00:00Explain what you mean by saying she should be held accountable, but also that holding her accountable could be sexist.
00:07Yeah, it's interesting because it has become such this lightning rod for what people think about Elizabeth Holmes and what they think about tech.
00:16What I'm saying is, you know, she should obviously be held accountable.
00:20The things that they've charged around the fraud and the deception and what she knew at the different times is true.
00:27But why are we only holding her accountable?
00:30There's so much male privilege that the people who have had similar wrongdoing, who are men, are not held accountable as CEOs the same way Elizabeth Holmes has been.
00:43So lots of pushback against your op-ed.
00:46Some people think it sounds like you're defending Elizabeth Holmes.
00:50Are you?
00:51It's so bizarre.
00:52I'm saying she should be held accountable.
00:54I don't know how to make it more clear.
00:56I just don't think that we should allow all of these male CEOs to not be held accountable.
01:01I'm saying, you know, we need to really take this moment and say, look, we can hold CEOs accountable and we should be holding everyone who's doing things that are bad for their customers, bad for investors, bad for society, accountable for their actions and their leadership as well.
01:22You write, questionable, unethical, even dangerous behavior has run rampant in the male-dominated world of startups.
01:29You compare her to Uber's Travis Kalanick, WeWork's Adam Neumann, Jules Kevin Burns, none of whom were prosecuted or known to have done anything illegal yet, and all of them have real working products.
01:40Is that a fair comparison?
01:41Yeah, I think the wrongdoing and the harm that's been caused by these different companies is quite significant.
01:48You look at Uber, you know, there are, you know, whole slews of customers who have said they've been sexually assaulted by drivers, and apparently Uber knew about it and didn't do anything about it.
02:00That's a lot of harm that is, you know, doesn't get much worse than that.
02:05There have been, you know, with Juul, they've built a market of vaping into the youth market that was very small before they came in.
02:17It was, I think, 12% of high schoolers in 2017 had vaped recently.
02:22It went up to 28% in 2019, and you started seeing people who are being harmed by vaping.
02:3068 people died from vaping.
02:32You know, Juul will say, oh, it's not necessarily from our devices, but you've created through all of this marketing and marketing to kids and to schools.
02:44And, you know, I just saw Massachusetts is saying that they were marketing on Nickelodeon channels for very young children, not even high school age.
02:51Right.
02:52You know, they're selling flavors that appeal to kids.
02:55They're building a market and market share in this audience that is, it's really, I don't know how you don't go after the CEO.
03:05Now, Sonny Balwani is a co-defendant of Elizabeth Holmes, and if the prosecution, as you argue, represents some sort of bias against women or in favor of men, then why is he a co-defendant?
03:19I'm focused on the CEOs.
03:22And obviously, if you're going to take down Elizabeth Holmes, you're going to take down the person who is working most closely with her.
03:31If you're going to call it a conspiracy, obviously, you can't have a conspiracy on your own.
03:35So you're going to bring in the person who has been the CEO of the CFO, I think.
03:42I don't think that's proof that it's not sexist.
03:46I think it, you know, they targeted the CEO and then they're trying to take down the people around her to build their case.
03:51So here's another issue, and I spoke with our legal reporter about this, is that your argument doesn't include some important legal considerations, which is that when prosecutors bring a criminal case, they need to be able to win.
04:06So connecting Holmes to fraud and the other issues that the prosecutors allege here is a much more simple proposition than trying to connect, you know, Mark Zuckerberg to what's happening in Myanmar or Juul to what's happening to a generation of vapors.
04:25How do you think about that?
04:26Juul has 2,000 lawsuits against them, 2,000, and a lot of them are being handled by prosecutors.
04:36They just settled for $40 million in one case.
04:41So I don't think it's that different.
04:42I think they've, if anything, they've got a lot more harm that people feel comfortable litigating around.
04:50So I'm not sure that that actually works against me.
04:54Now, Ellen, you've been continuing to do pioneering work on diversity and how we can make workplaces more inclusive.
05:03I'm curious what the reaction to your piece makes you think about progress or the lack thereof that we've made and what you're seeing in this new remote work world.
05:12How is that affecting women and people of color in the workplace or the remote workplace?
05:18Thank you for asking.
05:19So we've done some research on what workplaces have looked like since COVID.
05:25And we found that a lot of women, non-binary people, Black people, Latinx people, Asian people, indigenous people, and especially people who are in intersections of those groups,
05:38are experiencing a lot more harassment, a lot more harm, a lot more hostility, there's more ageism, there's more ableism, and it's all coming even remotely.
05:52Because I think the problems that we have in our workplaces, like discrimination and biases, they haven't gone away.
06:00You know, I think some people thought, well, if you're not in the same room, then it's really hard to sexually harass someone.
06:07It's actually, you know, the harassers are finding people online.
06:10They're finding ways to get them one-on-one in conversations or on email, and they don't seem to mind not being in the same room.
06:20And that's been a very disturbing learning from the work that we've done.
06:24From the last 24 hours, I've heard from a lot of women CEOs that I know, and they've been very supportive of this op-ed.
06:35And I think they are living it.
06:37Like, they know that there is bias, that there is privilege that is given to white men in the funding industry and in the expectations and the performance that they have to live up to
06:49and the bar that they have to cross that is much higher than what their counterparts, who are male and white, experience.
06:59And that, I think, makes them really understand what the message I was trying to get across.
07:04Like, we cannot continue to hold women to this higher bar.
07:09All, you know, men should be held to this bar of being, you know, of not lying and not harming the customers and the community.
07:19Right. Last quick question. I got about a minute left.
07:21I have to ask you about Reddit, your old haunt, $10 billion valuation driving a new class or group of people to finance, but certainly not without some drama.
07:31What's your quick take?
07:32I mean, I think they're really pushing hard to get to IPO.
07:37I mean, you know, the last number I saw was $15 billion and some unauthorized kind of, you know, anonymous source.
07:46I think they are, you know, and unfortunately, they're taking the Facebook path where it's like,
07:51I want to drive engagement at all costs because that is what I'm going to be measured on in the public market.
07:57And I want, you know, so you see the numbers they share are, you know, numbers of users, number of, you know,
08:03number of monthly users and that's not a healthy path.
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