It’s comforting to use someone else’s priorities to guide our work. It lets us off the hook.
But the only way to do our best work is to realize that part of what it means to do our work is to own the priorities as well.
Your boat, your compass.
Back in 2013, Dropbox was scaling fast.
The company had grown quickly by taking advantage of cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS), but when you grow rapidly, infrastructure costs can skyrocket, especially when approaching the scale Dropbox was at the time. The company decided to build its own storage system and network — a move that turned out to be a wise decision.
In a time when going from on-prem to cloud and closing private data centers was typical, Dropbox took a big chance by going the other way. The company still uses AWS for certain services, regional requirements and bursting workloads, but ultimately when it came to the company’s core storage business, it wanted to control its own destiny.
Storage is at the heart of Dropbox’s service, leaving it with scale issues like few other companies, even in an age of massive data storage. With 600 million users and 400,000 teams currently storing more than 3 exabytes of data (and growing) if it hadn’t taken this step, the company might have been squeezed by its growing cloud bills.
Controlling infrastructure helped control costs, which improved the company’s key business metrics. A look at historical performance data tells a story about the impact that taking control of storage costs had on Dropbox.
In March of 2016, Dropbox announced that it was “storing and serving” more than 90% of user data on its own infrastructure for the first time, completing a 3-year journey to get to this point. To understand what impact the decision had on the company’s financial performance, you have to examine the numbers from 2016 forward.
There is good financial data from Dropbox going back to the first quarter of 2016 thanks to its IPO filing, but not before. So, the view into the impact of bringing storage in-house begins after the project was initially mostly completed. By examining the company’s 2016 and 2017 financial results, it’s clear that Dropbox’s revenue quality increased dramatically. Even better for the company, its revenue quality improved as its aggregate revenue grew.
Well, we got to January 2nd before the latest angry resignation published by a tech executive on Medium.
Today’s installment comes from Ross LaJeunesse, who was head of international relations at Google and served for more than a decade in various roles at the company. He denounces what he sees as Google’s increasingly failed ambitions to be a company principled on human rights, and poses a series of questions about the future of tech and capitalism:
I think the important question is what does it mean when one of America’s marque’ companies changes so dramatically. Is it the inevitable outcome of a corporate culture that rewards growth and profits over social impact and responsibility? Is it in some way related to the corruption that has gripped our federal government? Is this part of the global trend toward “strong man” leaders who are coming to power around the globe, where questions of “right” and “wrong” are ignored in favor of self-interest and self-dealing? Finally, what are the implications for all of us when that once-great American company controls so much data about billions of users across the globe?
The whole read is interesting, and covers Google’s China operations, its Project Dragonfly censored search crisis, Saudi Arabia’s apps in Google Cloud, and his own personal experience with Google HR.
It’s a manifesto of sorts, and perhaps that isn’t surprising given that LaJeunesse is also running for the Democratic primary in Maine’s senatorial election to compete against Republican incumbent Susan Collins. His critiques of Big Tech seem to be channeling Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley, and that makes it a fascinating political strategy.
But let’s focus in on the key question at the heart of this debate: does Google have the ability to be “good” or “evil” when it comes to tech’s influence on society? Does it have agency to make a difference on human rights in countries around the world?
My answer is: Google used to have a lot of agency, which is unfortunately declining very, very rapidly.
I’ve talked about the fracturing of the internet into different spheres of influence for quite literally years. Countries like China in particular, but also Russia, Iran and others are seizing more and more exacting control of the internet’s plumbing and applications, subsuming the original internet’s spirit of openness and freedom and placing this communications medium under their iron fists.
As this fracturing has occurred, companies like Google, or Shutterstock, or even the NBA have increasingly faced what I’ve called an “authoritarian straddle” — they can either work with these countries and follow the local rules, or they can just get out, with serious ramifications for their home markets.
Those are the extent of the choices these companies have. Shutterstock is not going to change China’s policy toward photos of the Tiananmen Square protests, any more than Google can try to launch a search engine on the mainland or change Saudi Arabia’s deplorable women’s rights.
