by Emily Chang
There are a few founders who see the opportunity here. Everyone is looking for a competitive advantage, and some tech leaders have realized that there is an abundance of talent and valuable ideas in the populations that, for the last three decades, have been largely untapped. Looking at their new women-inclusive businesses and workplace cultures can give us some idea of the potential payoffs.
I ran into Dick Costolo in April 2016, ten months after he had left Twitter, and he was nearly giddy, having just hired another female engineer at his new personal fitness start-up, Chorus, the fourth company he has co-founded in two decades. From day one, Costolo focused obsessively on making sure he hired as many women as men, even if it took longer to find them. “Once you fall behind, if just two out of twenty engineers are women, it’s impossible to catch up,” Costolo told me. “Any one of these companies, the underlying disease is that it’s 90 percent men,” Costolo says. “Everything, literally everything, is reinforcing the problem.”
Jack Dorsey, who returned to Twitter as CEO when Costolo left, is also taking an innovative approach to improving the environment for women at his other company, Square. New female engineers joining the company are placed on teams that include other women rather than alone with a group of men. The hope is to engender camaraderie and networking and mitigate the “imposter syndrome” that women often experience when they are the only female in a room of male engineers. Still, with a limited number of female engineers, there is a trade-off to this strategy: some teams will remain all male. It’s an experiment, one that Dorsey believes is worth trying. In the meantime, Square has developed a strong bench of female executives. “It’s not just creating a sense of belonging that’s important,” Dorsey told me, “but also making sure women contribute to decision making.”
And then there’s the most straightforward strategy, that having women in charge will naturally attract more women. Julia Hartz, co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite, says the company’s gender balance is fifty-fifty and that this has happened organically perhaps as a result of simply having strong female role models at the top.
These founders are attempting to create products that will be used by everyone, no computer expertise required. Hiring only the stereotypical computer nerd that IBM and others were screening for in the late 1960s and early 1970s (those who “don’t like people” and “dislike activities involving close personal interaction”) would ensure disaster for these sorts of endeavors. Following James Damore’s broken logic from his Google memo and hiring mostly men because they supposedly systematize rather than empathize would be equally shortsighted. What these companies need is a tech-savvy workforce with a deep empathic understanding of people’s behaviors, interactions, and preferences. For new technologies like these to reach their potential, they simply must be created by teams with a diverse set of perspectives.
SLACK: A DIVERSITY CASE HISTORY
Stewart Butterfield, another multi-time entrepreneur and founder of Slack, is also proving that building a diverse, family-friendly workforce can be a key to creating a successful start-up. Butterfield had his first success when he co-founded the photo-sharing company Flickr with his then-wife, Caterina Fake. Flickr was meant to be simply a side feature for a video game Butterfield was developing, but the game financially flopped just as it became clear that photo sharing was about to become the next big thing. Yahoo swooped in, buying Flickr for north of $20 million in 2005, and Butterfield and Fake became dot-com stars. It wouldn’t last. Innovation at Flickr died under the Yahoo umbrella and Facebook and Instagram ran away with the mobile photo-sharing market.
Naturally, Butterfield started over. He built another game that failed, then, in 2012, shut the operation down, laying off all but eight people. But again, a side project of his company’s showed great promise. Butterfield’s employees had built new software to track projects and communicate with each other internally. That accidental, modern take on a chat room—now called Slack—quickly became one of the most highly valued unicorns in Silicon Valley.
Like many tech successes, Slack grew quickly—in four years expanding from twenty to over a thousand employees in five countries. But unlike most tech companies, it grew while hiring a lot of women. In 2017, Slack reported that 43.5 percent of its employees were women, including 48 percent of managers and almost 30 percent of technical employees—far better numbers than almost any tech company in Silicon Valley. Slack said of its diversity efforts in a Medium post, “We are simultaneously proud of what our people have been able to accomplish so far and determined to improve. This is a work in progress.” The real question is this: How did they do it? The answer: Butterfield and his team made a critical decision early to make diversity and inclusion an explicit priority.
I sat down with Butterfield at Slack’s SoMa headquarters in December 2016 and asked what he thought it would take to level the Silicon Valley playing field. “It’s so funny because I would have had a totally different answer to that on November 7,” he said, referring to the day before Donald Trump was elected president. “I just thought that the world was getting better, but then it turns out it’s not getting better.”
Butterfield is not shy about sharing his political views. He’s publicly backed Planned Parenthood, protested President Trump’s controversial travel ban targeting Muslims, and sent a companywide memo in 2016 urging his employees to take a pause on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. “Think about how profoundly shameful it is that there even ever had to be a ‘civil rights movement,’” Butterfield wrote.
