I'm sure this article only tells 10% of the story from both sides, but the fact remains that some people entrusted him with his money and that his behavior made them uncomfortable, which ultimately made them remove him from the position. I find all of this unsurprising.
"Back in San Francisco, Zhu was preparing for an important meeting with a prominent investor group. Believing that limited quantities of LSD would improve his pitch, Zhu, who had never before used the drug, decided to try the microdosing plan. He took what he thought was a small amount of LSD shortly before the meeting."
I don't know if that the's whole story necessarily, but that and the "didn't stop talking to a reporter about internal matters after being directly asked to" is enough for me to discard the "The most likely reason Zhu was fired was anti-Asian bias" claim.
On the other hand the valuation of the company was 2 billion so he did increase their investment. It’s a two way street. They give you money, you deliver profit. I don’t agree that just because you are uncomfortable with someone you get to fire them because you entrusted him with money. I agree that it happens a lot. :D
An interesting point, but there's a difference between "valued at $2B" and "delivered a profit in a bank account". It takes a lot of trust to bridge that gap.
Such is the story of the Mexican fisherman and the harvard MBA:
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, “only a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.” The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”
“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
except microdosing lsd is more like drinking coffee than smoking weed in terms of effects on your ability to do your job. He did it in hopes of enhancing his output
> His co-founder, Andrew Boni, and the company’s entire board told him he was losing his job, primarily because he had taken LSD before a meeting in 2019.
From the article, looks like that wasn't the actual reason. The actual reason is that Zhu preferred his own personal brand PR (with heavy social justice activism overtones, accusing anybody who challenges him of racism because he happens to be of Asian descent) to the good of the company, and was unwilling to reconcile the two.
His mistake wasn’t in taking the wrong amount of LSD. His mistake was testing it for the first time in an important meeting. But it seems this is a common type of mistake for him: taking unnecessary risks for himself rather than necessary risks for his company.
This wasnt his first mistake, this was the one that finally pushed things past acceptable comfort for other decision makers. Founder/ceo of a startup is high risk, high reward and he lost on his gamble. It happens all the time. The company will continue without him.
The board does not remove a CEO it is happy with for something this trivial, because it is too disruptive to the company. This was probably used as a pretext in a power struggle.
- We love our CEO! We'll do anything to keep this boss happy
- We're stuck with a loser, and we need to make a change
- We're in the middle. This CEO has real strengths, which we appreciate, and real weaknesses, which concern us. We're regularly taking stock of the situation, and we'd probably like an orderly transition down the road. But we're probably okay for now.
The third situation is quite common. And in those cases, you don't really need a "pretext" or a "power struggle." You just need the board to say: "We've tolerated a lot, but maybe we've tolerated too much. This new incident is not what we'd be seeing if we had the right CEO."
Getting zonked on a class A drug during an important meeting with investors - so zonked you can't even read your own figures on a whiteboard - is no trivial matter.
Yeh my thought too there's a lot of shady shit that goes on in the VC world.
I think he could have done with advice from a mentor who wasn't at all involved with the vc side - even on how formal meetings like board should be run.
He is right about different cultures around how meetings are run though.
The real lesson is,and been for a while, if you do a start-up, do like Zuckerberg and The Google boys. If you want your company to stay your company, watch that vital stock and keep the majority votes.
Zuckerberg:
“So one of the things that I’ve been lucky about in building this company is ... I kind of have voting control of the company, and that’s something I focused on early on. And it was important because, without that, there were several points where I would’ve been fired. For sure, for sure,”
In the vast majority of cases this will preclude you from getting investment money. Sure - some companies can get away with that, but not a lot of them.
It’s normal to give up, what, 10% a round? That means you can afford to give up voting rights on the first few rounds. If you have a strong enough trajectory at that point you may be in a position to make demands to keep more voting power.
Counterpoint: Other investors have as much incentive to maximize the value of the company as I do. Besides ego, why should I care if someone is brought in who can do a better job. I still get to keep all my shares, and don’t even have to show up to work anymore.
Zuck in the Verge article discussed how much pressure there was to sell to Yahoo for 1B. For an average start-up, it might be being pushed to sell for, say, someM when you could wait and chance on 10xsomeM if you had the votes.
The guy trips on LSD before investors, refuses to cooperate with people who work with him, and then blames getting fired on his race? No matter what real biases may be involved, those are things that would get a lot of people fired, no matter their race or anything else.
