Wu Chen
This spring, three American dramas modeled on startups have been listed together. Apple TV+ launched "WeCrashed" is the most eye-catching, about the story of WeWork founder Newman, and Newman's wife, Rebecca played by Anne Hathaway, is even more dramatic; Showtime, which is the same as HBO, launched "Super Pumped", which recorded the ups and downs of Kalanick's creation of Uber; the streaming platform Hulu was not willing to show weakness, and "The Dropout" was hailed as a woman. Jobs' Elizabeth Holmes was brought to the screen, and the series was released less than two months after Holmes was convicted of four counts of defrauding investors.
Theranos, a blood-drop testing company founded by Uber, WeWork, and Holmes, were among the best-known unicorns in the United States in the 1910s. The three companies have a lot in common, all of which are shown as "subversives": Uber replaces taxis, WeWork challenges traditional offices, Theranos transforms the medical testing industry; they are all models of young people's entrepreneurship, and the three founders are all very storytellers; of course, needless to say, they all once became the darlings of capital and mass media, representing a series of megatrends advocated by Silicon Valley startups in the 1910s: the Internet changed the world, the sharing economy changed jobs, Previously obscure industries (such as the diagnosis and treatment industry) exploded overnight after being subverted.
Similar to the "Gilded Age" of American robber tycoons more than a hundred years ago, the "10th Century" is also known as the "New Gilded Age", making wealth faster and showing off wealth is more exaggerated, and the entrepreneurs of these three companies are the models of impetuousness and exaggeration of the "New Gilded Age".
If Jobs and Gates represent the mavericks of geek entrepreneurs of the late 1970s, and Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon represent the trend of Internet platforming in the first decade of the twentieth century, then these three companies represent the "new gilded age" capital "seedling-fueled" accelerated bubble packaging innovation. "Painting tigers is not an anti-dog", especially the three companies have suffered setbacks in the form of some kind of "implosion", the three founders have been swept out, and Theranos is even more bankrupt and liquidated, and the investors' $900 million has been lost, which has confirmed the outside world's criticism of silicon valley entrepreneurship "burning capitalism".
Interestingly, these three American dramas are again a by-product of "money-burning capitalism". Unicorn entrepreneurs remake the story of "from beggar to rich man", faster, more drastic changes, young people turn stones into gold, get rich overnight, take helicopters to become billionaires, constantly challenge human nature; investors encourage entrepreneurs to spend lavishly, youth restlessness and money corruption, creating another kind of drunken gold fan, squandering extravagant life, satisfying the voyeurism of the audience; in order to maintain control, the founders and investors' open and secret struggles, comparable to popular court dramas; of course, there are stories of depravity and destruction, This is an eternal theme that highlights complex human nature, coupled with the youthful mania of Silicon Valley, as if the "wounded Zhongyong" of the new era, seeing him rise up a tall building, seeing him collapse...
Newman, Kalanick, and Holmes can't enter the Pantheon dedicated to Silicon Valley achievers like Jobs, Bezos, and Zuckerberg (Za jr. is still young and could stage a depraved plot, who knows), but that doesn't stop them from becoming household anti-heroes through Hollywood. And Newman and Kalanick are still among the billionaires, and perhaps there will be an "Empire Strikes Back War", so that Hollywood's sequel is unknown.
Don't waste any crisis! The "new gilded age" silicon valley money-burning game as a whole is a kind of adolescent restlessness: young people who do not have enough parental care but can spend thousands of dollars are rapidly corrupted and degenerate in the face of surging money, and the pressure of capital-driven rapid growth accelerates the distortion of human nature and makes self-destruction inevitable.
The corrosion of money
In the process of Holmes's final destruction, Holmes himself was absent.
