The lead characters — and probably their true-life counterparts — of “Super Pumped,” “The Dropout” and “WeCrashed” will all tell you the same thing: They wanted to change the world. The world, they say, just wasn’t ready.
In the span of less than a month, three new series have tried to figure out the rise and fall of the tech bro: Travis Kalanick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) at Uber, Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) at Theranos and Adam Neumann (Jared Leto) at WeWork. We know how all three end: Kalanick and Neumann were ousted by their respective boards and Holmes, along with COO Sunny Balwani, was charged with and convicted of criminal fraud.
Each tells a slightly different story. Holmes never got Theranos off the ground, bested by technology that didn’t actually work. WeWork, for a while, housed millions of office workers around the world, although its profit margins were dubious at best. Uber remains one of the most successful Silicon Valley exports.
But at the heart of all three shows is a single person who got swept up in all of it — and then watched it collapse.
There’s something about watching people fail. There’s a perverse pleasure in watching the king of the jungle fall, crumbling beneath the weight of ego or expectations. We tell ourselves we could have done it better, that we would have known when to stop or taken a different path at the fork in the road.
These shows tell us we probably couldn’t.
Power corrupts, or money does or prestige. How do you stop when Forbes is calling? Why would you say no to investors writing blank checks and begging you to take them?
What “Super Pumped,” “The Dropout” and “WeCrashed” want you to know is that it wasn’t just about Kalanick, Holmes and Neumann. There’s a larger system at play, one that cares about profits above — and instead of — all. Their founders may have cared about changing the world (transportation, health care and the workplace, respectively), but their investors only cared about the bottom line.
That’s not wrong, but it’s also an excuse. Kalanick chose to chase investments at all costs and ignored the rampant sexual harassment and toxic culture inside Uber because the perpetrators were still getting the job done. “The Dropout” offers the same for Holmes, constantly reminding viewers she was a woman in a man’s world, forced to work twice as hard to even get in the door, even as her lies piled up. Neumann was also an outsider, “WeCrashed” reminds you, a barefoot Israeli who grew up on a kibbutz and either couldn’t or wouldn’t conform to American standards.
There is a hubris required to get you to the level of Elizabeth Holmes or Adam Neumann and there is a naivete required to tumble from such heights. The spectacular flameouts are predictable, so much so that Hollywood was able to turn them into a patterned rise and fall.
From the outside, we get to judge. We thrive off it, in fact. We say that will never be us. We say that when we finally have that great idea, the one that will disrupt an industry and change the world, we will do it right. We will succeed.
“I used to think they were all Jesus Christ,” Benchmark partner Bill Gurley, played by Kyle Chandler, says in “Super Pumped” of the tech founders he funds. “Then I began to see that half of them were, indeed, on the side of the angels, and half of them were some version of David Koresh. … The trick is to flee the cult and get out of the compound the second before they burn it to the ground.”
We don’t hear about the angels. We hear about the Waco leaders who, for a while, convince everyone that they are the chosen ones. We hear about the burning compound because failure, when it’s not our own, is inherently more interesting than success. We like the fall.
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