Got high before an investor meeting, brought internal board discussions to the press, was unfamiliar with business performance ("Most of the board also wanted Zhu to commit to memorizing key company metrics as part of a performance improvement plan"), he "believed that he and the company were too focused on sales and money at the expense of altruistic goals," and the guy who replaced him is also East Asian.
Naturally, he presents the issue as being all about him getting ousted for being Asian.
There's no shame in taking LSD or being fired from the company you helped found because you think different as Steve Jobs might say if he were still alive. It's almost the ultimate homage to Jobs. I'm sure Zhu will be fine. I can't talk to people on LSD. I'm surprised no one told him about set and setting.
That is exactly the problem. They cargo cult Steve Jobs' personality, fashion or some other aspect, but they don't deliver Steve Jobs kind of results. It ends up being cringey at best and disastrous for their company at worst.
I have seen this before with CxOs and owners who decided their company would be "just like Apple" and they would be "just like Steve Jobs". They read how Steve Jobs was an asshole, so they just started acting like assholes towards everyone waiting for the fame and fortune to follow.
I don't admire Steve Jobs's personality, but I find myself talking about him all the time, for two reasons:
1) Steve Jobs had a vision for the appearance, function, and marketability of his products, and enforced his tyrannical will on his team until that vision was met, or at least it was impossible to enforce any more. The fact that his vision changed along the way or that he was inconsistent at times isn't as important as the fact that he was a central authority that was allowed to keep the resultant products consistent and stable. People who try to behave like Steve Jobs rarely have the level of vision that he did, and mimic his behavior rather than his principles.
2) Everything the teams under Steve Jobs produced has been cargo-cult mimicked ad nauseam by people today, to the point where every modern software looks like someone tried to redesign Apple software from memory. Unfortunately, it all sucks (compare Jira to Windows 95 Email in terms of form and its relation to function).
That's not only with Jobs. There are some brilliant people who are assholes - and many brilliant people that aren't. But the assholes get the headlines. So people decide "I want to be brilliant, why don't I start with being an asshole? Seems like the easiest way..."
The most damaging legacy of Steve Jobs is convincing millions of people that if you’re a genius you have a right to be a huge asshole; and conversely, if you’re being a huge asshole it must be because you’re a genius.
If dosed correctly (it takes time to find it and depends on the person) micro-dosing (usually around 5 - 20 ug per dose) an obvious effect in not as apparent as you might expect.
For me, 5 to 10 is enough. I don‘t actually want to feel the body high when microdosing. Precisely because it should feel like a normal day. Except your perception, creativity and emotional balance is heightened.
Trying a new drug for the first time right before a high-stakes meeting sounds incredibly stupid. Couldn't he just allocate a week-end to test it out beforehand?
But I don't think he was fired just for that...
Not to mention that LSD does not make you better at communication while on it.. Isn't the trope that leaders go on a hiatus and do LSD for ideation, not for performance?
>The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson.
>In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California.
>I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our Sun. And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we are not alone.
>I knew that life on planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced. But we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation.
>It seemed to me the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propagating to colonize the universe, and life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness.
>But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below.
>The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance and different languages. Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathmeticians, and economists all have separate pools of knowledge, but are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections.
>My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the curvature of the Earth’s horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity toward its center, such that every one of us is standing at the very apex. Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the “Blue Marble” team.
>How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I would look for the weak link and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper.
>It occurred to me the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem, but we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures. But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself.
>Knowledge, it seemed to me, consists of the “How” connections between pieces of information, the cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result. Science is a systematic attempt to discover the “How” connections.
>Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed, the bigger perspective of the “Why” connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another?
>I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information leading to knowledge leading to wisdom.
>This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard, a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas using new interactive media called HyperCard stacks.
>Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based scripting made HyperCard flexible and easy to use.
>It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August 1987, and included it free with every Mac so any user could create and share HyperCard stacks. Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created.
>HyperCard was a precurser to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the worldwide web. Six years later Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.
Readit News
"Back in San Francisco, Zhu was preparing for an important meeting with a prominent investor group. Believing that limited quantities of LSD would improve his pitch, Zhu, who had never before used the drug, decided to try the microdosing plan. He took what he thought was a small amount of LSD shortly before the meeting."
That's just plain stupid.
I prefer to smoke weed and hang at the beach, so I don't chase investor money, or make myself responsible for the wellbeing of full-time employees.
Is it limiting, absolutely.
