The Ideology of the Cancer Cell (Tech & People volume VII)
Let’s do a mental exercise.
Imagine you own a business, and that business earned you a net income of $20 billion on average in the past four years. That’s right! Every year you, the owners of the business, get a cheque for $20 billion, give or take a few billion.
Now, imagine if the person who runs that business for you came to you and said: Boss, I have some bad news. We’re running out of more people who want to buy our stuff but haven’t bought it yet. We’re still selling loads, don’t get me wrong about that — but they are the same loads we sold last year. So that means we’ll probably have the same profits from now on.
What would you do?
Before you answer, let’s give you two options, to make it easy and illustrative.
Option A - you tell your manager: “Ok, thanks for letting me know. I’m actually fine with $20 billion a year. Make sure you get me that next year too. We good.
Option B - you tell your manager: “That’s completely unacceptable. You need to make more aggressive plans. If you can’t grow the bottom line by double digit percentages every year, please to let me know. I will find me someone who can. We’ll throw you a nice farewell party.
Hold that thought experiment in your head for a bit. Let it sink. For my next trick, I’ll tell you a completely unrelated story, which will turn out to actually be related by the end of the post. (sorry about the spoiler :-))
About 6 years ago, for a short period of time, I worked for a company called Facebook which you may have heard of. I was a Product Manager and was put in charge of a product called Free Basics, which was part of Internet.org, a subdivision of Facebook’s Growth organization. Growth with a capital G.
I spent a lot of time talking to folks at FB, including some higher ups, and especially during frequent visits to the Menlo Park Headquarters (remember when we still had corporate travel?), about the existential essentials of internet.org. I mean, Facebook was and is an app company whose business is to build engaging social and communications apps and sell advertisers the attention of those who use them. What business did we have, messing with the cellular data bundles of folks in the Philipines, India, Senegal? Why did Facebook, who has an 80% gross margin business, want to have anything to do with internet or mobile service providers, whose gross margins were about a tenth of that on a good year. Why not just let the Verizons and Airtels of the world provide internet services, and do our thing up top the value chain making the best apps?
After a series of conversations, I came to understand that the logic was as follows:
FB had done a really awesome job penetrating the market, so much so that pretty much everyone on the internet used Facebook (or will do so soon)
this success posed a challenge - how do we grow our user base from here?
ergo, we must make more internet users
This was such a beautifully perfect argument that it left me speechless. the next step was clearly to turn more humans (of which there 7.5 billion at the time) into internet users (about 3 billion). Internet.org was a perfectly reasonable way to try to do that. Great!
The running joke was, by the way, that once we were done converting living humans into internet users, for the next phase of growth we would need either cloning or faster-than-light space travel. Either we could find alien users, or make more earthlings. The joke was funny because it followed the prevailing logic. This was how we were supposed to think.
When I think about it now, I’m ashamed to say it never occurred to me at the time to question the premise. What if we didn’t grow after a certain point? Isn’t there a point where big is big enough?
What made me think about all this after all these years was of course the brave actions of my former Google+ colleague Frances Haugen, her whistleblowing and revelations for the greater good of society. You see, Instagram Kids is just another example of the thinking I outlined above. All the grown ups use our service, so let’s go after the kids. Whether or not our product is good for them is rather beside the point.
You see, Facebook is that theoretical company from our thought experiment. they made $20b on average in the past 4 years, and as much as $29 billion in the most recent year. Surely, from the perspective of the shareholders, that’s enough. We are all, collectively through our holdings of the stock directly or indirectly, Mark Zuckerberg’s boss. Couldn’t we tell him it’s OK? reassure him that flat growth from now on is just fine?
Now before you send me angry hate mail, let me pre-empt some of it.
Yes, I can see the other side of the argument in favor of growth. Economic growth in the aggregate is really important for job creation and other reasons, and in order for the economy to grow firms need to grow. Also, the growth of Facebook (or any other company) is not seen internally at the company through a financial lens alone. When a mission-driven company grows, it is able to fulfill more of its mission. If Facebook’s mission is building community, surely more community building is more goodness.
Good argument, that. So far as it will go.
But me? more and more I am reminded today of a quote by Edward Abbey, famed American environmental activist of the 20th century. He said: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Surely, we humans should have a more nuanced view of Growth than the cancer cells we fight when they grow inside our bodies.
As an epilogue, I picked on FB here because I have some personal experience, and because they are really good at Growth with a capital G. really. freaking. good. But the issue is a broader issue with capitalism, not with one company.