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I wrote recently about my concern that too many young entrepreneurs had what I called “situational ethics” and that they believed that it was “nice” to tell the truth (or the whole truth) when it was quick or convenient, but that it certainly wasn’t essential – especially when it got in the way of getting something else done. A little inaccuracy can save a ton of explanation – if you don’t care about your reputation or your customers.
Sadly, too many of these characters don’t really care about anything but themselves. Certainly they have no time or truck for things as vague as honesty and some kind of basic business morality. It’s like they were raised in a values vacuum. These are my values, but if you don’t like them or they don’t suit, I’ve got others as well. Something to fit every occasion.
Then – when the truth gets out and they’ve got to explain to millions of ripped-off and disappointed users - they go for cheap excuses and try to paper over the problem with legalese and after-the-fact improvements to their boilerplate policies and written disclosures. Worse yet, I see too many cases where there’s an even more upsetting and gratuitous attitude toward their customers (who, after all, are millions and millions of young kids with their own “whatever” attitudes) – they not only take them for granted; they take them for idiots who just really don’t care about these things or wilful co-conspirators who are just as likely to forget and forgive a little “mistake” here or there in the service of the greater good – making a lot of money and sticking it to the man. After all, what your parents can’t see or share, they can’t bust your chops about what you’re not supposed to be doing once they do. Snapchat and sexting uber alles.
And now, we have the two Snapchat co-creators who have stepped up to be the poster boys for flagrant fiction followed – once they’ve been caught red-handed in their lies – by slick and superficial attempts to say they’re sorry. Saying you’re sorry doesn’t mean a thing unless you mean it and it isn’t worth a thing if what you’re sorry about is getting caught – not screwing up in the first place.
Their mediocre and self-serving mea culpa blog post is a complete crock. “We were so busy building” that we didn’t pay “enough” attention to the very things that were the core principles and the basic value proposition of our product – privacy and ephemerality. It turns out that the government has determined that (a) the “snaps” don’t necessarily disappear in a few seconds; (b) that Snapchat’s claims and promises about privacy were lies; (c) that the alert notification system was also flawed and by-passable; and (d) that private location and other data were being collected even though Snapchat expressly said that this was not happening.
The fact that they’ve settled their “dispute” with the FTC’s division of privacy and identity protection where they were accused of deceiving their users and multiple misrepresentations to consumers about how things actually worked and with whom they’ve now agreed to hire an independent expert watchdog for the next 20 years doesn’t mean squat and certainly doesn’t give me any confidence that anyone has learned anything useful from this episode. I’m just hoping against hope that the tens of millions of people who have been duped decide that maybe there’s another product or service that does the same job (maybe even a better job) and that it’s a smarter tool and place to do the stupid things that they want to do.
But all of this noise isn’t really the lesson for smart entrepreneurs who are trying to create real businesses and real value for themselves, their users and their investors. The point is much simpler – it’s just too easy today to build something that looks good and seems to solve a problem or create a solution on the surface – this is the triumph of form over substance – but, if you’re in such a big hurry to get something out there in the market and you don’t take the time and invest the hard work and the necessary resources to build the infrastructure necessary to really deliver on your promises into your product or services at the beginning, then ultimately you haven’t built anything real or lasting. Your solution won’t scale. Your design won’t survive real due diligence. Your prospective acquirers will be happy to take the concept, but not the code or the crew. And you’ll find out that you built a toy – not a technology and wasted a lot of time in the process.
The biggest shame in the Snapchat story is not that they were unethical egotists; it’s that they were bad engineers.
PP: “You Get What You Work for, Not What You Wish for”
Photo: Evil and angel via Shutterstock