To have any agency here at all, you need a monopoly on a product or service so important that the dictatorship has to accept the terms you offer. In other words, these companies need extreme leverage, essentially the ability to go to the regimes and say, “No, fuck you, here’s how it is going to work, we’re going to follow human rights, and you have no choice in the matter.”
What tech companies are discovering — even massive giants like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft — is that they really, truly don’t have that kind of leverage in these countries anymore. Not even Apple, which employs hundreds of thousands of manufacturing workers through its subcontractors in China, can move the needle in that country anymore. Iran shut off the internet for a period of time to dampen the intensity of political protests in that country. Russia last week tested shutting off the internet to make sure it can just pull the plug when it wants.
If whole countries can just flip the switch and turn off “tech,” exactly what leverage do any of these companies have in the first place?
And that diminution of power is a trend that tech companies, and particularly American tech companies, haven’t fully grappled with. They don’t really get a choice anymore in the decisions here. China has its own search engine, and increasingly, its own mobile phone ecosystem unencumbered by U.S. patents and therefore U.S. policy. If Azure leaves Saudi Arabia, Alibaba Cloud is more than willing to step into the gap and make the money instead.
So when you get to LaJeunesse’s comments that he pushed Google internally to formalize some of its values:
My solution was to advocate for the adoption of a company-wide, formal Human Rights Program that would publicly commit Google to adhere to human rights principles found in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, provide a mechanism for product and engineering teams to seek internal review of product design elements, and formalize the use of Human Rights Impact Assessments for all major product launches and market entries.
… one can’t help but feel solace for an optimistic world where a better product design review process might have once improved global human rights.
The issue is far simpler though than it was in the past. You don’t need a human rights protocol, or some sort of review process for market entry. You are either in, or you are out. You either launch in these countries and deal with the inevitable human rights abuses and concomitant consumer protests in the home market, or you maintain your values and you walk away, ignoring the profit mirage from these regimes in the process.
That’s why I recently argued that Google and the NBA should just walk away. I still hold that belief. It’s also why I called on Shutterstock to leave China and return to its more open and free values. No U.S. tech company today has the leverage to make a dent on human rights the way that they did a decade ago. The internet has fractured, data sovereignty is on the rise, and there’s a binary choice to be made whether to engage or to flee. Ultimately, I take LaJeunesse’s side — these companies should walk, because there really isn’t much choice otherwise.
Well, we got to January 2nd before the latest angry resignation published by a tech executive on Medium.
Today’s installment comes from Ross LaJeunesse, who was head of international relations at Google and served for more than a decade in various roles at the company. He denounces what he sees as Google’s increasingly failed ambitions to be a company principled on human rights, and poses a series of questions about the future of tech and capitalism:
I think the important question is what does it mean when one of America’s marque’ companies changes so dramatically. Is it the inevitable outcome of a corporate culture that rewards growth and profits over social impact and responsibility? Is it in some way related to the corruption that has gripped our federal government? Is this part of the global trend toward “strong man” leaders who are coming to power around the globe, where questions of “right” and “wrong” are ignored in favor of self-interest and self-dealing? Finally, what are the implications for all of us when that once-great American company controls so much data about billions of users across the globe?
The whole read is interesting, and covers Google’s China operations, its Project Dragonfly censored search crisis, Saudi Arabia’s apps in Google Cloud, and his own personal experience with Google HR.
It’s a manifesto of sorts, and perhaps that isn’t surprising given that LaJeunesse is also running for the Democratic primary in Maine’s senatorial election to compete against Republican incumbent Susan Collins. His critiques of Big Tech seem to be channeling Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley, and that makes it a fascinating political strategy.
But let’s focus in on the key question at the heart of this debate: does Google have the ability to be “good” or “evil” when it comes to tech’s influence on society? Does it have agency to make a difference on human rights in countries around the world?