The clash between the Wall Street Journal's reporter and editor-in-chief and Theranos Sky-High Lawyers is a brilliant episode of Dropouts. The reporter repeatedly hoped that the report exposing Theranos' fraud would be published earlier, but the editor-in-chief advised him to be patient and tirelessly tell the story of a Sicilian fisherman. In Sicily, fishermen would stand motionless in the sea for hours, waiting for the fish to get used to their presence, no longer feeling threatened, and when they gathered, they would suddenly move together, dance harpoons, and reap the rewards in a few minutes. Static braking is the Wall Street Journal's way of confronting Theranos, who has been "armed to the teeth" by lawyers, waiting for it to self-destruct.
The Wall Street Journal has a no surprise policy, when reporting on any company's problems, always put their own knowledge of the company in advance to verify the reported company, giving them a chance to respond. Theranos, who raised more than $900 million, including the $100 million Wall Street Journal owner Murdoch had just invested, had plenty of ammunition and hired a strong team of lawyers led by barristers who had served as attorneys in the Gore and George W. Bush case. Unexpectedly, David's battle with Goliath lasted only a few hours before it ended, Holmes told too many lies, so many flaws, even the shrewd lawyers could hardly get all round, and the Wall Street Journal only needed to find one omission. The lawyers' team soon gave the reporters the evidence that Theranos was not falsified, and it was this report that pushed Holmes off the altar.
Kalanick's self-destruction, by contrast, is a completely arrogant cocoon. On the one hand, Newman and his wife Rebecca are lustful, on the other hand, they are blindly expanding at the instigation of Son Zhengyi, and finally they are out of control.
When these plays are reproduced on the screen, the audience's intuitive feeling is the corrosive power of money and the drunken gold fans who burn money. The biggest difference between newman and the previous generation of entrepreneurs is that their money comes too easily, too quickly, and too much. They are the result of "seedlings" from investors who are eager to find the next Google, flocking to the founders of Hideaway who talk about change and disruption in a FOMO (Fear of missing out) mentality.
Holmes, who dropped out of school in his sophomore year, actually did not have the opportunity to grow up like other young people. She gets money but needs to give up a lot of things, such as cultural accomplishment, entertainment, and even love. Holmes falls in love with Sunny, an Indian-American who is older than her teenage years, and inserts him into the company to become COO, but does not disclose the love affair between the two, highlighting this distortion of "precocious immaturity".
They are also typical of beauty and ugliness. The biggest advantage of the three is that they are imaginative and obsessed with subverting their chosen tracks, and they are all natural "showmen", who are crazy, brain-opening, want to get away with it, and can penetrate the psychology of others, so they can get the pursuit of funds.
Youthful mania is immature because of precocious puberty. Holmes lost himself in the performance. Many people choose to believe in her painstaking heart of "saving the suffering and saving the suffering" in the gaze of her big blue eyes, but she abuses the goodwill of ordinary people and uses one lie after another to cover up the technological breakthrough of the company's delayed blood drop detection. Newman and Kalanick put "Hustle" on their lips, crazy work, crazy entertainment, breaking rules, ignoring taboos, and the company has formed a "toxic" culture in the process of soaring.
They are all master packers, under the pressure of endless money and rapid growth, packaging their own work, hoping to achieve quick success, hoping to cut corners, indulging in the occurrence of some kind of evil. In the process, their investors act as connivors, hoping to find NBT (TheNextBigThing) and create the unicorn myth together, but they end up struggling to resist the corruption of money.
The three dramas also show the confrontation between Silicon Valley culture and feminism in a positive way.
As a representative of women's rights, Holmes abused women's rights, abused Silicon Valley's expectations for the success of a female entrepreneur, abused the blind spots brought about by political correctness, and finally faked the incident, which made women more difficult in Silicon Valley. WeWork, a company that advocates a new work culture, is a "nepotism" mom-and-pop shop for the Newmans; instead of helping female employees who have been sexually harassed, the ambitious Rebecca can't help female employees speak up, but instead shows a stereotype of women - jealousy and paranoia. Uber's culture is the most problematic, completely objectifying women, ignoring discrimination and harassment against women, encouraging a "knock everything down" attitude, and letting most male managers do whatever they want, as long as there is success.
