Forced Behavior At Scale? Big-Tech’s Ritual Blueprints for Predatory Control Systems with Pizza
Topics Include: Compliance, Normalization, System Control, Stealing, Pizza, Lack of Trust, Dogfooding, Replacing Inclusion, Behavioral Programming, Rituals, Failed Products, Scaling Behavior, Incentive Engineering, Leash Metrics, Selfies
The local university is hosting a panel of corporate professionals who are helping startups think like the bigwigs do over at the top companies around. Though I’m not a huge fan of a lot of these companies, this should still be interesting. These are going to be “practical lessons entrepreneurs can apply immediately”. Sounds useful, huh? It’ll reveal how these super successful companies think about their products from the start, how they think about their customers for the long-term, and how they keep up a fast pace.
Why Attend: Sound super interesting… especially the first one, and I’d like to have these notes for the future. I’d like to know how these big companies think about their products as I build out my own (and hopefully bring back WtV soon). And I’d like to get more advice on leadership and advancing my career. Especially now that I’m going to start this new era of having interns… It’s tough to be a leader. But I’d like to start leading more, maybe even building community locally. Wah! hahha. No pressure. It’ll happen when it’s time.
PHOTO COLLAGE AND COMMENTARY:
NOTES FROM THE EVENT:
We’re in the “startup hall” of a huge university, and it makes me realize… how cool are you to be a university student with a startup!? I used to think I was cool for being able to do kegstands and shotgunning a beer. What the heck, brainwashing, you know? Hindsight is 2020. And so was COVID. Now, let’s get to it.
Upon arrival, I ran into a ‘friend’(?), someone I keep running into lately. He’s building AI for fun. We talked about our plans for the weekend. He’s taking his daughter on a ropes course nearby. I told him that I’m taking my daughter to the NW Remodeling Expo this weekend. Going to check out shingles and stuff. But actually what I’m most excited about is the Garden Show two weekends from now, hahah. Amazing.
Okay hte woman is beginning and said good afternoon everyone. But its lunch time haha. Let’s go!
Okay its a multi-industry incubator for life sciences, hardware, tech, and climate tech. Mentorship and resources for learning and networking.
Oh! And they will have a lab tour at 1:30. Maybe I’d attend.
Her voice is super loud on this microphone though, keeps cracking the audio.
They’re talking about their sponsor, a huge tech lawfirm, who has been involved with startups for 2 decades.
She’s excited to introduce the speaker. A friend of hers.
It’s so hard to follow her talking style and take notes, because she’s reading a script. Isn’t that so interesting how that happens all of the time?
He says he wants to make sure the echo is nice. I think he noticed her audio was horrible.
He says it’s such a nice day with the weather. Thanks for missing the sunshine to sit and listen to this talk.
There are about 260 signups for htis so it’s amazing marketing or a big desire to understand how big-tech works.
Let’s share the learning today. What would you consider doing?
not here to say be “Google-like” and start worshiping them. If every startup could give free food, we’d all worship them.
He found a new feature on google that says “beautify,” and so this is his fancy poweroint and he loves it. But besides that, there’s no AI
He shows a picture of an outline of someone, and he asks if we know who it is. But it’s just an outline of a person. And he says, do you know who she is? And I’m like “no” lots of people say no. He says, “Come on, how don’t you know her? That’s Taylor Swift”
LOL. It’s impossible to tell. So funny.
He says someone told him he’s the Taylor Swift of tech. He has so many exes (so many big tech companies)
He worked across multiple organizations.
He shows off his family picture and even his dog. Says he’s lived in Seattle for 26 years.
Last year, he went on a holiday for the first time to really check a lot off of his bucketlist and now he’s addicted. He went to 40 conferences and events across the world to stay engaged with the community without the corporate grind.
He helped build a lot of products:
Microsoft Clippy, Windows Phone, Google Glasses, Amazon Fire Phone, Apple Newton, Windows Vista, etc.
They’re all failures. They could have done better.
They all come from the same companies that gave us amazing products. Yet all of these companies tripped upon things which suddenly seem as a failure. But I look at these as failures of not talent, companies, but decisions made in the company. Maybe too early, too late. Ignoring obvious signals from the community and your customers. And then you fall in love with your idea instead of the problem.
The contents will be startups vs big tech
Big tech culture and rituals
10 things you should care about
steal, adopt, ignore
recap and discussion
He said that the startup he worked at at first was Gemini the crypto company. It's not as different to work at a startup as people think that it is.
Lots of companies made bad decisions, even Facebook says move fast and break things.
As a startup, you’re optimizing for survival, speed, and focus.
