CHAPTER SIX

What the accelerators got half right

I want to be careful in this chapter. It is the one in which I criticise things I also participated in. The move I am about to describe went in with good people and was built by good people. I stayed connected to several of them for many years. Some of the best friendships of my working life came out of it. The criticism is structural, not personal. I want the reader to keep that distinction in mind while I make it.

The move is this. Take a young person who is unusually capable. Pull them out of the normal path they were on — often the path that led through university and a job — and put them on a different path. Usually the founder path. They build a company with whatever money they have been given. Around them, a cohort of other young people doing the same thing.

The move is the same move I made at Euston in 2012. The move is the move the programmes I am about to describe made, at scale, for about fifteen years.

I was inside those programmes. I went in good faith. I believed they were doing a version of what I had been doing privately, with my own money, one founder at a time, since I first started backing people. I still think the people who ran them went in good faith. I want to describe what they did. Then I want to describe what I came to see. Then I want to tell you why I stepped out of it in January 2017.

I went to Peter Thiel's 20 Under 20 as a mentor in 2012. They had not invited me. I had heard about the programme, decided I wanted to be in the room, and written them an email asking to be involved. Then a rambling five-page follow-up explaining why. They said yes. I went. They invited me back the year after. I did SF, and I did New York. The programme took twenty people under the age of twenty and paid each of them a hundred thousand dollars over two years to leave university, or not go to university, and build something instead. It was controversial. It was supposed to be controversial. The argument was that university had become a four-year holding pattern that delayed the best young people from doing the work they could already start doing. If you believed this, giving some of them the money to do the work was a more honest response than complaining about the universities.

The programme sat me with the cohorts over a few days while they decided, in public, what they were going to do with their lives. I liked the people who ran it. I liked the kids. I liked the premise enough that I was willing to be inside a programme that some of my London friends thought was an American indulgence. I went both times.

I went to Techstars too, in London, in several years. I went to Entrepreneurs First. I spent time around Ignite in Newcastle. I was not just inside these programmes as a mentor or a visitor. I was an LP in all three. I wrote the first cheque into Ignite. I wrote the first cheque into Techstars London. I wrote, I think, the second cheque into Entrepreneurs First. I went in when each of these programmes had nothing. Then I stayed in across ten or so cohorts of each. I was not a skeptic standing outside. I was a believer, standing inside, with my own money on the table, for about six years.

What I came to see, across those six years and the ones that followed, was not that the programmes were cynical. They were not. They pulled in the same direction.

Every programme I was inside, across two continents, across different funding models and different mentor pools and different selection criteria, produced the same output. Smart unusual twenty-somethings went in. Accelerator-graduate founders, on a venture-capital path, working in a fashionable industry, with a deck that looked like the other decks, came out. The programmes selected for unusual people and then, across a year or two, made them less unusual. The programmes' real output was a standardised founder. That was not what the programmes had been set up to find.

The graduates were not less smart. They were not less ambitious. They were not less capable. What had happened to them was that the programme had provided a shape, and the shape had absorbed their particular strangenesses into a generic founder form. The cohort norms mattered. The VC norms mattered. The pitch-deck norms mattered. The founder-conference norms mattered. The whole system was an accelerator of sameness for people who had been selected for difference.

This is not an accusation of bad faith. A programme built to hold unusual people is a different programme from a programme that funds unusual people. Most of what got built for fifteen years was the second kind rather than the first. Funding is easy. Holding is hard. Funding can be done with a wire transfer. Holding is a ten-year commitment to the person inside the company. The programmes did the funding. Most of them, most of the time, did not do the holding.

I want to repeat this because it is the centre of the chapter. The programmes did half of it. They found the unusual people. They put them in rooms. What they did not do was hold the unusual people for the ten years after the pitch deck stopped working. The move without the holding is the move by itself. The move by itself does not produce what we need.

I want to tell you about the night I realised the programmes had been, for me, a container of a different kind than they had been for most of their graduates. The friendships I had made inside 20 Under 20 turned out to carry, privately, across years, in the way the carrier chapters describe, even when the programme itself had moved on.