My answer is: Google used to have a lot of agency, which is unfortunately declining very, very rapidly.
I’ve talked about the fracturing of the internet into different spheres of influence for quite literally years. Countries like China in particular, but also Russia, Iran and others are seizing more and more exacting control of the internet’s plumbing and applications, subsuming the original internet’s spirit of openness and freedom and placing this communications medium under their iron fists.
As this fracturing has occurred, companies like Google, or Shutterstock, or even the NBA have increasingly faced what I’ve called an “authoritarian straddle” — they can either work with these countries and follow the local rules, or they can just get out, with serious ramifications for their home markets.
Those are the extent of the choices these companies have. Shutterstock is not going to change China’s policy toward photos of the Tiananmen Square protests, any more than Google can try to launch a search engine on the mainland or change Saudi Arabia’s deplorable women’s rights.
To have any agency here at all, you need a monopoly on a product or service so important that the dictatorship has to accept the terms you offer. In other words, these companies need extreme leverage, essentially the ability to go to the regimes and say, “No, fuck you, here’s how it is going to work, we’re going to follow human rights, and you have no choice in the matter.”
What tech companies are discovering — even massive giants like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft — is that they really, truly don’t have that kind of leverage in these countries anymore. Not even Apple, which employs hundreds of thousands of manufacturing workers through its subcontractors in China, can move the needle in that country anymore. Iran shut off the internet for a period of time to dampen the intensity of political protests in that country. Russia last week tested shutting off the internet to make sure it can just pull the plug when it wants.
If whole countries can just flip the switch and turn off “tech,” exactly what leverage do any of these companies have in the first place?
And that diminution of power is a trend that tech companies, and particularly American tech companies, haven’t fully grappled with. They don’t really get a choice anymore in the decisions here. China has its own search engine, and increasingly, its own mobile phone ecosystem unencumbered by U.S. patents and therefore U.S. policy. If Azure leaves Saudi Arabia, Alibaba Cloud is more than willing to step into the gap and make the money instead.
So when you get to LaJeunesse’s comments that he pushed Google internally to formalize some of its values:
My solution was to advocate for the adoption of a company-wide, formal Human Rights Program that would publicly commit Google to adhere to human rights principles found in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, provide a mechanism for product and engineering teams to seek internal review of product design elements, and formalize the use of Human Rights Impact Assessments for all major product launches and market entries.
… one can’t help but feel solace for an optimistic world where a better product design review process might have once improved global human rights.
The issue is far simpler though than it was in the past. You don’t need a human rights protocol, or some sort of review process for market entry. You are either in, or you are out. You either launch in these countries and deal with the inevitable human rights abuses and concomitant consumer protests in the home market, or you maintain your values and you walk away, ignoring the profit mirage from these regimes in the process.
That’s why I recently argued that Google and the NBA should just walk away. I still hold that belief. It’s also why I called on Shutterstock to leave China and return to its more open and free values. No U.S. tech company today has the leverage to make a dent on human rights the way that they did a decade ago. The internet has fractured, data sovereignty is on the rise, and there’s a binary choice to be made whether to engage or to flee. Ultimately, I take LaJeunesse’s side — these companies should walk, because there really isn’t much choice otherwise.
The business of selling consumer goods and services online is a relatively young endeavor across Africa, but ecommerce is set to boom.
Over the last eight years, the sector has seen its first phase of big VC fundings, startup duels and attrition.
To date, scaling e-commerce in Africa has straddled the line of challenge and opportunity, perhaps more than any other market in the world. Across major African economies, many of the requisites for online retail — internet access, digital payment adoption, and 3PL delivery options — have been severely lacking.
Still, startups jumped into this market for the chance to digitize a share of Africa’s fast growing consumer spending, expected to top $2 billion by 2025.
African e-commerce 2.0 will include some old and new players, play out across more countries, place more priority on internet services, and see the entry of China.
But before highlighting several things to look out for in the future of digital-retail on the continent, a look back is beneficial.
