely makes sense even if the company is sexist in its hiring process. In late February, Google sued Uber for stealing self-driving car technology. The very next day, one of Uber’s self-driving cars ran a red light on a busy street. Uber’s response was to blame human error, but that was before people knew the car was autonomous. Then, in early March we learned that Uber has been lying about their cars’ sophistication – they can barely drive themselves a mile at a time before a person takes over. Whatever gets you ahead, right? About a week later, video evidence of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick losing his temper at an Uber driver came out. In his public apology, Kalanick said it was his “first time admitting he was willing to admit he needs leadership help.” Sounds like a teenager’s ego. But perhaps this isn’t surprising for Uber since another manager threatened to beat an employee to death with a baseball bat. At the end of March, Uber’s President had had enough, and quit. If at the time you thought, “That isn’t a good sign,” you were right: Kalanick just resigned as CEO this week, just two months after their President left. His investors had had enough of him and the bad press he was bringing to their company. This is not to say that everything Uber does is bad, or that all its employees are unhappy or mistreating others. Uber got ridesharing off the ground like none other, opened the market to other companies, gave hundreds of thousands of drivers the opportunity to earn money, and helped countless people get from place to place, including me. And of course there’s UberEats (which is arguably even better than Uber itself, because food). But Uber is an example of how the actions of higher-ups can make even an otherwise-well-working startup go wrong. This dramatic management change could bring new life and culture to the company – and serve as an excellent example of how the market can adapt and improve. Learn from (Their) Mistakes We’ve all heard that you should learn from your mistakes. One of the most underrated sayings is that you should learn from other people’s. If you’re thinking of beginning a startup of your own, or if you already have one, learn from the ones that have failed. Look objectively at your bro friends and their startups. Look at that one bro’s startup downtown that looks awesome yet vaguely unsustainable. Watch them and their employees to see if you detect “bro co” before investing in them or asking to follow their business model. To be fair, some of these might succeed. Not all bros are necessarily bad at business. But learn what you can and be honest with how you act and how you want to run your own startup. As Uber so clearly demonstrates, it hurts you in the long run to lie about your business. And maybe don’t threaten your employees with a baseball bat. Eileen L. Wittig is an Associate Editor and author of the Lazy Millennial column at FEE. |
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The Islamic State militant group (ISIS), the U.S.-led coalition and the Russia-backed forces of the Assad regime are trapping thousands of civilians in a “deadly labyrinth” in the eastern Syrian city of Raqqa, Amnesty International said on Wednesday. A Kurdish-Arab alliance backed by the air power of the U.S.-led coalition is besieging the city that laid the foundation for the group to announce a caliphate for the world’s Muslims straddling the Iraqi-Syrian border. Raqqa became the ISIS de facto capital after its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi made himself caliph of the Islamic State in July 2014. The Kurdish-Arab coalition, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, has seized half of the city’s neighborhoods from the jihadist group in a two-month offensive that has been slowed by the jihadist group’s sniper fire, vehicle suicide bombs and booby traps. The U.N. estimates that between 10,000 and 50,000 civilians remain inside the city. The Syrian regime has been conducting airstrikes on villages south of the city. Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now “As the battle to wrest Raqqa from Islamic State intensifies, thousands of civilians are trapped in a deadly labyrinth where they are under fire from all sides. Knowing that ISIS use civilians as human shields, SDF and U.S. forces must redouble efforts to protect civilians, notably by avoiding disproportionate or indiscriminate strikes and creating safe exit routes,” said Donatella Rovera, Senior Crisis Response Adviser at Amnesty International, who led the rights group’s investigation. “Things will only get more dangerous as the battle reaches its final stages in the city centre. More can and must be done to preserve the lives of civilians trapped in the conflict and to facilitate their safe passage away from the battleground.” The rights group and other monitors have expressed concern about mounting civilian casualties in and around Raqqa. Strike monitor Airwars reported on Tuesday that the U.S.-led coalition under President Donald Trump has killed more civilians in seven months than in the previous two-and-a-half years that the coalition was conducting strikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. It said the U.S.-dominated multinational force has been responsible for a minimum of 5,117 civilian deaths since August 2014, with about 55 percent of them occurring under the Trump's administration. Smoke billows in an eastern area of the embattled northern Syrian city of Raqqa on August 15, 2017, as Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a U.S. backed Kurdish-Arab alliance, battle to retake the city from the Islamic State (ISIS) group. Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty Survivors and witnesses told the rights group that civilians are facing the threat of ISIS snipers who target anyone who flees, strikes by the Syrian regime and the U.S.-led coalition and ISIS using them as human shields to deter the strikes. Civilians who manage to escape the city also face suspicion that they were members of ISIS and persecution at the hands of the SDF forces, as many did in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul at the hands of Iraqi security forces. ISIS’s religious police, known as the hisbah, have also tried to prevent civilians fleeing with threats and intimidation. So too have ISIS fighters, according to one survivor. “They [ISIS] came to knock on our door and told us we had half an hour to get to the Old City. If you refused they accused you of being a PKK [Kurdish Workers Party] agent and threatened to take you to the prison,” Reem, who fled the Daraiya area, said. One of the key routes out of Raqqa is across the Euphrates River by boat. But survivors told Amnesty that the U.S.-led coalition is targeting boats crossing the stretch of water. The coalition’s top commander, Lieutenant General Stephen J. Townsend, said last month that the coalition forces “shoot every boat we find.” A Kurdish fighter from the People's Protection Units looks at smoke rising after an coalition airstrike in Raqqa, Syria, on June 16. Reuters/Goran Tomasevic/File Photo “Crossing the river has been a key escape route for civilians fleeing the conflict in Raqqa, so striking ‘every boat'—on the erroneous assumption that any boat will be carrying IS fighters or weapons—is indiscriminate and prohibited by the laws of war,” said Rovera. It is not only civilians leaving Raqqa in a state of disrepair. The U.S.-led coalition said last week that ISIS fighters emerging from Raqqa were “emaciated,” “malnourished” and high on drugs. The city has been besieged with airstrikes long before the latest offensive and the humanitarian conditions inside the city for residents are dire. “As water turns off, as the ability for food to, you know, come in and out of these cities—it makes it very, very difficult to sustain oneself,” coalition spokesman Col. Ryan Dillon said. The coalition says the jihadist group has formed a network of tunnels underneath Raqqa to help launch counter-attacks against coalition forces, or to escape the city. Raqqa was the site of several filmed executions of western hostages, including American journalists James Foley and Stephen Sotloff, as well as British nationals Alan Henning and David Haines. After the group overran the city in January 2014, it imposed its brutal brand of Islamic law, lashing, beheading and executing opponents, and instilling fear among the estimated 200,000-strong population of the city at the time of its capture. 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