In big-tech, some of these rituals have been carried on for a long time
I’m just thinking of the word “rituals” and how much freaky stuff is coming out lately from the Epstein files and I’m like, guys. There are some serious rituals that some big companies may or may not be funding. I am not really sure, but just that word is heavy this week esspecially.
If you leave with better questions in your mind, this session has done its job.
So, what are rituals? Each company has little things. These rituals aren’t just for fun, each one exists to force a behavior the company cares about at scale
ahhhh ahhaha omg. geeze. To “Force behavior at scale” eeks
When these companies are so large, you can’t rely on trust. Documents are supposed to replace the hallways converations. Metrics replace inclusion. Companies build these rituals.
The first thing catching his attention at a huge company was giant coolers with hundreds of types of drinks.
He came from consulting to big-tech. And in the consulting company, you have to requisition everything. You need to fill out a form even to get a pen. It’s interesting to see these mail rooms stocks edwith supplies.
All of these sodas aren’t actually good because all that sugar becomes sugar in your blood. IF you’re thinking about it, think about it again.
-Omg theres a girl in front of me who was taking pictures of this guy liek right in the front row, i’m in the second row. She came and walked up in front of me to take pciture of this guy in the front row. But now she’ s like shopping for fancy plates. Like she’s still standing in front of me and looking at Pinterest or something, and looking at fancy plates. Like, what the heck. Go sit back down and shop sitting down, not in the front row of this event. lol. i need to take a picture of this. Done
Success is not just for me, it’s for everyone. For your partners and clients.
How do people perceive your product? How does the success translate?
Dogfooding is another phrase: eat your own dog food. Force the entire global workforce to use a product internally for months before the release.
This phone plate shopping girl just kicked my guitar by mistake. My guitar caee I’m like, girl… go sit down. Why are you standing in the front row lookign at pinstagram? Now she’s looking at makeup tips and adding pictures to different folders. So distracting.
The engine of ennovfation:
DESIGN SPRINTS: 5-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototypignand testing
OKR: Objectives and Key Results: setting ambitious moonshot goals with measurable, transparent results and encouraging 10x thinking
20% time: employees spend 20% of their time on side projects
Blameless Post-Mortems: WHen failtures occur, the focus is “how the system failed,” not “who do we blame.”
Launch review: formal checkpoints ensuring UX, privacy, reliability, and scale readiness before shipping
Free Food and Perks: include fancy perks like nap pods
Okay, the phone girl is wearing a nametag; it seems she works for this venue. N owonder why she’s taking these pictures and is also bored. She does this all the time hahah omg.
I can’t tell you how satisfying it is, if your main job is boring, you can work on something fun on the side
A great way to improve the culture and learning
This guy’s voice/accent is hard to listen to sorta casually. He has a strong accent, and so you have to really listen carefully or I can’t keep up with what he has to say.
OMG AND PHONE GIRL’s BELLY BUTTON IS SHOWING from her shirttt hahahah omg. Geeze. There is so much going on here. Now that she’s moved like more “to the side” and is leaning against the wall, now in front fo the front row, you can see she’s got her belly button showing here. Do you think she’s trying to be nonchalant casual-cute? shes is jsut swipign on her phone in the more-tan-front-row. That’s not setting a good example for everyone else. Probably she’s a volunteer, though, or else she’d totally be fired IMO.
The speaker keeps asking if there are ex-corporate people. Different huge tech companies. People raise hteir hands time to time.
The “Need for Speed”
BOOTCAMP: new hires (including senior leaders) spend 6 weeks in the codebase to understand the product DNA
FEATURE FLAGS/GATING Technical ritual of shipping ‘dark’ features, rolling them out gradually (1% - 5% - 100%)
HACKATHONS: 24-hour sprints for engineers to build whatever they want (eg, "‘Like’ button, messenger)
"MOVE FAST WITH CARE CULTURE: Evolved from ‘move fast and break things’ to a ritualized ship early + fix quickly mindset
IMPACT OVER OPTICS: Performance ritual that rewards moving the needle on metrics and not just ‘looking busy”
QWKLT OPEN Q&A: Radical transparency ritual where any amployee can ask the CEO anything face-to-face
FREE FOOD: and many other perks
Learn the leadership principles of big tech. They’ll help you be better people, leaders, and entrepreneurs:
PR/FAQ (working backwards): write the press release and customer FAQ before coding.
6-Pagers (narrative over PPT): read high-density narratives silently for the first 20 minutes; no PowerPoint in meetings
2-Pizza teams: Teams too large to be fed by two pizzas suffer from “social loafing.”
eeh eew. This company i don’t like - Bamadon… i’ll call it. why are they talking about pizzaaaaaaa. Is anyone else in the audience thinking that?
