Equally as trashy and sick as Bumfights, the sort of thing that might happen in the early scenes of a documentary exposing the rise and fall of another fraudulent startup. I'm sure he'll be in the 30 under 30 soon.
"We need to find smart people who will work 100 hours a week like Musk"
"How do we do that?"
"Let's ask them to tattoo our logo before we'll consider interviewing them"
"brilliant. That shows the kind of commitment we need"
"The press will be fantastic as well"
"lets do it"
> We are bold, we take risks, and we do things that haven’t been done before.
This is a very annoying line. Risk for the sake of risk is self-destructive. The risk-reward profile is what matters, and people respect risk taking with large upside.
Having your company’s logo tattooed on a bunch of random people is zero or negative upside.
There seems to be a line of thinking that past unicorn startups had bad risk-reward profiles, and therefore a good founder should be taking lots of bad risks. If they take good risks, they will never succeed and become a unicorn. Very "tres commas".
So, demonstrating there's no risk too outlandish for you becomes a form of social signaling to investors.
It's the kind of action founders imagine who would be willing to give optional tattoos to any of their their proud employees after all their unusually generous equity packages have skyrocketed, matured, and been cashed in.
But they know they don't have what it takes for that.
The fantasy series, Farseer trilogy, and beyond (great read) has "Map-Faces". People subjugated to slavery, wearing their current owner's crest on their cheeks so everyone immediately knows who they belong to. Of course, when traded/sold to another, means yet another "map".
Seems like the valley is getting there and dropping all pretense pretty rapidly.
What purpose is that? Are you claiming they aren't looking to hire people, and just want their company name out there for other purposes? Or that having this story somehow helps their actual hiring goals (e.g. by dissuading people who think that this is awful from applying, or that it will actually make people want to apply)?
I can think of several purposes someone might claim that this has. All of them seem pretty dubious to me though, so if you think it's obvious, I would be interested in hearing what you think it is.
I could imagine how a potential interviewee might say something like “I’d tattoo myself with your logo for a chance at a job” and a CEO might respond “Hell, yeah! That’s the kind of energy I’m looking for.”
What I can’t understand is how in a whole executive team, no one thought bringing a tattoo artist to tattoo potential interviewees with was a stupid idea. This wasn’t an accident, or surprise, like a tattoo artist just happened to be there and things got wild. They specifically brought a tattoo artist to do this. What the fuck.
> I could imagine how a potential interviewee might say something like “I’d tattoo myself with your logo for a chance at a job” and a CEO might respond “Hell, yeah! That’s the kind of energy I’m looking for.”
If I were that CEO I'd avoid that person because of their very poor judgement, lack of boundaries, and questionable self respect.
That you think it's even on the edge of normal describes the current balance of power in the tech job market in a nutshell, though.
There's hundreds of thousands of programmers out of work from recent layoffs. Getting a small tattoo to stand out in a crowd doesn't necessarily signal bad judgement. It's more likely to be a calculated sacrifice due to desperation. Other people might have a beer, talk with the artist while they are getting inked, then enjoy having a stupid story to tell others. I wouldn't do it in my current situation, but I don't know what I would do if I was homeless and hungry.
Also, you did the counterfactual wrong. You can't simply say "if I were that CEO" and then change the ethics of the situation and of the person and who has agency in the situation.
Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't want to work for this guy. But that doesn't mean I'm going to shit on people who would consider it, even if they have to do something I would consider degrading.
They didn't think it was a bad idea because they don't have a sense of right and wrong. If something is potentially profitable and technically legal they will do it. This is what YC screens for.
Group think. Monkey see, monkey do. It's actually remarkably difficult to be the only one to dissent unless you grew up in a culture where dissent is encouraged.
The people who work at a company all were filtered from the hiring process of the founder. If his filter included sycophants and suck-ups, he filtered out any dissent or critical thinking that could challenge his decisions. It's easy to get an exec team who doesn't diverge from decisions of the guy at the top, but obviously that much homogeneity / thought alignment comes with a cost.
Anyway, I'm glad this was publicized. Some rumored or one bad GlassDoor review can be easily overlooked; this will be a stain on the CEO's reputation for a while.
I so yearn for "the good ol' days" when "tinfoil hatters" were ridiculed and statements like yours were still proper humor and not almost logical and halfway believable reality. I mean, lizards are cold-blooded and might benefit from a hotter Earth like we're currently "terraforming" towards after all...
Ummm... Excuse me while I run out and buy another roll or two of tinfoil...
From a job listing I saw here on the front page today. Instantly repulsive:
> About the role
> "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success"
> You gotta be in founder mode.
> Next.js web / React Native app. / Supabase, firebase, and Prisma. / Nest.js for WhatsApp / Open AI and Anthropic APIs for agents / Solidity and web3.js for Smart contracts. / A lot of Typescript.
It is a reference, but seemingly also sincere, at least to a non-trivial extent.
Not going to click on any of the articles to avoid driving traffic to this…conflagration of poor judgment colliding head on with amorality…but there’s a part of me that wonders if the tattoos were all done with the same needle. Bear with me here. This is not a case study in good judgment. Extending the logic is purely academic.
Ew. At what point do we just decide that this whole community has eaten itself? Remember when a "YC founder" was a diligent nerd just trying to make something people want and get to ramen-profitable before the runway from their tiny seed check ran out?
Now being a founder is such a valuable status that it's attracting people who thinking that ghoulish worshipful body art (on the bodies of people afflicted with the same status envy, it needs to be pointed out) is a great idea.
Was that image of the plucky hacker shooting their shot actually something based in reality or something cooked up to get people interested in founding a company?
Look at the inaugural YC class. Do those people today resemble what you're describing?
It is important to have critical literacy about things like this. Describing a narrative that isn't consistent with reality in order to convince people to do something is not unique to Silicon Valley. I'm not encouraging wholesale cynicism but just a healthy level of skepticism.
> The founder of Corgi, a YC insurance tech company with a $4 billion reported valuation, known for running a Corgi cafe without any dogs, recently said (opens in new tab) that two-thirds of his early staff members have a company tattoo.
absolutely contrary. You are who you surround yourself with. These people have a private social network called bookface. Hidden from the rest of the world
It sounds sinister when you say it like that, but I've got private group chats with my friends that are "hidden from the rest of the world" and someone shares pictures of their dog or music they liked. I think tattooing people with a company logo for an interview is fucked up, but let's not pull out the guillotines just because certain people are having secret encrypted private conversations with each other.
If you're advertising that you're going to permanently mark your almost certainly transient brand on desperate people for the promise of just an interview, I think it's fair to wonder what you'd prefer to keep hidden. In your case it's all puppies and rainbows, but presumably your public face is also quite a bit milder than, "Sure get the tattoo and maybe I'll see if you can make it to the next round of interviews, hope you're ready to work 7-day weeks if you make it!"
Lets be real, they aren't. This is a community that was notorious for sycophancy, desperation, and cruelty for quite some time now if the success of the show 'Silicon Valley' indicates anything. This is the community that keeps justifying limitless greed with the belief that we're building the future, while increasingly the future being built is defined by terms like, "Enshittification."