I have found it nearly impossible to look away from the continuing crisis in Ukraine, a democratic country that has been invaded by its neighbor and longtime aggressor Russia. It is a gripping and tragic narrative being broadcast in real time, which led me to spend much of the past week talking to a range of cybersecurity and disinformation experts about the implications.
This is an internet-fueled conflict like no other before, in much more profound ways than just how well the Ukraine president, Volodymyr Zelensky, appears wearing a bulletproof vest amid the rubble or how much the Russian leader Vladimir Putin resembles a Bond villain — cue the weirdly long table and menacing military thugs on one end — in a battle of social media memes.
In that contest, it is no contest: Zelensky is the winner. He’s gotten a big assist from the creative use of mobile phone clips from average Ukrainians, expertly chronicling their pain and the destructive wake of Russian attacks to generate a flood of support. While some of the stuff making the rounds might be dubious, like the “Ghost of Kyiv” fighter pilot, much of it has an immediacy that is captivating. This is perhaps the first conflict at this scale where the world can see it unfold in real time on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other big platforms.
But as much as these clips inspire empathy, the lasting impact of watching a war play out on social media is unclear. There has been plenty of suffering around the world over the past few years in places like Sudan and Yemen that has not, for lack of a better word, gone viral like the invasion of Ukraine. Inevitably the twitchy and reductive news cycle will move on.
Russia has tried for the better part of the past decade to sow distrust and acrimony, as well as falsehoods, online across Europe and the United States. And while its leaders have relied internally on state-sponsored media, like RT, to control spin within its own population, it has also spawned and funded a plethora of other online media to try to influence the West.
It’s been a nice ride for Russia, even if it has been hell for the rest of us. But that’s over, I think, as those who have been subject to such abuse have turned the tables, including the U.S. government and also the giant tech companies that until now have allowed these often-miraculous online tools to be misused and abused. What a difference a week makes! What’s particularly promising is that what we’re seeing from Ukrainians is the antidote to Russian agitprop — and it’s winning.
Now Putin has to operate in plain sight, because tech giants have decided this incursion gives them the moral high ground to employ new punitive measures beyond simple de-platforming. The change of heart among tech companies shows that it would be easy enough to just block the obvious troll efforts elsewhere, but other arenas are a lot grayer and shift relentlessly — everything from election lies to anti-vax info, which conflict with the larger concept of free speech. That ideal has been expertly and cynically manipulated, particularly by Facebook.
But it’s about time Big Tech made some of the difficult choices to show the world what they stand for. That’s what the former Facebook information security techie Alex Stamos told me in a live chat on Twitter this week. I call it editing and others call it taking responsibility, but the moves taking place in Russia by tech companies now point in some interesting new directions.
Most compelling to me is a more robust focus on “de-amplification,” which is to minimize the reach of certain content. That may sound awfully close to what some conservatives have called “shadow banning” — a practice that apps like Instagram and others have denied doing — the capability to bury or remove content has always been there, be it through tweaking algorithms or design changes.
Architecture is how the Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen — featured at President Biden’s State of the Union address this week — termed it in a Sway interview with me last year. “I really think we are way at the beginning in terms of thinking about what to do with these problems, because Facebook has done a really good job of distracting us with the censorship debate,” she said. “So we are very hotly arguing over, should you take off the platform XYZ content? Is there enough censorship, not enough censorship, when, in reality, the things we should be talking about are about platform design choices.”
In just a few days, tech has shown it can make meaningful and tough choices about who can use its platforms and how they can be used and make the world a better place in the bargain — a silver lining amid all this gloom in Ukraine.
4 Questions
This week I reached out to Ali Partovi, a longtime tech entrepreneur whose latest effort is Neo Accelerator, a new start-up creator that is trying to reinvent the approach to mentorship and innovation. I’ve edited his answers.
What has changed in the start-up sector and in the investment landscape, especially with venture capital? Do they, like finance, need to be decentralized?
There’s never been a better time in history to start a company. The start-up world is larger, more vibrant, and more varied than ever. It has subsectors with diverging needs. As a result, investors are becoming more specialized. For example, while capital is abundant, access to it isn’t distributed equally: Some founders can raise money easily, whereas others struggle to get funded. Incredible start-ups sprouting in emerging markets have different strengths and needs than Silicon Valley companies.
The investment landscape has shifted to serve these different needs, and start-up accelerators are no exception. For example, Y Combinator appeals to founders with less access to capital. Today, it focuses on large and lucrative emerging markets like Africa and Latin America. The fund is 70 percent international, 90 percent male, and 100 percent online. An online academy is ideal for a global program of its scale: YC graduates 2,000 people a year. This focus diverges from YC’s origins as a tight-knit community. If Patrick and John Collison were starting Stripe today, I wonder if they’d drop out of M.I.T. and Harvard for a program that graduates more people than those colleges. Neo Accelerator will appeal to strong technical founders who have no trouble raising capital — by offering a more intimate, in-person community of 20 teams and a more relevant demo day focused on recruiting. Today, these founders aren’t applying to any other accelerator.
