Why Do We Keep Elevating Horrible CEOs?

Too Long; Didn't Read

Back in 2007, I accepted a job as the IT Manager for tribe.net, one of the first social networks. It was started as part of a triumvirate of websites by three CEOs who had linked up to buy the Six Degrees patent. You see, in the early days of the internet there was one social network called SixDegrees and they patented the equation for graphing how many degrees away from any other person on their social network. This was bought by the founders of Tribe, Friendster, and LinkedIn — Mark Pincus, Jonathan Abrams, and Reid Hoffman. I thought it was pretty cool to work for Tribe at first, and then I realized that the people in charge had no sense of ethics. Working with Andrew Trader (popularly known as AT) and Mark Pincus was a bit like talking to Donald Trump — whatever story they made up that day was reality. I put up with a lot, but I started to have my fill of it when they used the Tribe.net email database to seed Zynga’s mailing list. The final straw was when I realized a program I’d started with the users to get income to upgrade the site was hijacked by Mark and AT to fund Zynga’s Texas Hold’em game. I quit — but not before a close friend of mine alerted me to the fact that Zynga was ripping off artwork of his for Zynga’s VAMPIRE WARS game. Few things get my goat than ripping off individual artists. <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/drama-zynga-founder-mark-pincus-gets-tro-on-old-tribenet-colleague/">My angry letter to Mark became the basis for both him and AT filing a restraining order against me and publicizing it via TechCrunch to try to hurt my chances of getting a&nbsp;job.</a>