As I said before, I’m sure they were told not to discuss business, because almost nobody did. And I didn’t want to know. I would never want to carry trade secrets around in my head. I had too much to do. But I knew that whatever was happening, it wasn’t good.
Things were failing left and right. This was around the time that people started to talk about the company going public. Then it just stopped. The fizzling of the IPO created a sense of upheaval. People started worrying about the potential for layoffs. The stress level definitely picked up. It drove a lot of traffic to our wellness center.
That’s also when our wellness startup started to get mixed signals about its relationship with the tech company.How did that go down?
After the failed IPO, the tech company brought in someone new to run HR. And that person terminated the contract with the wellness startup.Do you know why?
The startup’s founders talked to me a lot. They said they routinely got feedback that we were so good at our jobs that the engineers were coming back to work too relaxed. So maybe that played a role in the demise of the program. Maybe stress and tension really do make you a better worker.
7The Storyteller
Among Silicon Valley’s chief exports are the stories it tells about itself. Every company needs a founding myth—extra points if it involves a garage. But as critical scrutiny of the industry has increased, storytelling has acquired a new urgency. More than ever, companies need to justify themselves and their actions to politicians and regulators and journalists and the general public, as well as to their own employees.
The people who perform this work fall into a range of roles: communications, marketing, and public policy, among others. But their function is broadly similar. They help the company speak, and ensure that it speaks in a single voice.
We talked to someone who, until recently, told these kinds of stories for a living. They helped us understand how Silicon Valley speaks, both to itself and to the world.
What was your most recent role in the tech industry?
My job was to tell the right story for bringing a product to market. Let’s say there’s a new product, or a new feature of an existing product, that the company wanted to launch. I helped craft a strategy for midwifing it into the world. My goal was to come up with a way to talk about the product in such a way that it would not be misunderstood.What does it mean for a product to be misunderstood?
My job was at a high-profile company that can be closely scrutinized by the public and by the press. Its products can easily be misunderstood by external parties: by users, policymakers, journalists. So it was important to tell the story in a way that accurately conveyed the benefits but also factored in the risks.
If there are aspects of a new user experience that could be perceived as self-serving for the company, or only appreciated by a subsection of its users, those kinds of misperceptions need to be anticipated and mitigated with thoughtful messaging.Could you give an example?
Imagine a new feature that’s designed to make messaging more private. If it’s good for privacy, it might not be so good for safety. So certain privacy and human rights advocates might like it but parents and safety groups and law enforcement might not. You have to start with the stakeholders. Who is going to care about this? Who is going to be most affected? Whose stakes need to be understood and analyzed and managed?
When it comes to telling the story, it’s almost like architecting a screenplay. You need to know who your protagonist is. This might be the person who is going to benefit from your feature—or the entire community at large. Or it might be the person who led the development of the feature within the company.
But you don’t get the length of a screenplay, obviously. You have to be concise. You have a press release, or really just the headline of a press release, because that’s what positions the whole launch. Or you have the text that pops up in the app when someone tries to use the feature. That language is heavily labored over. It reflects a lot of care. It might be just a few words, but it’s been refined and reviewed by a lot of different people.
And that kind of concision can be challenging, because a lot of tech products are highly technical. Sometimes their underlying dynamics are actually quite confusing and complicated. It’s hard to fit it all into a single sentence. Moreover, people don’t trust corporate motives. When a company speaks, it generally starts from a low level of credibility. Getting the message through can be difficult.Part of the reason for that mistrust is that it’s rarely in a corporation’s interest to be completely honest. In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of examples of tech companies being less than truthful with the public. Have you ever felt like you needed to tell a story that wasn’t completely true?
Well, you always start with the truth. It’s the only way. If the truth is that you’re launching a new feature to improve advertisers’ ability to run ads on your platform, then you start with that. You can’t change the purpose of the product, but you can modify where the emphasis is in the explanation.
I never felt pressured to tell a partial truth. But it’s not always a question of simple truth or falsity. It’s a question of completeness. Every company has a communications component because the message needs to be managed. Why does the message need to be managed? Because if
