💖Motivation Meows💖
Welcome, everyone, to my first edition of The Black Cat. Fun fact: I had a column in my final semester in college called The Black Cat, where I went around South Central L.A. talking to Black business owners about their hopes, dreams, and aspirations. I named the column after a restaurant in Hollywood that, for the longest time, I couldn’t enter because I wasn’t 21. When I finally turned 21, graduated, and submitted my last column for the student paper, that restaurant was the first place I ate at — a celebration of the great unknown to come.
This newsletter is not necessarily a rehash of what I did in college; this will be more personal. Here, I will be sharing a lot of the work I’ve written, breaking down new topics and other people’s stories, pondering ideas, and late-night thoughts. There’s a lot happening in the world, and sometimes, it’s good and therapeutic to write your thoughts somewhere. Please feel free to subscribe, send around, email me your reflections, and follow me on Twitter and Instagram at dominicmadori.
This month, I’m reading: Banjo by Claude McKay, a so-called plotless story about Black people from throughout the diaspora who lived in Marseille, France, in the 1920s.
This week, I can’t stop listening to: The First Cut is the Deepest, the P.P Arnold Version.
💢From the Chatterbox💢
I can’t look at anything else OpenAI-related. It is already giving me trauma to think about and seeing his name anywhere now causes my blood pressure and anxiety to rise in ways that will now take weeks to settle. With that being said, there was one topic about this AI drama that I haven’t seen a lot of people talk about. Well, scratch that; I’ve seen a few people tweet about it, and some people message me privately. But an angle I have yet to see is, well, there is kinda a double standard with everything that happened to Sam, right? I started diving deeper into that in the backdrop of making memes about Sam and OpenAI.
First, let me say good for Sam Altman.
Good for the entire team at OpenAI, who stood their ground and helped reverse what some call the most stunning tech ouster since Apple fired Steve Jobs. Good for Altman and Greg Brockman, who got their jobs back, but not before being offered a cozy position at Microsoft (one of OpenAI’s biggest investors.) Good for everyone who, over the weekend, showed nothing but support as OpenAI’s board ousted Altman for mysterious reasons we still don't know.
He signed on to come back last night (and agreed to an internal investigation), and what happens next is anyone’s guess. What is known is that order in the Silicon Valley universe is restored, for now at least.
Cut through all of this spirited noise, though, other sentiments bubbled. Not in a bad way, just a and they-say-women-are-too-emotional-to-run-companies type of way. It was more like we-have-no-idea-what-Altman-even-did-and-he’s-already-getting-a-second-chance vibes. Now, note he has an amazing resume, and also one of palace intrigue (what happened at Y Combinator, Sam!). It’s totally fine, seriously. It’s just, “this is a simple case of white boys in Silicon Valley doing what they do with billions of dollars at stake,” one Black founder told me.
And sure, call these feelings projection, personal gripes; call them covetousness. But you can’t necessarily call them wrong. Each time a white man like this is exalted to new heights, there is always a whisper in the back of a Black person and even a woman’s mind just wondering how different a situation would unfold if that white man were them. "It’s all so speculative but sexism isn’t,” one woman founder told me. “And if Sam was a woman, she would be gone and done — even if she too was a great leader.”
The Black founder pointed to the case of Kimberly Bryant, who was ousted by her board two years ago and received little support. In fact, Black founders and women often run into trouble with the boards over mistakes and hardly get second chances.
Yes, they might not be Sam Altmans. But that’s the point — Sam Altmans are never just created; there are a lot of preparation-meets-opportunities with those types of technologists, and women and Black founders do not get those opportunities. The past weekend was wonderfully entertaining and mildly tinged with the thought that this type of support, these types of chances, well, that’s not something certain people will ever know of.
It’s true that Altman’s company loyalty, paired with negotiation skills by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, helped stabilize the company after four days of peril. Of course, Nadella is not a white man, but when it comes to the functioning of the patriarchy, a tech diversity expert told me that men are most often afforded the opportunity to hold power, to wield power, to fail and bounce back, in ways that women and specifically Black people are not. Like seriously, Adam Neumann is on his third company.
“I feel jaded because I know what Sam is getting will never be what will happen to me or anyone that looks like me,” another Black person in tech told me. “You know what we will get? Thoughts and prayers. Sam and many white men in tech get second chances, which are career suicides for me. He gets a second chance when it’s a death knell for us.”