Two years before I sat down with Butterfield, former Google engineer Erica Joy Baker was marching the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the shooting of a young black man named Michael Brown, when Butterfield tweeted at her, “Be safe.” When Baker looked at Butterfield’s Twitter page, she realized he cared about diversity almost as much as she did. “He is woke. I want to go work for him,” Baker said of her discovery. In 2015, she joined the Slack team as a senior engineer fully convinced after reading a powerful Medium post by Slack’s then-engineering chief of staff, Nolan Caudill, in which he outlined the company’s core values. These included diligence, curiosity, and empathy—a stark contrast to Uber’s original core tenets: “steppin’ on toes,” “always be hustlin’,” and “meritocracy.”
“Our industry has for decades been directed and built by a mostly homogeneous group, and has downplayed the accomplishments of others not in this group,” Caudill wrote. “We recognized our own shortcomings in this area and thus wanted to be explicit about what Slack stands for, what we are trying to build, and who we want here to help us build it. By focusing on how we build Slack first, we can hopefully improve the greater industry, in whatever measure.”
Butterfield is quick to acknowledge that white male privilege helped land him in the CEO suite in the first place. He recalls his old group of buddies from Yahoo who went on to become great successes in tech, including Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, and Andrew Braccia, a venture capitalist at Accel who invested in Slack. “All of them are men,” Butterfield says. “It’s not a conspiracy, but it’s also not a coincidence.”
Butterfield admits that his Rolodex gives him a huge, and somewhat unfair, advantage. “It would have been the same experience if you worked at eBay in early days, Google, Facebook, or in this generation Airbnb, Pinterest, Snapchat, Slack,” he says. “I have all these amazing contacts that I can call on if I want my company acquired, or I want an investor, or if I want to do a partnership, or I want to hire someone, or whatever. And if you don’t have access to that network, it’s not impossible to be successful in tech, but it’s an order of magnitude more difficult. Not actually insurmountable, but close.” There are plenty of women entrepreneurs who deserve funding now, but it is also true that we are in a transition period where men like Butterfield with influence, connections, and access to money can help. Women who gain career momentum at Slack will go on to greater things with their own set of vital connectio
ns.
Butterfield grants that Slack’s values may sound like “hippie-dippy bullshit,” then gets serious: “We have to make money to be a successful business, but the making of the money doesn’t determine whether the whole thing was successful and worthwhile and whether I feel like my life was well spent . . . I find it totally plausible that it drives better business outcomes, but I don’t think that’s the prime reason. The real drivers were, this just seems fairer and better for the world.” Butterfield acknowledges that he, personally, is already richer than he ever dreamed of being. Does that make it easier for him to focus on the company’s values rather than on its bottom line? To him, they are the same. “For the company to make more money is a good thing because it can reinvest in all kinds of stuff. But having some belief in the mission is going to make us so much more effective in the first place.”
Slack can’t change who applied to college five years ago, Butterfield points out. “So, how can we have an impact?” he asks. “We can have an impact by making this a good place for people to work. If women are less likely to leave the industry because they worked at Slack, then there will be more people who survived at a higher tenure of experience and therefore a higher role and could go on to be a VP of engineering at Slack or at some other company in the future.”
The Slack team is engineering a system that was specifically created to foster teamwork and collaboration. It would simply be bad business not to employ a diverse team that knew something about how people of all types work together to build this product. Though Butterfield knew the kind of team he wanted, he also knew he couldn’t make it happen all by himself: “As an already successful, white, male, straight—fucking go down the list—I’m not going to have the relevant experience to determine what makes this a good workplace, so some of that is just being open but really just making it an explicit focus.”
The path to creating the workforce and corporate culture he desired wasn’t easy. In 2014, when the company was just fifty employees, almost all of them white and male, Butterfield hired the company’s first female executive, Anne Toth, who ultimately ran Slack’s people operations and recruiting. “If there was more than one woman in the bathroom, that was kind of an ‘Oh my gosh’ moment,” Toth recalls. “I knew Stewart wanted Slack to be a different kind of workplace . . . He used to say the business fundamentals are solid . . . but we cannot screw up on the people we bring into the company, we can’t screw up on the culture, we don’t have the same margins for error that we might on the business front. He was very passionate about who we are.”
Toth contacted Joelle Emerson, a former lawyer who had started a new business called Paradigm to help tech companies build their diversity and inclusion policies. I first met Emerson in March 2016, at the airy San Francisco headquarters of Airbnb, another company her team was advising. She speaks incredibly fast and with conviction. Right off the bat she said, “None of these companies are winning, and all of them are struggling” when it comes to the representation of women. By September 2017, Emerson was mildly more optimistic: “We’ve seen a handful of companies (like Pinterest, Intel, and Airbnb, for example) demonstrate progress in some areas, while stalling in others. Sustained progress takes time . . . That companies shouldn’t be congratulating themselves doesn’t mean there isn’t progress; it means we have a long way to go.”
One impediment to progress, Emerson says, is that companies have been focused more on raising awareness about unconscious bias rather than educating employees about actions they can take to combat bias. “If you focus on trying to raise awareness, you probably won’t see a ton of impact. If you train people on actions they can take, that can have an impact,” she says.
