Hi, folks. It's Shira. Silicon Valley has a split personality about "brilliant jerks." These are the kind of abrasive, boundary-pushing executives that the industry (and often the media) lionizes—until they push boundaries too far and are kicked out of the tech Garden of Eden.
Let's look at Anthony Levandowski, a former executive in Alphabet Inc.'s self-driving vehicle project who the U.S. government charged this week with stealing the company's trade secrets.
Alphabet's Google for years enabled and rewarded Levandowski, even though he flouted company rules and government regulations. Levandowski formed several startups on the side while he worked at Google, and then sold them to Google. He lobbied for driverless car legislation in Nevada without telling his bosses, and more than once sidestepped the permissions required to test autonomous vehicles on public roads.
Levandowski thrived with actions that would have gotten most employees fired—until his rule-flouting allegedly involved pilfering Alphabet documents on his way to start his own autonomous-vehicle company, and quickly selling it to Uber Technologies Inc.
After that, Alphabet's Waymo driverless car unit sued Uber in connection with the actions of its former golden boy, and provided documents and other ammunition for the government's criminal allegations against Levandowski. He pleaded not guilty. His attorney said Levandowski didn't steal anything, and that prosecutors rehashed "discredited" claims from the lawsuit that Waymo and Uber settled last year.
Obviously, there's a difference between Levandowski going around company bureaucracy while he was at Google and claims of stealing secret information. But to me, the Levandowski litigation again shows the tech industry's schizophrenia about those brilliant jerks.
People like Levandowski, Travis Kalanick, Parker Conrad, Elizabeth Holmes and Andy Rubin are regarded as scrappy, visionary entrepreneurs, until they go too far, get unwanted attention or someone with power (or courage) stands up to them. After that, they are sometimes seen as outliers and monsters who sully the tech industry's reputation.
But can it really be a surprise that if a rule-breaking executive is lauded and rewarded for this behavior, he or she might at some point break rules to the point of stealing from the company, misleading board members, obtaining medical records about a rape victim, orchestrating a massive fraud, or committing sexual misconduct against a co-worker? If people have evidence that normal rules don't apply to them, it seems natural that they could exploit that permissiveness.
That's exactly what some Google employees have been saying about a culture that they claim repeatedly protected executives accused of misconduct at work. On Wednesday, Jennifer Blakely, a former manager in Google's legal department, described what she said was the aftermath of a sexual relationship with David Drummond, Alphabet's top lawyer. She was required to transfer out of the legal department and, Blakely said she believed Drummond at one point sought custody of their child as payback for her request for financial support or interaction with their son. (Drummond didn't reply to an email seeking comment, Bloomberg reported, and a spokeswoman for Google didn't respond to requests for comment.)
Sidestepping conventions can sometimes make a good company great, or push along a nascent technology product. The question is whether the benefits of a boundary-pushing culture outweigh the Levandowski and Drummond-type examples of harm from tolerating or applauding bad behavior from a chosen few.
The stakes can be extremely high. The New Yorker wrote about a near-accident that Levandowski and a Google colleague got into in 2011 after taking a driverless car on an unsanctioned freeway route. Levandowski described the incident—which injured his colleague and caused another driver to veer into a median—as a useful data-collection opportunity, rather than an unnecessary and dangerously irresponsible decision. It's not hard to draw a line between that cavalier behavior and the shortcomings of safeguards in Uber's autonomous cars before one test vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona last year.
The enabling of brilliant jerks isn't isolated to technology, but certainly that industry hasn't figured out how to handle Levandowski types. Surely it isn't healthy to one minute applaud and enable visionary rogues, and then be surprised when those people do terrible things. What if sometimes "brilliant jerks" are just...jerks? —Shira Ovide
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