The night was 23 June 2016. I was in San Francisco with my son. Four of us were in an airbnb that evening. Me. Two men I had met on 20 Under 20 four years earlier. One British and living in SF, one American. And Tade, who had come into my life not through the programme but through Euston station in 2012 with a cardboard sign. I had introduced him to the other two about a year earlier. By Brexit night the four of us had a year of dinners and conversations behind us. We were on the sofa, eating pizza, watching the news.

The UK was voting on Europe that day.

I want to say what it felt like to be in that room. The feeling is the evidence. The four of us had no particular reason, structurally, to be in the same airbnb. The programme that had brought two of them into my life had ended, for me, years before. The founder from chapter one was not from the programme at all. We were there because we liked each other. When any one of us had been in the same city as one of the others, the default had become to have a meal, or share a house, or sit on a sofa watching the news eating pizza. The arrangement was built on four years of small, unadministered contacts that the programme had made the first of and not the last.

Brexit happened. We watched it happen. Each of us was in a different relation to the news — me British, one of the men British and living in SF, one American, and Tade, the founder, also American. We talked our way through it. We did not agree about everything. We were friends. In the middle of that conversation, or just after it, Tade and I walked through a door in a park in London a few weeks later and he said so and I wrote him twenty-five thousand pounds. The Brexit pizza and the Green Park so were in the same period of my life, a few weeks apart. The second event was only possible because of the four-year substrate of friendship that the first event was sitting on top of.

That substrate was the thing the programme had been, for me, good at. It had put me in rooms with them four years earlier. I had liked them. We had stayed in touch. The staying-in-touch was not something the programme did. The staying-in-touch was something all four of us did. Between us we produced a friendship that outlived the programme and produced, at the four-year mark, the sofa in SF on the night of Brexit, and a few weeks later, the cheque that became the online college.

Nothing in any dataset captured any of this. The airbnb booking on 23 June 2016 would appear, if you looked for it, as a receipt. The pizza order would appear as a transaction. The Brexit result would appear everywhere. The Green Park meeting a few weeks later would appear, as I said in chapter one, as a wire transfer of twenty-five thousand pounds and nothing else. What would not appear, anywhere, is that four men who had met through a structured programme four years earlier had sustained the friendship privately, across years, across continents, without the programme's help. That the friendship was the infrastructure on which the subsequent investment had been made. That the online college — which has now educated several thousand students — exists because four men ate pizza on a sofa on the night the UK voted to leave Europe.

The friendship was the work. The programme had been the occasion for the friendship. The friendship was not the programme's work — it was ours. The programme would have counted, as its output, the companies that came out of the cohort. It would not have counted the four-year substrate of contact among the participants and the mentors, because the programme did not know how to count that. The thing that mattered most, to the people inside the programme, was the thing the programme had least way of measuring.

This is what I mean by the programmes got half of it right. The selection was half of it. The holding — the staying, the four years of small contacts that accumulate into a substrate that can carry an investment on its own — was the other half. The programmes did the first half at scale. The second half was done, inside the programme, by the particular people in the particular mentorships who happened to be carriers. It was not done inside most of the other mentorships. It was not done at all by the programmes' structures.

Which is why, by 2016, I could count, on one hand, the friendships I had made through 20 Under 20 that still carried. Two of them. Out of five years of mentoring and many cohorts' worth of young people. The rest had graduated, gone into the venture machine, and been absorbed. Two had stayed.

Two were enough. Tade had not been on the programme. He had come through Euston in 2012. But by 2015 he was sleeping at the two men's house in SF when he was in town, and through them was being drawn into the Thiel network. His investor list now contains a number of Thiel fellows. That is not an accident. That is what happens when you put the right people in a room with each other and step back. The college Tade now runs, the hundred million dollars it has raised, the several thousand students who pay nothing out of pocket — these things rest, in part, on the substrate of two men who liked him and let him sleep at their place. The two were the ones the college rested on, even though only one man had built it.