The research shows that the effects of unconscious-bias training are mixed; there’s evidence that it can wear off quickly and even backfire. Emerson says that’s reason not to get rid of the training but to improve it, in order to help employees to understand why certain changes are being made and empower them to engage with those changes. That’s why Emerson is focused on building her learnings about bias into the everyday structure and operations of companies. First and foremost, she says CEOs and VCs need to buy into the idea that diversity is important and hire a head of HR before the company grows beyond forty to fifty people.
With Emerson’s guidance and Toth’s execution, Slack started by having employees discuss and articulate the company’s values including, most importantly, empathy. And the company started collecting diversity data on its employees.
Restructuring the company’s interview process was another key component of Emerson’s formula. “When interviews aren’t structured, they tend to be about as predictive as a coin toss,” Emerson says. “It’s only by articulating what you’re looking for and assessing for that consistently that we can have any objective evaluation of candidates.”
The company also ended “whiteboard coding interviews,” a standard practice at many Silicon Valley companies that involves a candidate writing code on a whiteboard in front of a panel of interviewers. “When the candidate is asked to do something they don’t normally do and do it in front of someone judging them, it introduces a performance dynamic that can be alienating,” Slack’s infrastructure engineering head, Julia Grace, wrote in a Medium post.
Companies also need to focus on how prospective employees are finding them in the first place. Employee referrals can be one of the most insidious drivers of sameness in company hiring; that is, men are most likely to refer other men. Emerson recommends asking employees explicitly to refer diverse candidates. “Just by thinking harder and being intentional about it,” she says, companies can change surprisingly quickly. Pinterest, another client of Emerson’s, has seen significant increases in its percentage of women and minority candidates simply by asking employees directly to refer women and underrepresented minorities.
“Stewart has said things I’ve never heard from a CEO, like ‘Can you refer people who look like you to me? I get white guys all the time. You can make a difference.’ These are things more people need to say,” says former director of engineering Leslie Miley, who is African American.
In fact, whenever Butterfield tweeted about hiring diverse candidates, Toth says the company saw ridiculous spikes in inbound interest.
Slack also diversified its recruiting team. “We have a recruiter who’s sixty, we have a Latina woman, two African American women, an African American man, an Asian man, several Caucasian women, and I can’t even count the number of LGBT folks,” Toth told me. These recruiters were given explicit instructions to source underrepresented candidates from a broader swath of schools (including often overlooked schools such as historically black colleges and those in the South) for every new role at every level of the organization. “We were also looking for candidates who might be older, midcareer, or reentering the workforce from different geographical areas, where typical tech companies weren’t looking,” Toth said. Recruiting “captains” were designated for various groups, including women, “Earthtones” (referring to people of color), LGBTQ, and veterans, to promote better understanding and support of those specific candidates.
Job postings were reworded. According to Emerson, male-biased terms such as “rock star” and “ninja” are no-no’s, along with words such as “brilliant” that convey the belief that intelligence, talents, and abilities are innate, rather than traits that can be developed. Research shows that job descriptions that contain such language get fewer applications overall and fewer from women. Slack also removed explicit requirements like number of years of experience and specific degrees necessary, in the hope that candidates wouldn’t opt out prematurely.
Today, Slack’s job postings clearly articulate the company’s focus on diversity, stating, “We believe everyone deserves to work in a welcoming, respectful, and empathetic culture. We live by our values and hire accordingly . . . Ensuring a diverse and inclusive workplace where we learn from each other is core to
Slack’s values. We welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. We are an equal opportunity employer and a fun place to work. Come do the best work of your life here at Slack.”
A big bonus of even a little success at diverse hiring is this: once you get more women and underrepresented minorities in the door, more want to join. “The next hire is easier. There’s an increasing return dynamic there,” Butterfield says. “Now that we have this reputation . . . it feeds on itself.”
There is an important myth to dispel. Some people think hiring for diversity is illegal. “They’d be wrong,” says Emerson flatly. “Generally, what you can’t do . . . is, you can’t say, ‘Here are two equally qualified candidates, and I’m going to hire you just because you’re a woman.’ But you can engage in efforts to counterbalance the candidates you’re seeing. I would say you have an obligation to do that; not only is it legal, but you should have to.”
Which brings me to a point the PayPal Mafia member Keith Rabois raised early in this book: he told me that it’s important to hire people who agree with your “first principles”—for example, whether to focus on growth or profitability and, more broadly, the company’s mission and how to pursue it. I’d agree. If your mission is to encourage people to share more online, you shouldn’t hire someone who believes people don’t really want to make their private lives public, or you’ll spend a lot of time arguing, time you don’t have to waste when you’re trying to build a company. But those who believe in your mission and how to execute it aren’t limited to people who look and act like you. To combat this tendency, you must first be explicit about what your first principles are. And then, for all of the reasons we discussed, go out of your way to find people who agree with your first principles and who don’t look like you. Because if you don’t build a diverse team when you start, as you scale, it will be incomparably harder to do so.