OneZero_ is partnering with Big Technology, a newsletter and podcast by Alex Kantrowitz, to bring readers exclusive access to interviews with notable figures in and around the tech industry._
This week, Kantrowitz sits down with Bloomberg Beta head Roy Bahat. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
_To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, _you can check it out on _Apple Podcasts**, Spotify, and _Overcast.**
Venture capitalists, founders, and others in the tech industry are feeling pretty raw these days. Once admired as upstarts fighting the status quo, they now feel under siege, under attack for the negative things their products do without being appreciated for how they improve our lives.
Bloomberg Beta head Roy Bahat, a veteran venture capitalist, joins the Big Technology Podcast this week for a nuanced conversation about what’s going with the tech world, how its innovation might be linked to its problems, and how it should handle the criticism.
Kantrowitz: You’re one of the VCs out there that are very public with what you think. You tackle the important issues, not skirting around them. And I feel like you don’t yell at journalists, and that’s a good start.
Roy Bahat: I definitely do not yell at journalists. As a person who once thought I might be a journalist and failed at it, I basically think journalists are looking for the truth. If we all want to operate in this world, let’s help them find the truth and then we can figure it out. You just mentioned having the voice, a question I got asked by a founder in our portfolio, he’s like, “Why is VC Twitter so weird?”
You’re getting right into my question.
Oh, good. Then ask me questions and…
I want to hear what you got to say, and then I’ll follow.
Well, I was thinking about it. Look, venture capital is a strange business because: What do we do? People think we invest in companies. Kind of. We really sell money to companies because the companies have so much leverage when they’re doing well. And you only want to invest in great companies, so you think the ones you’re investing in are doing well. In a way, we’re all salespeople. And what do we sell?
In the language of tech, we are customer success people, meaning helping our customers, founders to succeed. And we sell money and money is a commodity, meaning like literally my product that I sell is legally equivalent — it’s tender for all debts, public, private, whatever it says on the bills. As a result, as with all commodities, the way you distinguish yourself is with your brand, reputation.
And so, VCs just have become, in a lot of cases, these flat-out braggarts who just are incredibly annoying. And I’ve tried for myself to figure out how do you highlight the things you’re proud of and the founders you’re also proud of while also having some things very difficult to have in public which is authentic, genuine engagement and it can be maddening.
One of the reasons I think people who are inauthentic in public is the fear that they could have any piece of what they say excerpted and flattened and mischaracterized and I’ve just kind of concluded that that’s going to happen sometimes and I’ll just try to be myself.
And one reason I like podcasts is — I’ve even invested in a bunch of podcast companies — is that in a podcast, it’s very hard to do that. It’s very hard to pull out that little piece and flatten you and the listeners typically paying close attention. And so that makes for a better conversation.
I like them too. I do think that you can talk with a level of nuance here that you can’t on Twitter. And one of the things that I worry about these days is that there’s a whole segment of the conversation that’s left out because any attempt to be nuanced can be rewarded with yelling. People love to yell.
You talked about the VC brand. Why do so many decide that their brand is grievance?
This is something I’ve not talked about in public before but then I’ve been thinking about, I think that it stems from an entire piece of the ideology of the technology industry because I don’t think the aggrieved thing is just VCs. I think it is founders of companies and executives and middle-level employees. I think it’s kind of endemic to the tech industry at this point. Why is that? I think it is the root cause is that a bunch of people entered tech with a certain set of beliefs about how the world works, and those beliefs don’t align with how the world works now.
And I’ll give you an example of that. I call this the Tech Paradigm. One example of that is that we in tech are the attackers. There’s this famous Steve Jobs’ line about, “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to be in the navy.” But what do you when the pirates run the most valuable companies in the world and have more power than the navy does? Well, then all of a sudden, you’re the admiral.
And so, tech does not know how to wear the crown of criticism that comes with all that responsibility. Instead, it’s like, “Well, I’m just misunderstood and if only you got it, you’d be happier with me.” Instead of saying, “Oh, shit. There actually is something valid about this. Since I have power, maybe I should show a little nuance and responsibility.” And as a result, they feel aggrieved because they’ve been attacked.
I remember there was an article that a journalist wrote about a VC fund basically saying like, “This VC fund is falling apart.” And the VC fund was led by somebody who was really sympathetic and it’s not even important who it was because this could have been many situations. It’s like it’s not about that person. And all the responses, the journalists were like, “Well, why didn’t you write about all these other things that that fund is doing that are great?” It’s like, “Well, because the point of my story was not to grade the fund overall. The point of my story was to talk about this one thing.”
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