Around the same period, on a different day, I walked through SF with the three of them. Me, the two 20 Under 20 men, and Tade. I talked about women, football, baseball. They talked about VC. I do not mean they talked about it a bit. I mean they talked about it. Term sheets, valuations, who had raised, who was raising. I was forty-something. They were in their early twenties. I told them, on that walk, that they had their priorities wrong. I told them they would be thirty-five and very rich, and they would not have gone to the parties a twenty-two-year-old goes to, and that would be a loss not just to them but to society. Later in life they would not have the experiences, or the simple human fun, that everything else they would build needed to sit on top of. I said it on a sidewalk in San Francisco, in 2016, to three men I had funded and introduced and walked around with in the way people walk around with each other. They listened politely. The conversation went back to VC.

That sidewalk walk is the chapter in miniature. The standardisation was so deep that the man who had funded the programmes, telling them in plain English that they were wasting their twenties, did not break it. They listened politely. They went back to VC.

Two out of however many hundreds went through the programme is a low yield for a machine whose point was supposed to be finding and holding unusual people. The machine found them. It did not mostly hold them. The holding came from the fraction of the mentor pool who, privately, did the work the programme did not know how to do.

In January 2017, six months after the Brexit pizza night, I wrote a post and published it on Medium and quietly stepped off the system.

The post was called Love the people, hate the system. The line gave me the epigraph of this book. I am not going to recycle the voice I was writing in at the time — I was angrier then than I want the book to be. I want to name what I was stepping off from.

I was stepping off from the angel investing game. Not from backing founders privately. I carried on doing that, when the right person turned up, for years afterwards. I still do. What I stepped off from was the machinery — the events, the pitch days, the wire-transfers-at-scale, the appearing on investor lists, the logos on company websites, the invitations to sit on panels about what makes a good founder. I had realised, over the prior year, that I was spending more of my time inside the machinery than outside it. The machinery was a different activity from the one I had gone in to do. The machinery was, on the margin, corroding the disposition the activity depended on.

I also realised, more specifically, that the machinery was turning the people I cared about into versions of themselves that were worse than the versions I had backed. The young founders I had been inside the programmes for were being taught to market themselves. They were being taught to tell the same story about themselves in every room. They were being taught to be loud about the thing the founders I respected were, by disposition, quiet about. Some of them were going to come through it anyway. Many of them were not.

I could not fix the machinery. I did not have a platform, by design, and I did not want one. I could step off. I could say the thing plainly, once, in public, and then go back to doing the private version of the work. That is what the January 2017 post was.

It ended a phase for me. I did not stop meeting founders. I stopped meeting them through the machinery. The ones who have come into my life since have come mostly through other people who know what I do. The pattern has continued. It has continued, mostly, outside the programmes that claimed to be doing it at scale.

I want to close the chapter on something the reader will have noticed.

Most of the people I have described, across the first five chapters of this book, are men. Most of the carriers I named in chapter three are men. The founders I have mentioned, the friends on the airbnb sofa, the teenagers on platforms with cardboard signs — all men. The grandmothers, and my aunty, and the women who have carried the pattern through a kitchen for decades, are women.

I am aware of this. I am not going to pretend the book is balanced in this respect. It is not. The pattern the book describes is not a gendered pattern in the practice. Both men and women carry it. The woman across the LinkyBrains coffee table in chapter three is the most load-bearing single example of the disposition appearing in a woman in the working world. There are others I have not named. What may be gendered is the visibility of the pattern. Men, in the industries I have worked in, have been more visible as examples of the carrier disposition at work, because the industries themselves have been male-dominated and because the men have been the ones in the public roles. The women carriers have been, on the whole, quieter. Further from the centre of the public record. Less well-placed to be noticed in the form the book has been describing.

This itself is part of the silence problem. If the carriers are not well-represented in the public record, the women carriers are represented even less. The machines being trained on the public record will be missing the male carriers. They will be missing the female carriers twice as badly. That matters for what the machines are going to know about how humans actually hold each other.

I will come back to this, briefly, in a later chapter. I flag it here because I want the reader to be noticing, by now, the shape of what is missing. The shape is not only that the carriers are missing. Some sub-categories of carriers are missing more completely than others. The missingness compounds in ways that should worry anyone thinking about what the machines will think a human being is.

The next chapter is about who is carrying this forward.