Warning to companies that market themselves as messiahs
Sometimes I see startups waxing lyrical about how they're helping the little guy by sticking it to the big corporates / the boomers / the Government / the [insert hated flavour of the month]. It's almost the equivalent of the modern company .
If this is you, hear me out.
Any time you market yourself as a messiah, or as someone fighting for the little person against the tyranny of someone else, you inevitably put yourself on a pedestal (how high will depend on how far you're able to push that message).
If you can stay up there, good for you...but it can be a long fall from the top if things go awry.
I wrote a post here recapping the Gamestop saga and how the app Robinhood went from the people's champion to their whipping boy: https://thisweekintech.substack.com/p/robinhood-men-in-headbands
It's a long read, but I'm hoping it'll make us all think twice about our messaging (note: I don't mean mission - that can, and should be, as lofty as you like). Theranos is the most extreme example of blowing up the hype to biblical proportions while producing absolutely nothing and while the company is now defunct, Holmes was a billionaire for years. She got a lot out of it. IBKR banned trading Gamestop. It did almost nothing to IBKR stock and it's currently at a near ATH. TWTR took a plunge after purging accounts including Trump's, but is now at a 5 year high. Before there was ubiquitous internet access, a scandal could terminate a company. News Of The World went out of business after hacking people's phones and engaging in other unsavory practices. But a lot of these global internet companies 1) have a potential market of up to billions of users 2) are quasi-utility companies in that they provide more or less essential services (communication, search, payments, investing). They are almost to big too fail and the Gamestop incident will probably be a nothingburger in the greater scheme of things. can you give another example besides Robinhood? Uber went from better than those horrible SF taxis to law breaking and with many internal dramas Facebook connecting the world is now spying on it. Google: don’t be evil.