# Silicon Valley Etiquette made me sick

- Link: https://www.andreidraganescu.info/2016/10/05/silicon-valley-etiquette-made-me-sick/
- Published: 2016-10-05T10:19:33+03:00
- Author: Andrei Draganescu

Here is a very popular article:

[https://medium.com/@romainserman/silicon-valley-etiquette-6934cf6f8f73](https://medium.com/@romainserman/silicon-valley-etiquette-6934cf6f8f73)

I read it. It hurts. The author is great, don’t get me wrong, [Romain Serman](https://medium.com/u/f5e43b249eaf)
is doing a great job with the article. The article is good as a story. The content
is the problem, the fact it describes _a desirable behavior _and _a present reality,
_in a place that is supposed to build humanity’s future, is an Oscar given to a 
B movie, an exploitation flick getting the Golden Globe for the best script.

First, _Etiquette is the worst part of any culture, it is the shit of our weak minds,
the excrement of thinking, the poorest of habits, one of the worst limiting factors
of any society. _I personally wish all culture of the world be purged of their etiquette
prescriptions. That’s what I daydream about.

For example,

> I even _dressed up _for my very first meeting at Google, Mountain View, Ca. Really.
> I wore a tie.

You see, etiquette wastes our feeble precious life. We think about what we wear,
even when we already thought about what to wear.

Almost every single rule in the much congratulated article is a horror born out 
of a societal preset, one that will, in time, mutate into a code of being, a code
of living, suffocating yet more people with rules of existing in a random universe.

Even as they are so trivial, they are such dense mind waste.

**Rule #1: Be On Time **sounds harmless, right? Well it would be, if we stopped 
acting like robots who can warp their existence around every single business meeting
we get, especially considering VC meetings are a lot of times moonshots and screening
time. Because being “on time” means being 3–4 minutes in advance. Because being 
late means you are “unreliable”, “unorganized” or “disrespectful”. Because sending
a message 20 minutes in advance will not save you the labeling, since with or without
the message you are still late, hence labeled.

**Rule #2: Same Day Email** is the rule I am guilty of applying to others, because
_I am able to stand the guilt and pain of not paying attention to important people
around me, so that I can reply to emails same day, and I expect my shitty behavior
to be embraced by everyone who wants something from me. _But, to consider a bad 
behavior as etiquette is moral rot, and moral rot in the valley that has artificial
intelligence in its womb, that is not what we want.

**Rule #3: The Double Opt-In Intro **is precisely, surgically precise I mean, the
thing that keeps progress dripping instead of flowing. The valley, or any innovation
hub, should try to NOT make such networking primitive primate behavior a way to 
access capital, information or mentoring, because the minute proper networking becomes
etiquette, your meritocracy has vaporized into thin air and guilds, brotherhoods,
cartels, families, frat bros and valueless “influencers” or lobbyists who “know 
everyone” will become the gatekeepers of your new connectocratic world.

**Rule #4: The 3-Bullet Email **discourages a lot of good things from happening.
If you plan of making another trivial Tinder, or shopping assistant, or to do list
manager, your three bullets are a waste of text. If you are a VC investor or angel,
and expect to find true value by spending three minutes and forty four seconds in
a pitch, you are not doing proper diligent and intelligent capital investment, you
are playing your gut and hope to win a lottery.[ Green lumber](http://nassimtaleb.org/2012/08/nassim-talebs-green-lumber-problem/#.V_THa-B97QU)!
You sell green lumber and all you care to hear is “green lumber” and in a three 
bullet email you will miss what is green about the lumber.

**Rule #5: Good Karma **is essentially show me yours, I’ll show you mine. Or, the
worse, one hand washes the other, the “I owe you” that makes for the true sell outs
we never hear about: the projects that never happen, the people shunned without 
explanations, the quick glimpse of someone’s tacit approval or denial. When gratitude
is considered etiquette it becomes a social obligation instead of an emotional state,
and social obligations make the foundation of “the ends justify the means”.

**Rule #6: The 15-mn Call or the 30 | 60 mn-Meeting **is akin to the three bullet
email, subject to the same fallacy and, behold, this is protocol. Friends, _protocol
is an act of performed submission._ If we run things on the same underlying principles
of power exchange, where your time is priceless and mine is available and abundant,
we’re digging up the centuries of shit piled below our “innovation” driven progressive
visions.

**Rule #7: Accent Is OK**, oh my God, the worst. “Accent is OK. Not speaking English
is not OK.”, means precisely the bad interpretation of “culture fit”, the club, 
the language of the elite. When I read this, all I heard was that oh so common thing
in the U.S., yelling “English please!” at a Spanish speaking folk in damn supermarkets.
And, behold again, do you know why English is the shit? Here: because “Otherwise
you will face discrimination at some point of your journey. Pretty quickly actually.”.
So, you see, the etiquette of Silicon Valley is an instruction manual on how to 
please a discriminatory system or racist and exclusionary spoiled brats. What, never
heard of a translator? We have a parliament in the E.U. where politicians speak 
their own god damn language and it works, and you tell me I can’t get some bucks
to fund some crappy app unless I know English well enough for “nuance”? And that
dictionary of how you’re given the shaft is an even bigger embarrassment:

> “Your product is OK”. Translation: “It sucks, I won’t buy it for sure”.

This diplomatic doublespeak is as far from a self proclaimed meritocratic society
as Voyager 1 got from Earth by now.

**Rule #8: Data Or Die** would be a great advice, but then again when it means we
should all level intellectually at evaluating “ TAM | SAM | SOM, MoM | YoY growth,
MRR | ARR, ACV, Rev churn | Cust churn, Cohort Analysis, LTV, CAC, DAU | WAU | MAU,
GMV, Retention Rate, Burn Rate, and so on.” it becomes a flat out lie, a filter 
for competition, a secret code to enter monopoly markets, a way to stifle creativity
and novel approaches, any of which decrease profitability but return value to society.
All acronym data is the “corporate tiger” polishing the torture tools used on the
unsuspecting victims: our children inheriting “the data” and struggling not to die.

**Rule #9: Storytelling, **I call this legitimized lying. When you are in sales 
mode all the freaking time you become the puppet of your hubris. We see this, we
see it especially with high profile founders who start believing their own sales
deck and use the power they wield to force it upon us.

When a technology industry and financial management industry meet and do this:

![](https://draganescu.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/ea2b2-1bchjledvgjrnb8s39x5drq.
gif)

I want to run the hell as far as my humble two feet can carry me, the uneducated
rugged fool who dared to dress up for a fucking job interview. If this is what we’re
expected to do, maybe it’s best to not be seen by the king.

The king of the day, that is.