This rapidly amplified evil stands in stark contrast to the greatness preached by Silicon Valley.
The indulgence of the "gold diggers"
After the 2008 financial crisis, VC (venture capital) and PE (private equity investment) investment funds similar to Benchmark Capital opened a new Silicon Valley "gold digging tide", and this gold digging wave was the market capital surge caused by the Fed's quantitative easing after the financial crisis, and the long-term low interest rate also made all kinds of capital choose venture capital and private equity in pursuit of high returns.
The VC industry itself is also changing. They have shaped silicon valley and two generations of silicon valley entrepreneurs, and have accumulated some successful rules, on the one hand, they have spared no effort to dig up young people who have successfully started a business, creating the myth of dropping out of school from Jobs to Zuckerberg; on the other hand, they are also well aware of the shortcomings of young entrepreneurs, and they are accustomed to making up for the shortcomings of young founders by parachuting mature executives. As a close partner of the two founders of Google, Schmidt has taken credit for promoting the growth and maturity of Google; Sandberg, who is ten years older than Xiaoza, has long been the COO of Facebook, and has also combined Xiaoza's creativity with Facebook's operations.
But entering the "new gilded era", the surging tide of funds, the expectation of faster and greater returns, and the entry of more new capital have intensified the fermentation of FOMO sentiment, which has gradually changed the relationship between investors and entrepreneurs. If the previous investors were like caring parents, supporting the growth of entrepreneurs, providing them with help, and warning and teaching them in time when necessary, now they are more like conniving parents, only looking at achievements (growth and making money effects), not asking anything else.
VCs lack management of startup governance at the board level, especially those that have gathered large-scale spotlights. WeWork and Uber are two obvious examples of founders who can "do whatever they want" (which is also a normal form of expression for young people after they have a lot of wealth and dominance). As long as you can go public and exit and earn more than 100 times the income, the VC is selectively blind to the shortcomings of the founder.
In addition, the surge in capital investment has also accelerated the corrosive power of funds. Usually VC investments are calculated in millions of dollars to tens of millions of dollars, and the growth funds of startups mainly rely on listing financing, and listing also gives VCs a convenient exit mechanism. The appearance of unicorns has rewritten the rules of the previous game. The order of magnitude of private equity investment has risen one liter after another, and both Uber and WeWork have received more than $4 billion in SoftBank investment from Son Zhengyi, which is an astronomical amount. The time for listing has been pushed back and forth, the lack of public market supervision of corporate managers, and the monopoly of entrepreneurs in unicorn companies has covered the sky, and governance is in jeopardy.
Capital becomes the "king maker" that determines the pattern of market competition, becomes the ultimate "moat" of start-ups, creates the network effect of money-burning capitalism, the more financing, the more money is burned, the faster it grows, it can raise more funds, burn more money, crush more competitors, and finally form its own dominant position in the track (at least in theory).
Both Uber and WeWork are examples of money network effects driving development, and are representatives of the VC's "god-making movement." As long as you're selected and you're constantly being transfused by investors, it's likely to become a "self-fulfilling prophecy."
Capital thus became tied to the interests of the founders and actively participated in the myth of the founders; until the founders became a stumbling block to their profits, and they became "king killers" through palace coups and litigation investigations. Success is also Xiao He, and defeat is also Xiao He. But whether it is a "palace fight" or a lawsuit, it provides the "dog blood plot" necessary for ups and downs.
"Recording the Bubble of Bubbles"
Wall Street "electrocution" has a long history in Hollywood. "Barbarian at the Door" is the debut of private equity, showing the brutality of the power of private equity-led mergers and acquisitions, and also lamenting the momentum of the renewal of the rules of the capitalist game. "The Big Short" is a portrayal of the 2008 financial crisis, and there are always smart people who find the doorway to short derivative transactions in the US real estate market and make money alone on Wall Street, which is full of blood. "Billions" is a side note on the development of hedge funds, constantly challenging the regulatory bottom line in the pursuit of "unattainable advantages" (BlackEdge). Similar to the film that wrote Wall Street, there is "The Wolf of Wall Street" starring Little Plum.
