[brigadier132]

> White dude CEOs like Brian Armstrong and Jesse Powell came out hard against DEI efforts and even paid employees to leave, which led, incidentally, to morale at their companies so low it could be measured in millisieverts. But they were making money, baby, so it was all good.

> So, by all measures, Alexandr Wang’s MEI bullshit was just that, bullshit

Amazing, I don't think he gets it. His rant about white dudes while the person being critiqued is an Asian dude. You don't have to think hard about why Asian people might value merit in a system that previously penalized them for their race?

> Haje argued that Wang was a wang.

Comments like this really highlight the hypocrisy and lack of actual principle behind the stances of these people.

[unsupp0rted]

He doesn't get it. Any time one starts a sentence with "[Skin/ethnicity color] dude CEOs", that's a dead giveaway.

In his world because it's "white" it's punching-up/innocuous.

[PedroBatista]

Even by Bay Area standards, the last decade and a half has been beyond obscene by the amount and level of douchebags created and their most asinine takes and sins.

As time passes like in everything we tend to forget the bad things and imagine the past with rose colored glasses when the borrowing rates were essentially zero.

But then you interact with one of "those key people" from that era, and dear Lord.. your soul exits the chat.

Btw, Tech Crunch is and always was almost from the start a cesspool of snakeoil salesmen with zero scruples and a shitty pseudo PR firm. Everybody knew this and "everybody" with VC money played the game.

[baxtr]

Then there are the hard working people commuting every day to their jobs optimizing the products we use daily.

There are many companies like that in the valley too. They just don’t get the attention they deserve.

That’s one of the reasons I miss Steve Jobs. He delivered so much value but could also play the attention game so well.

[adamors]

You miss the Steve Jobs that colluded with Google and other big tech companies to keep wages down until they got sued by Department of Justice?

[ToucanLoucan]

Steve Jobs is the progenitor of the species of well-spoken douchebag that now infests our industry. Don't get me wrong, the turnaround he pulled off with Apple is fucking incredible and a story for the business ages, but Jesus Christ, it is so clear now that every startup CEO is desperate to be Steve Jobs, but lacking the vision that he had, resort merely to mimicking his (likely disordered) personality. Shouting at subordinates, fostering a culture of fear, and generally just being an absolute asswipe to work with.

When you have the absolutely astonishing insight into how to create and dominate markets like he had, and the numerous strokes of luck, not to mention the engineering mind of Wozniak to bring your insane ideas to life, you can get away with it. If you have anything short of that, running the Jobs playbook will get you nowhere, and rightfully so.

Edit: And that's not even touching his personal life, which was absolute trash fire.

[floren]

> Shouting at subordinates, fostering a culture of fear, and generally just being an absolute asswipe to work with.

This was one of my big takeaways reading through folklore.org: "oh man, I would have hated working for that prick"

[brandur]

Also notable that the author didn't link Haje's (the TechCrunch person who railed against Alexander Wang) actual writing because he knew it doesn't make either Haje, or his argument in favor of Haje, look good. So, here it is:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240628212036/https://techcrunc...

The Pulitzer Prize-worthy content in question:

> I would invite him — and those supporting them — to fuck all the way off. You misunderstand me. You thought I wanted you to fuck only partially the way off. Please, read my lips. I was perfectly clear: Off you fuck. All the way. Remove head from ignorant ass, then fuck all the way off.

This is the quality of writing whose loss the author is arguing is why TechCrunch has lost its global relevance. A perfect inversion of the truth if I've ever seen one.

[rurp]

Yeah that was a weird pivot in the article. I enjoyed it up to that point, but the strident defense of that terrible Haje article seemed out of left field; like I'd switched to reading Twitter for a couple paragraphs. Of all the things that has hurt TC, getting rid of Haje for that article seems like it should be at the very bottom of the list.