Why is there a need to remake the Y Combinator model, which has been a real touchstone of tech start-ups? Is it antiquated, or does everything need to be disrupted?
The world has changed, and the strongest tech founders don’t need today’s accelerators. They face new challenges and need new solutions. At Neo, we’re taking on the task of making the accelerator relevant to them again.
In 2008, Airbnb applied to Y Combinator as a lifeline: they needed the cash. If the Airbnb co-founders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nate Blecharczyk were starting today, they could get funding within days just by changing their Twitter bios to “working on something new.” They wouldn’t need a three-month program with a demo day to raise money. Capital is more abundant than ever, and Zoom has made it easier to raise. Meanwhile, tech talent is scarcer than ever. Start-ups desperately need help recruiting engineers, which is what Neo does. Since 2017, we’ve built an awesome talent pipeline and convinced hundreds of star engineers to join start-ups.
Building on this track record, we’ve reimagined Neo Accelerator’s “demo day” to be more like a career fair. Instead of pitching investors, imagine pitching an audience of exceptional engineers and scoring meetings with candidates interested in joining you. That’s something every tech founder would want. Starting a company is a lonely experience, especially for people early in their careers, and Covid lockdowns have left us all craving human contact. Unlike any other accelerator, Neo kicks off with a monthlong all-inclusive retreat in Oregon, which we’re calling “Neo Campus.” Imagine living under the same roof and bonding with mentors and other founders over meals, hikes, and other activities.
What do you consider innovative now? Talk about specific areas that are under-hyped and overhyped.
Whenever I make predictions, I’m usually wrong. I prefer to bet on people smarter than myself and trust them to figure out what to build. With that caveat, there are two areas I’m very bullish on in the post-Covid world.
The first is any technology that supports the redistribution of work and wealth from a few concentrated cities to the rest of the world. For the first time in history, prosperity has been decoupled from physical location — knowledge workers can be productive from anywhere. This means workers can relocate and work from wherever they want; and employers can hire new workers from all over the world. This is a seismic shift; it may take decades to realize its full scale.
Second, I’m bullish on anybody building a new social network. During the pandemic, we saw amazing tech solutions rise to meet our needs. Physical meetings became impossible, so Zoom filled the void. Office conversations became impossible, so Slack filled the void. Making new friends and socializing at parties became impossible — yet nothing filled the void. While Zoom and Slack’s traffic skyrocketed, Facebook and Instagram’s did not. Facebook is the new Myspace. Meanwhile there’s an enormous human need that isn’t being met, and a trillion-dollar opportunity for whoever reimagines social networking.
At Neo Accelerator, you are stressing diversity and also youth? Are you essentially going back to the old way and with hindsight 2022?
Since Neo’s inception in 2017, we’ve embraced diversity in everything we do. Fully half our capital has backed female or underrepresented minority CEOs. Our community counts more than 150 tech veterans of representative ethnicities, genders, and every age. While investing in experienced founders is arguably more profitable, there are a few reasons that we designed our new program, Neo Accelerator, to appeal to technical founders within four or five years of graduating college. Neo is a mentorship community, which is inherently more relevant to people early in their careers. Also, it’s where there’s a need. Today’s accelerators are no longer focused on young founders. Y Combinator’s median age is 30 years old.
Education is part of my family heritage. My father co-founded Sharif University of Technology. My brother Hadi and I launched Code.org, and his leadership has brought computer science to millions of K-12 classrooms. Of course, investing in young people can be lucrative too. An analysis of Y Combinator’s successful investments finds that 75 percent of their market capitalization came from funding technical founders within four years of college. I believe deeply in young technical leaders’ potential to build generational companies, especially with the right support and guidance.
Lovely & Loathsome
Lovely: I am looking forward to the spate of streaming series about Silicon Valley, especially about two figures I know well. One that just premiered on Showtime is about the loudmouth journey of Uber co-founder and former C.E.O. Travis Kalanick, from executive producer Brian Koppelman and based on a book by New York Times reporter Mike Isaac (full disclosure: a former employee of mine) called “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.” The other is “WeCrashed,” about the travails of WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann, which will start on Apple+ on March 18. Both feel juicy and, well, not nice.
Loathsome: Easy. Kanye West’s use of social media to harass Pete Davidson, who’s been dating his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian. After weeks of antagonization online, West upped the ante by posting a new video and song in which he buries the “Saturday Night Live” cast member alive. Given how rabid West’s fans are, it’s really a dangerous move and not the kind of free speech we should encourage. While it’s one thing to write eviscerating songs about exes — as Taylor Swift, another West victim, does expertly — this is quite another.
