It’s been a week of people trying to understand what is happening in technology. If you’ve been compartmentalizing: Cheers! Now let me explain to you what’s going on.
On Monday, WeWork founder Adam Neumann raised a seed round from Andreessen Horowitz for a new real estate company reportedly valued at more than $1 billion. Neumann’s return, coinciding with the largest check ever written by one of the most famous firms, was met with a flurry of reactions, given his tumultuous leadership at WeWork.
A few days earlier, Kimberly Bryant was fired from Black Girls Code, the nonprofit she founded, by the board she had appointed.
You’ve been caught up: We had a return and an expulsion event within a few days.
A common response was that women and people of color would never get the same “second chance” as Neumann, because first chances are hard enough for the historically overlooked cohort. Allison Byers, the founder of Scroobious, a platform that aims to diversify startups and make founders more daring, described the feeling as “a muffled rage”.
The returns came from the white man who misled investors and employees. The expelled was a black woman who started a non-profit organization to bring more diversity into the coding world.
If that’s where the analysis stops, that’s a disservice. as my colleague Dominic Madori Davis say it: “people talk about these things without the nuance of two things at once, but that’s the same with most online fights. They turn things and people into one-dimensional objects as if it were easy to parse.” If you’re not careful, you could scroll into an opinion that lacks the multifaceted nature of controversies.
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.