Kelly connects with Telle Whitney, who has logged decades in Silicon Valley’s tech industry. She has a new book: “Rebooting Tech Culture: How to Ignite Innovation and Build Organizations Where Everyone Can Thrive.”  

I was listening to a tech broadcast this weekend and the host was trying to get these straight, white male founders to understand that their product could be devastating for people. 

“I actually think I listened to the same podcast that you did: the startup CEOs or the founders were completely clueless as to how their company was going to impact all these people, as much as the host tried to get them to think about that, it never happened. I do believe that part of the push for rebooting tech culture, which is what my book is called, is about opening the tent and having more people with really great ideas help inform the technology that is coming. And the best leaders will be inclusive. They will look for ideas for innovation from across a broad set of people. I believe that because of that, that the future could look brighter because we don’t yet know how this is all going to play out.” 

You also write about the myth of the lone genius in the tech world. 

“This idea of the lone genius is really part of the tech DNA. if you look at Walter Isaacson and talking about the innovators, if you look at history, even though there was this myth of the lone genius, it wasn’t true. Every great technologist actually had a team behind them that was working with them, and part of the best leaders like that, people like Steve Jobs, is that they actually solicited ideas from a pretty broad set of people. And meritocracy is interesting because some of the people who I admire greatly have talked about how there is meritocracy in Silicon Valley. But if you are a woman or somebody who doesn’t look like the normal, the icon, the ideal, I can guarantee you, you don’t feel like it’s a meritocracy.” 

You didn’t seem to let your own voice be drowned out in these spaces. 

“I didn’t stay at places very long if my voice wasn’t heard. I must admit I was pretty unconscious of that being the driver, but if I didn’t feel like I could have an influence on the outcome, I was not long at the company. And I was very lucky. And that’s one of the advantages of going to small places. I was at a couple of startups where you need everybody, all hands-on deck because your future, your very existence, depends on people participating in those kinds of conversations. Where you see that breakdown, and this is more research than my own experience, is in really large companies where they want the products of tomorrow to very carefully mimic what the products are of today. I’ve known of many companies where they had a breakthrough product that they never brought to market because it didn’t fit within the products that they were offering.”