> García Martínez describes women in the Bay Area as "soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit.”
Why on earth would anyone put something like that in a book?!
Because he was comparing the woman he was dating to his general experience.
You can look at the larger passage as important context. It’s easy to dismiss him still as a jerk, but what bothers me is the idea that one cannot have an authentic experience that isn’t totally whitewashed and ready to be used for an ad for a multinational.
Reading all of the selected quotes in that petition came off to me as thoughts he probably shouldn’t have published, but ones that many ordinary people have that aren’t total monsters. Yes he’s probably got a lot of toxic masculinity hold ups.. but so do millions and millions of people. If you read the minds of most employees at large companies and then put it into words, probably people would be fired left and right.
At some point we need to acknowledge personal thoughts aren’t always the same thing as professional interactions, and that people can also grow, learn and change.
He might not be the one for this, but I think the public response feels very snap for someone’s life. Probably almost no one signing that petition actually read his book or learned much about him in order to put things into context and perspective, yet they were easily wanting to ruin a man’s life.
NB Perhaps he deserves it, I don’t know. But I’m wanting to withhold judgement, and I don’t have enough time or cares to actually investigate him.
This book came out at a time where people were lampooning the excesses of startup culture. (e.g Disrupted and HBO's Silicon Valley).
It's my opinion García Martínez thought he would capitalize on the trend and wrote a book describing his experience in a YCombinator company that was aquihired by Facebook.
He wrote himself as a character in that genre. His writing style in general, however, seems to give him away as a blowhard - which I don't think was was his intent.
You can look at the larger passage as important context. It’s easy to dismiss him still as a jerk, but what bothers me is the idea that one cannot have an authentic experience that isn’t totally whitewashed and ready to be used for an ad for a multinational.
Reading all of the selected quotes in that petition came off to me as thoughts he probably shouldn’t have published, but ones that many ordinary people have that aren’t total monsters. Yes he’s probably got a lot of toxic masculinity hold ups.. but so do millions and millions of people. If you read the minds of most employees at large companies and then put it into words, probably people would be fired left and right.
At some point we need to acknowledge personal thoughts aren’t always the same thing as professional interactions, and that people can also grow, learn and change.
He might not be the one for this, but I think the public response feels very snap for someone’s life. Probably almost no one signing that petition actually read his book or learned much about him in order to put things into context and perspective, yet they were easily wanting to ruin a man’s life.
NB Perhaps he deserves it, I don’t know. But I’m wanting to withhold judgement, and I don’t have enough time or cares to actually investigate him.