I recently heard one of the more interesting insights about Silicon Valley I'd heard in a while. It explained something I’d wondered about for years.
But I can't tell you what it was.
There's too much downside in sharing any opinion that could easily be misinterpreted online. Even facts are dangerous to share if they don’t align with what people want to believe.
There's a lot of concern about "fake news" lately. That is a real problem, but there's also the opposite problem: true things that aren't being said.
Some of the most useful things I've learned about startups over the years are also things I'd never share publicly. Not because the ideas are necessarily controversial in their own right, but because anyone could twist them to seem controversial if they were sufficiently motivated to. And when that happens I immediately regret having said anything. It's a massive distraction. I have two young kids, and I have hundreds of startups to keep track of. I don't have time to fight with people who are trying to misunderstand me.
Not surprisingly, the juiciest targets for this sort of willful misinterpretation are organizations and people who are successful. They have power, and power makes them both interesting and envied; I teach founders they all have to be prepared for this as their startups grow.
In my blog post, "Subtle Mid-Stage Startup Pitfalls" I said:
You can't prevent yourself from being a target. It's an automatic consequence of being successful. So the best you can do is react in the right way when people attack you. To some extent you have to resign yourself to letting people lie about you.
The problem with this is, the most successful people in an industry tend to have some of the most valuable insights about it. So you lose a lot when they are silenced. And also, if they keep those insights to themselves, it makes the powerful more powerful. It means useful information remains amongst insiders, like me, for example.
Another downside of friction in sharing ideas publicly is that we lose the conversation they would have generated. Before Twitter et al, and before the media were so reliant on page views, Paul wrote an essay called “What You Can’t Say.” In it he said:
The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to.
Thirteen years later, that's my default plan. There’s just too much downside for me to get distracted with others’ opinions of my opinions. [1] It's not that I'm afraid of expressing my opinions. I just think, "Why bother?"
It's great that technology has given more people a voice on the internet. But that doesn't necessarily mean less friction in sharing ideas, because some of those voices are shouting down the others.
How do we solve this problem? I don't know, but I hope there is a solution. I hope we’re just in the social media 1.0 phase, and that technology will eventually bring us a social media 2.0 where one can speak more openly. [2]
I’m horrified at the prospect of the most insightful people in their fields thinking, "That's something I should comment on. Nah, what's the point? Too much downside."
That's what happens now, and we don't even know how much, because how do you measure the sound of silence?
Notes
[1] One of my favorite parts of “What You Can’t Say”:
Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist.
[2] One reason I have hope for a solution is that I do find I can speak more openly on Facebook than elsewhere, so maybe that’s a clue about what direction social media 2.0 might take.