Would I rather work myself to death now so I can... one day (maybe, dad died at 50 so...) one day maybe do the same thing... Lol
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, “only a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.” The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”
“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
From the article, looks like that wasn't the actual reason. The actual reason is that Zhu preferred his own personal brand PR (with heavy social justice activism overtones, accusing anybody who challenges him of racism because he happens to be of Asian descent) to the good of the company, and was unwilling to reconcile the two.
Hard to say he lost overall if he is walking away with 8-9 figure equity.
- We love our CEO! We'll do anything to keep this boss happy
- We're stuck with a loser, and we need to make a change
- We're in the middle. This CEO has real strengths, which we appreciate, and real weaknesses, which concern us. We're regularly taking stock of the situation, and we'd probably like an orderly transition down the road. But we're probably okay for now.
The third situation is quite common. And in those cases, you don't really need a "pretext" or a "power struggle." You just need the board to say: "We've tolerated a lot, but maybe we've tolerated too much. This new incident is not what we'd be seeing if we had the right CEO."
The article has a specific quote which would indicate there's some disconnect between the average board and this ceo.
>> He believed that he and the company were too focused on sales and money at the expense of altruistic goals
This is an obvious point of conflict with a board, which would not align itself with a CEO who said that even privately.
I think he could have done with advice from a mentor who wasn't at all involved with the vc side - even on how formal meetings like board should be run.
He is right about different cultures around how meetings are run though.
Zuckerberg:
“So one of the things that I’ve been lucky about in building this company is ... I kind of have voting control of the company, and that’s something I focused on early on. And it was important because, without that, there were several points where I would’ve been fired. For sure, for sure,”
Source: The Verge
That often isn’t the case. I personally know of situations where CEOs were pushed out and recapped to effectively little.
Naturally, he presents the issue as being all about him getting ousted for being Asian.
That is exactly the problem. They cargo cult Steve Jobs' personality, fashion or some other aspect, but they don't deliver Steve Jobs kind of results. It ends up being cringey at best and disastrous for their company at worst.
I have seen this before with CxOs and owners who decided their company would be "just like Apple" and they would be "just like Steve Jobs". They read how Steve Jobs was an asshole, so they just started acting like assholes towards everyone waiting for the fame and fortune to follow.
1) Steve Jobs had a vision for the appearance, function, and marketability of his products, and enforced his tyrannical will on his team until that vision was met, or at least it was impossible to enforce any more. The fact that his vision changed along the way or that he was inconsistent at times isn't as important as the fact that he was a central authority that was allowed to keep the resultant products consistent and stable. People who try to behave like Steve Jobs rarely have the level of vision that he did, and mimic his behavior rather than his principles.
2) Everything the teams under Steve Jobs produced has been cargo-cult mimicked ad nauseam by people today, to the point where every modern software looks like someone tried to redesign Apple software from memory. Unfortunately, it all sucks (compare Jira to Windows 95 Email in terms of form and its relation to function).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Nguyen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs
https://collapsed.co/startups/color-labs
https://www.fastcompany.com/1784823/bill-nguyen-the-boy-in-t...
https://www.fastcompany.com/1742613/how-colors-bill-nguyen-w...
If dosed correctly (it takes time to find it and depends on the person) micro-dosing (usually around 5 - 20 ug per dose) an obvious effect in not as apparent as you might expect.
For me, 5 to 10 is enough. I don‘t actually want to feel the body high when microdosing. Precisely because it should feel like a normal day. Except your perception, creativity and emotional balance is heightened.
I would love to work for someone like this, but since I just retired, not really a thing any more.
I wouldn’t assume this, or that they’re worth the same.
https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp...
>The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson.
>In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California.
>I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our Sun. And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we are not alone.
>I knew that life on planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced. But we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation.
>It seemed to me the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propagating to colonize the universe, and life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness.
>But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below.
>The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance and different languages. Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathmeticians, and economists all have separate pools of knowledge, but are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections.
>My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the curvature of the Earth’s horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity toward its center, such that every one of us is standing at the very apex. Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the “Blue Marble” team.
>How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I would look for the weak link and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper.
>It occurred to me the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem, but we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures. But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself.
>Knowledge, it seemed to me, consists of the “How” connections between pieces of information, the cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result. Science is a systematic attempt to discover the “How” connections.
>Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed, the bigger perspective of the “Why” connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another?
>I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information leading to knowledge leading to wisdom.
>This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard, a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas using new interactive media called HyperCard stacks.
>Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based scripting made HyperCard flexible and easy to use.
>It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August 1987, and included it free with every Mac so any user could create and share HyperCard stacks. Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created.
>HyperCard was a precurser to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the worldwide web. Six years later Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.