Dear Tech Guys: HBO's Silicon Valley Is NOT An Instruction Manual

I've been living in Silicon Valley for just about twenty years at this point, and lived through the original dot com bubble (got the t-shirt, etc.). And there are a few small signs that remind me quite a bit of the "bad stuff" that started to show up in the 1999/2000 time frame, just before everything collapsed. One of the biggest issues: the carpetbaggers. Basically, as things get frothier and frothier, a "different" kind of entrepreneur starts to show up. In the original dot com bubble, these were frequently described as "MBA's" -- but as someone with an MBA degree, I find that to be a bit misleading too. There were plenty of good, smart, tech-savvy MBAs who added value to the innovation community. The real problem was the people who came to (a) get rich and (b) party (not always in that order). Getting rich and having a good time aren't necessarily bad things, but if they're what you're focused on, then bad things tend to result.

Lots of people like to mock the whole mantra of "we're changing the world" in Silicon Valley, and sometimes it deserves to be mocked. But... in many cases, there is actual truth to it. And, in many cases, there are entrepreneurs and innovators who really are trying to change the world and make it a better place. The problem is that you have the other element -- the carpetbaggers -- who show up with no actual interest in innovation or in making the world a better place, but who readily adopt the terminology and slogans of those who do. And, these days, we're seeing more and more of those types of people in the Valley. It's been happening for years, but it's been getting worse and worse lately. It's why people talk about "Techbros" with dumb, but flashy, company ideas, while ignoring entrepreneurs working away at truly world-changing products and services.

I've been thinking more and more about this lately, especially as a whole bunch of stories have come out in the tech world (as in so many other industries) about sexual harassment and sexual assault. And, as in so many industries, this has been an issue for a long time around here -- and often not taken seriously. Earlier this year -- before many of the bigger stories came out -- I wrote about why Silicon Valley needs to get its act together and grow the fuck up. But with many of the revelations coming out, showing how widespread the culture of harassment (and assault) has been, it's a much bigger problem.

That's why this story from Bloomberg is so flabbergasting. Even after all of this, to hear that some tech companies are hiring good looking models to attend their holiday parties is just so... dumb.

Local modeling agencies, which work with Facebook- and Google-size companies as well as much smaller businesses and the occasional wealthy individual, say a record number of tech companies are quietly paying $50 to $200 an hour for each model hired solely to chat up attendees. For a typical party, scheduled for the weekend of Dec. 8, Cre8 Agency LLC is sending 25 women and 5 men, all good-looking, to hang out with "pretty much all men" who work for a large gaming company in San Francisco, says Cre8 President Farnaz Kermaani. The company, which she wouldn't name, has handpicked the models based on photos, made them sign nondisclosure agreements, and given them names of employees to pretend they're friends with, in case anyone asks why he's never seen them around the foosball table.

To be honest, the story is so dumb, and no companies are actually named, that I'm wondering how much of this story is actually planted by the modeling companies hoping to make it reality. But... these days, we're hearing about so much bad behavior that it may very well be happening.

And I saw more than a few people commenting on Twitter that this seemed like something straight out of HBO's Silicon Valley. Which leads me into another thought that I've been toying with recently. Last time I was in Washington DC, some friends based there were asking me what I thought of the show, and I said that for all of its famed "accuracy," I thought it was ruining the actual Silicon Valley. My friends suggested this was ridiculous, since the show clearly made most of the protagonists out to be fairly buffoon-like, and worthy of mockery. But... without other guidance, it really feels like many people are arriving in Silicon Valley with the HBO show as their mental model of how things are supposed to be. And, even if the show is "truthy" in how it portrays certain people/activities, it does so for the sake of entertainment. Thus, it only presents the really exaggerated versions, and creates entertaining caricatures of certain types of people, while leaving out the many, many, other people who actually get real shit done here, without being buffoons or assholes.

People out here, for the most part, still love the show, because they recognize elements of reality within those characters and events -- but it misses out on the nitty-gritty of how stuff gets done and the fact that some people are legitimately doing good stuff without being horrible people. But if everyone now coming into Silicon Valley is coming in with HBO's Silicon Valley as their model -- too many are looking at the show as an instruction manual, rather than a giant warning sign of what not to do. In some ways, it reminds me of the classic 90's indie film Swingers with Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn. When it came out, I remember lots of guys trying to "take lessons" from the movie in how to pick up women, even though the entire point of the movie was to make fun of those people with their tricks and rules and games.

Assuming that story of hiring models for parties really is true, it feels like yet another brick in this problematic wall of "techbro" culture taking over from what has always been the true core of Silicon Valley, involving non-assholes who really are changing the world. It would be great if we could get more of that, and less of the HBO version, no matter how entertaining it might be.