By the second decade of the twentieth century, the focus of innovation had shifted from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, and Hollywood's commercial dramas had found new darlings. "Jobs" and "Social Network" fixed the image of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as code farmers, and "Silicon Valley" joked and cursed Silicon Valley.
The newly released three American dramas should be said to have opened an era of media integration. Inside and outside the play, it embodies a new kind of integration: the Silicon Valley bubble spawned by capital has itself become the material for creating the Silicon Valley bubble.
Financial journalists' books about Silicon Valley startups have become trendy over the past few years. Three plays are born out of three books: "Bad Blood," about Theranos, "Hot Blood Ambition", which chronicles Uber, and "BillionDollarLoser" that tracks down WeWork. Business insider books have spawned the popularity of podcasts, Hollywood has begun to consider putting podcasts on the silver screen, and famous journalists have actively participated in the writing of scripts, all because the streaming explosion opened by Netflix has given more market for the content that broke the news. Interestingly, the streaming media industry has gone from being the dominant Netflix company to a huge bubble. It's not just Netflix, Amazon and Apple that are competing, all traditional media outlets have built their own streaming platforms.
Financial journalists were the recorders of this era, and Holmes, Newman, and Kalanick were once regulars on the cover of shiny financial magazines, and the stories they told, whether it was the revolution in blood testing or WeWork's change in the workplace (including their transformation of the entire building charter for big businesses like JPMorgan Chase and Amazon), or Uber's every innovation from self-driving to Uber food delivery, was recorded and discussed by the financial media.
Similarly, journalists who spend a lot of time exposing startup shading are part of the entire capitalist ecology, and their oversight makes it healthier. Media convergence opens up entirely new changes, with investigative journalists spending a year or more digging up scandals and, in an age of innovation and integration, a few ducks to eat: news reports, bestsellers, podcasts, movies and TV series. Originally, investigative journalists only played a noble role in purifying the ecology, but in the face of new business opportunities, they may also become new stars, and in the face of the popularity of streaming media, they also hope to become rich and celebrity. Who would say no to money?
The New Yorker, which is best at telling non-fiction stories, has set up a dedicated script adaptation department to join the new gold rush and help itself and its journalists fight for more in the game with Hollywood and Silicon Valley streaming platforms.
More than a decade ago, Hollywood was unwilling to adapt commercial stories, afraid that there would be no plot twists and turns, ordinary people could not understand the commercial story, and they were worried that the plot had long been revealed, and the audience was not interested in seeing the end. Now it's different, streaming media is fueling the waves, and the stories of entrepreneurial success and failure reflect the grayscale of human nature. And the exciting money game, whether it's copying WeWork's spending money team party, or recording the Uber board without smoke, is more likely to satisfy the public's "voyeurism".
On the one hand, silicon valley entrepreneurship history creates a lack of creation, so that the general public can compare the life they did not have, just as the title of "Billion Loser" suggests, Newman and Kalanick, although they failed, are still proper billionaires, completed their "American Dream"; Holmes, although facing prison, she also has a brilliant life, which is beyond the reach of ordinary people. On the other hand, these plays also deepen the spectacle and recreate a journey that ordinary people never have the opportunity to go through.
While viewers who pay attention to financial news know the ending, there is still enough material to create a compelling story between the impulse to start a business and the result of failure. In the streaming war, second-tier teams from Apple, Hulu to Showtime all want more eye-catching factors in the competitive landscape, and what can be compared with the entrepreneurial story of "quickly realizing the American Dream"?
Interestingly, when Silicon Valley records one bubble after another, it may not be far from bursting the bubble, because the QE (quantitative easing) that originally blew the bubble has been replaced by the Federal Reserve's QT (quantitative tightening).