It’s been a week of people trying to understand what’s happening in technology. If you split: Cheers! Now let me tell you what happens.
On Monday, WeWork founder Adam Neumann raised a seed round from Andreessen Horowitz for a new real estate company, reportedly valued at more than $1 billion. Neumann’s return, along with the largest check one of the most famous firms has ever written, was met with with a set of reactions given his tumultuous leadership at WeWork.
A few days earlier, Kimberly Bryant was fired from Black Girls Code, the non-profit she founded by the board she appointed.
You caught up: Within a few days, we had a comeback and an eviction.
One common response was that women and people of color will never get the same “second chance” as Neumann, because first chances are hard enough for a historically overlooked cohort. Alison Byers, the founder of Scroobious, a platform that aims to diversify startups and make founders more risk-averse, described the feeling as “muted anger.”
The return came from the white man who misled investors and employees. The one removed was a black woman who founded a non-profit organization to bring more diversity to the coding world.
If the analysis stops there, it is a disservice. As my colleague Dominique-Madori Davies said, “people talk about these things without the nuance of two things at the same time, but that’s also the case with most arguments online. They turn things and people into one-dimensional objects, as if this is easy to analyze. If you’re not careful, you can slip into an opinion that misses the multifaceted nature of the controversy.