I’m just like, with all thats comign out lately about pizza, why is this built into their company standards/lingo? And really, does anyone else feel like “eew” about this?
He said he used to be on the 3-pizza team, he loves pizza so much get one just for him. But i think he just literally means innocent pizza.
Single-trheaded Owner: one person is solely responsible for one sepcific goals’ successes
Bar Raiser Hiring Ritual: designated interviews can veto hires to maintain the quality bar
WBR & MBR (The Operating Rhythm): weekly deep-dives into input metrics prevent issues; monthly strategic resets align tactics withvision
Perks: not found at this company
This speech’s title was so interesting, but the reality of this speech is not as intriguing. I think its cause of his accent being hard to keep up with but/and also idk. I’m not sure what is off about this speech. It’s just not interesting me as much.
He says we’re running out of time, we’ve run through this relatively fast
Maybe that’s it, just rushing through everything. I’m hardly writing down 50% of what he’s saying, maybe even 20% cause he talks a lot and just keeps going through it all. Though I didn’t realize this university has these talks once a week.
He said you need to focus on your intention behind rituals:
build deep customer understanding
high decisions made at speed
Clear accountability and ownership
Learning that compounds
It’s like, this girl in the more-than-front-row is so distracting on her phone the whole time. And this speaker has hardly taken one moment to pause. Maybe that’s it, too. Its just nonstop.
Stop building for the person shouting the loudest. Access is not insight.
You need to focus on your vision. As a leader should start thinking of a problem list, your features, and how you solve them.
Your problems will age well if you’re solving them directly.
With startups, everything is important. But everything can not be important; that’s the problem. Urgency is where people start missing things.
Don’t spend time debating in a meeting on what color the button should be. Don’t be rushed through an architecture decision.
Make sure you’re spending the right amount of time on the different decisions. People want to move fast. Don’t create a backlog of issues. Don’t move fast if you’re building a big debt. Treat your startup like a credit card. IF you’re only paying the minimum balance, you will have such a huge debt cause you have decided to cut corners.
This is a good point.
If a metric is not helping you make a decision, it’s not data.
What can you do to bring people into the funnel? Make sure people are going to the interview
. This reminds me that I have lots of people who applied for my marketing role, but just a few so far to apply for my journalism internship role.
He said decision-making discipline is a key thing. If you reflect on things that have gone wrong, it’s often not bad decisions, just slow/delayed decisions.
Don’t make decisions about who is making decisions as a big team. Think about this ahead of time when your mind is calm and when everyone understands how the organization escalates.
Democracy is great for countries but bad for products.
We only have 10 minutes left in this speech. I feel like I haven’t even learned anything at all. I wonder what were his goals fo this speech? I wonder if anyone got much out of this speech. It’s hard to say. I bet so, but idk. I’m just surprised.
Promotions and incentives can really shape how your organization behaves.
LOL, this girl is just swiping Instagram and looking at fashion pics. Zooming in on fashionable outfits.
At the end of the year, it’s part of your performance package for how well you cooperated with your partner and what your partner thinks of you. You have to be thoughtful of your wording. If you’re rewarding firefighters, don’t be surprised if people get matchboxes and then get rewarded for putting things out. Think of people reducing future work, making others better, decisions qualities. Think of how you want to reward to peopel who work for you.
I don’t want to stay for questions. Lately, I’m all about preserving my energy and this is totally draining my energy.
Homework: write a 1-page customer narrative. Clarfiy decision rights. Audit incentives, not tools. Define promotion signals early. Adapt one learning ritual.
He says sorry he only left 4 minutes for Q&A.
Then he takes a selfie of the entire crowd and himself. Then goes to take questions.
They cut him off after one question and ask everyone to please be considerate with portion sizes so everyone can have food. The line is so long and I just decide to leave. Something in me wants to get out of here as fast as possible.
Though I did go to get a glimpse of what they’re serving… pizza.
I’ll go ahead and say it: I think this was the worst event I’ve attended ever. Not that it was so boring… it just was unreal. It was unreal. I’m still having trouble processing what I heard and witnessed.
Ontop of that, on my way out I saw a handsome man I’ve met before talking one to one with a beautiful blonde lady he was sitting next to. He mentioned his wife, which reminded me of the time he sat and talked to me really attentively as well. He also told me about his wife and how she didn’t take his last name. I’m just like give me a BREAK people. What is this event? And what is this guys deal? Talking to girls one to one about his wife?
Oof.
This was the most tone deaf speech I’ve ever been to. Amidst freaking Epstein mega week. I’m just like. Get me out of here now!!! lol. Really. What was that??