“It just highlights the brokenness in tech where people like Sam can navigate comfortably, knowing they have others to protect them,” the Black techie continued. “Where was this for Timint?”
Timnit Gebru was brought up a few times throughout the OpenAI saga to me by people in tech and also generally online by those who remembered what happened. She left Google in 2020 after raising concerns about an AI report they were working on. She says she was fired, Google said she wasn’t. The fallout was intense, and she hasn’t returned to the corporate tech space; instead, she went on to start her own AI research institute.
Her situation is different from what Altman finds himself in, but that hasn’t stopped a lot of women and Black founders from pointing out the deep contrast in who received unconditional support in the industry. Those, again, are the whispers. Gerbru did not immediately return our request for comment, but she tweeted at Jeff Dean, the chief science officer at Google DeepMind, who she says fired her and who expressed support for the OpenAI research team, saying, “glad to know you have empathy for someone.”
For a weekend, we were all immersed in the usually shrouded tech bro bubble, watching in real-time how power moved and how most of us are far from its offerings. It was a spectacle, fascinating and illuminating in ways most will never see again. Just think for a moment: Altman got billions to build OpenAI, a speculative idea. And they felt anger for him when it seemed like that was all going away. We all witnessed what it looks like when somebody cares.
“We don’t write those kinds of checks for Black women, like are you kidding me?” Matt Wallaert, a behavioral scientist and tech founder, told me. He pondered a fair question, which was, what would have happened to Altman if he were a Black woman? The idea is even hard to grasp. Altman created so much shareholder value that the mentioning of his leaving caused a dip in Microsoft's market cap. That is the type of value a Black founder at this point in time has never and will never have for a company. Even media coverage would have been different if Altman were a woman.
A former director at a VC firm said that the media skews stories around female tech leaders negatively, “as if their ousting or failure is deserved while painting white male leaders and wrongfully mistreated victims.”
Brian Brackeen, founder of Lightship Capital, was briefly ousted by his board at his company Kairos. He said that bad boards know if a founder is Black, they are automatically going to be assumed guilty in the press.
“They know they can lie, and it will be accepted by a percentage of the population, and in that, they can get cover,” he continued. “With Sam … they can’t just make things up, and because of that, they are losing in the court of public opinion. Black founders can not win in that court, not until we have an honest conversation with ourselves about our biases.”
Bryant, the founder who was ousted from her company Black Girls Code two years ago, added to that, saying that women and Black women in tech experience “heightened and often rabid media scrutiny and sometimes limited industry and community backing.”
“Unlike Atlman, Black women founders rarely enjoy such overwhelming support, and the road to recovery after setbacks can be exceptionally challenging,” she said, adding that these disparities highlight the pressing need for more equitable narratives and support systems for all founders. “The absence of a Black or female counterpart for Altman in the tech industry reflects the persistent replication of the 'successful CEO' prototype, primarily shaped by the persona of the white male wonderboy.”
There were so many jokes about how much money former OpenAI employees could have raised if they all left OpenAI. Well, how much money they might raise, as women work at that company too and realistically, women don’t tend to raise a lot of money by themselves. When Altman was initially fired, OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati briefly stepped in as interim CEO, prompting some on Twitter to make sexist jokes about her. Others took to criticizing the education levels of women on the board, with the irony being that Altman himself is a dropout.
Women in tech saw those tweets and all those who engaged with them. It loudly showed what they quietly often murmur to themselves: that sexism is still deeply ingrained in this tech-bro world, and that is not going to change anytime soon. “Attribution bias is intricately connected to performance bias, and stereotypically, irrespective of race, men are frequently perceived as more competent,” the DEI tech expert said. “Consequently, in moments of error, they are afforded the chance to recover or encounter diminished scrutiny.”
Cindy Gallop, founder of Make Love Not Porn, said this weekend demonstrated that Silicon Valley had doubled down on believing the “white-male lens is the be-all-and-end-all,” adding that “AI through the female and diverse lens hasn't even begun to be tapped.” Funding to Black founders dipped this quarter while funding to all-women teams remains stagnant at around 1.9%. But the weekend’s spectacle was also an interesting first-hand look into how visionaries are created and sustained.