The early years for development of African online shopping largely played out in Nigeria (and to some extent South Africa). Anyone who visited Nigeria from 2012 to 2016 likely saw evidence of one of the continent’s early e-commerce showdowns. Nigeria had its own Coke vs. Pepsi-like duel — a race between ventures Konga and Jumia to out-advertise and out-discount each other in a quest to scale online shopping in Africa’s largest economy and most populous nation.
Traveling in Lagos traffic, large billboards for each startup faced off across the skyline, as their delivery motorcycles buzzed between stopped cars.
Covering each company early on, it appeared a battle of VC attrition. The challenge: who could continue to raise enough capital to absorb the losses of simultaneously capturing and creating an e-commerce market in notoriously difficult conditions.
In addition to the aforementioned challenges, Nigeria also had (and continues to have) shoddy electricity.
Both Konga — founded by Nigerian Sim Shagaya — and Jumia — originally founded by two Nigerians and two Frenchman — were forced to burn capital building fulfillment operations most e-commerce startups source to third parties.
That included their own delivery and payment services (KongaPay and JumiaPay). In addition to sales of goods from mobile-phones to diapers, both startups also began experimenting with verticals for internet based services, such as food-delivery and classifieds.
While Jumia and Konga were competing in Nigeria, there was another VC driven race for e-commerce playing out in South Africa — the continent’s second largest and most advanced economy.
E-tailers Takealot and Kalahari had been jockeying for market share since 2011 after raising capital in the hundreds of millions of dollars from investors Naspers and U.S. fund Tiger Global Management.
So how did things turn out in West and Southern Africa? In 2014, the lead investor of a flailing Kalahari — Naspers — facilitated a merger with Takealot (that was more of an acquisition). They nixed the Kalahari brand in 2016 and bought out Takelot’s largest investor, Tiger Global, in 2018. Takealot is now South Africa’s leading e-commerce site by market share, but only operates in one country.
In Nigeria, by 2016 Jumia had outpaced its rival Konga in Alexa ratings (6 vs 14), while out-raising Konga (with backing of Goldman Sachs) to become Africa’s first VC backed, startup unicorn. By early 2018, Konga was purchased in a distressed acquisition and faded away as a competitor to Jumia.
Jumia went on to expand online goods and services verticals into 14 Africa countries (though it recently exited a few) and in April 2019 raised over $200 million in an NYSE IPO — the first on a major exchange for a VC-backed startup operating in Africa.
Jumia’s had bumpy road since going public — losing significant share-value after a short-sell attack earlier in 2019 — but the continent’s leading e-commerce company still has heap of capital and generates $100 million in revenues (even with losses).
I’ll only use that 2020 riff once. But it was on-point enough to have been worth waiting for ever since I got my first eye exam.
For most of us, 2020 is going to be a turning point. Because it’s another chance to live tomorrow over again. A chance to reset, to decide what’s important and what’s worth working for.
Not a New Year’s resolution, because resolve is often in short supply.
Instead, making the choice to learn to see. A chance to decide to decide.
Sure, that’s meta, but it beats the alternative. To not see. To simply accept. To not choose. To obediently follow instead.
We’re devoting this year to bringing you a series of workshops that can undo the status quo if that’s what you choose. A chance to see more clearly and even more important, to learn to trust yourself enough to change things for the better.
To find out more about what we’re up to, I hope you’ll visit the page on our upcoming worldwide virtual conference and sign up for our free year-long 2020 update list. First dibs, details and occasional discounts.
The future has a way of showing up whether we ask for it or not, and it pays to be ready for it.
It’s hard to look right at it.
The possibility that lies before us, the chance to connect, to lead, to be heard–it’s bigger than it’s ever been.
Tempting indeed to avert your eyes, because staring into infinity means embracing just how small we feel. We avert our eyes because to realize how much potential we have to contribute puts us on the hook.
But whether we ignore it or not, the infinity of possibility remains.
Dance with it.