“We get criticized for the most petty stuff,” Bryant said, referencing an article written about Glossier founder Emily Weiss that wrote how her employees took note of the fact that she had no fish in her fish tank. “It validates my point that the odds are not the same for women and Black women in these matters.”
The conversations around gender and racial equity in this industry always come and go, and each time, the doors to the Silicon Palace shut. For a moment this weekend, we were all a part of something, and it was fun to watch his hero-arc story with a perfectly cast plot that HBO is sure to snatch the rights to one day. Maybe what happened with Altman is all just a nothing burger, right? After all, he's returning, so whatever he did can’t have been that bad, right?
In fact, some Black founders have spoken about how this has been a good time for them.
“I woke up and was like, ‘good, a lot of founders are distracted today,” one Black founder told me. “I sent so many emails out and actually had several fundraising calls.” Another texted me, “My dream is for Black founders to get our companies to a $90 billion stage where we can see the magnitude of support he’s been receiving around OpenAI.”
But even then, I kept thinking, those whispers will never go away.
What are your thoughts?
Elsewhere, I can’t stop thinking about this piece in the Atlantic called “Black Success, White Backlash” by Elijah Anderson. Specifically, there is a part in this story that I think put words to something I’ve tried to articulate to many non-black people in my life.
When I jog through upscale white neighborhoods near my home in Connecticut, white people tense up—unless I wear my Yale or University of Pennsylvania sweatshirts. When my jogging outfit associates me with an Ivy League university, it identifies me as a certain kind of Black person: a less scary one who has passed inspection under the “white gaze.” Strangers with dark skin are suspect until they can prove their trustworthiness, which is hard to do in fleeting public interactions. For this reason, Black students attending universities near inner cities know to wear college apparel, in hopes of avoiding racial profiling by the police or others.
This doesn’t just end with Black college students and doesn’t just stop with college attire. At my last job, I once told a group of colleagues that I bought Lululemon clothes so that people in my neighborhood at the time (the Upper East) would stop racially profiling me. They laughed, thinking it was a joke. But I was very serious. I thought at the time that I was crazy, even though I knew and still abide by the reasoning that fashion is quite political and the way you dress is the first thing you say to people when you enter a room. When I read Anderson’s passage, I said, ‘Oh, that’s it!’ I realized that, of course, this is an experience that other Black people have, too. We have to blend into the social codes around us, or we could, well, die.
I was wearing my college hoodie and sweats with a beanie on, standing outside a coffee shop in the East 60s when some lady racially profiled me, yelling at me and telling me to get away from her. Others around us defended me and shunned the woman to silence. That was quite nice of them, but that was the moment I realized I needed to take it all up a notch. Not even in my own neighborhood could I be out with my hair undone, wearing sweatpants, to go get a cappuccino. No, even my ugliest clothes had to be twice as good, ten times as better. How exhausting. I ended up moving and feel much more comfortable in my new neighborhood, but the feeling of caution always enters my mind whenever I leave the house. There is a sociological undertone to fashion that we like to dismiss, and I think after 26 years of being Black, those undertones have become just pure trauma for me. I remember the Financial Times wrote a story called “How to Look Rich,” and it broke down everything white people look at to judge the value of another person — glossy hair, skin, jewelry, botox.
I asked myself what are the codes Black people look at to assess someone and ourselves because surely it cannot all be the same. When I was chatting with someone about this, he said that so much of our lives are just written about in the context of the white gaze that we have a lack of interpersonal stories about what we want and what we like. As we move up in our careers, as we go outside our homes to the store or to events, we dress, talk, and smile for the appeasement of others. We live our whole lives for the perception of others, and even then, they still call the cops.
🔥Please, Mind My Business🔥
Other stories I’ve written these past two weeks:
“Tech Spark AI raises $1.4 million to create ChatGPT alternative”
“Founders: Pay attention to what happened with OpenAI’s board”
Please consider subscribing to my work at TechCrunch (just click on one of my articles and subscribe on them, please!) and signing up to listen to the podcast I co-host called Found, where me and my colleague Becca talk to entrepreneurs about their startup journeys.
💫Kitty Talk💫
Here are some interesting articles I’ve read since we last met: