While everyday San Franciscans went about their normal business last week, a collection of movers and shakers from the worlds of business, tech, media, and politics gathered at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for Vanity Fair's third annual New Establishment Summit. This being 2016 San Francisco, it is perhaps no surprise that summit organizers' stated goal of hosting "inspiring conversations on the issues and innovations shaping the future" meant lots of talk about the tech sector, awkward acknowledgments of bias in venture funding, and, of course, the presidential campaign of one Donald J. Trump. Thankfully BuzzFeed was there to pick up on some of the more eye-popping musings to emerge from the 3-day summit and to remind us that simply throwing the word "new" in front of "establishment" doesn't do much to change the views of the old guard.
On stage were familiar tech luminaries such as Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, Sequoia Capital's Michael Moritz, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Moritz, you may remember, has been in the news for saying that he and his partners weren't prepared "to lower [their] standards" in order to hire women. Apparently he feels similarly about funding anyone over the age of 27, a seemingly ageist position moderator Andrew Ross Sorkin threw back at Moritz.
“You can’t say that legally in the state of California, I deny ever saying that,” BuzzFeed reports Moritz responding, with the publication noting that his tone was "seemingly in jest." When pressed by Sorkin, Moritz added that entrepreneurship is “far easier” when people are the “age of 18 or 19 or 21, which is often when we intersect with people who start the most interesting companies around — you have no sense of how difficult it’s going to be, and by the time you’re age 30 or 35 with all sorts of other obligations, you know how difficult building anything [can be].”
When asked about his comments regarding hiring women, Moritz went into another circuitous defense. “All of us have unconscious biases,” BuzzFeed reports him noting. “Look at the four of us here. Imagine being a black or a Hispanic and trying to get a job as a senior position in Silicon Valley? It is brutal. Outrageously unfair.”
Moritz wasn't the only one to asked to defend his questionable ideas. When Sebastian Thrun, the CEO of education startup Udacity, was asked about ways in which machine learning can exacerbate systemic biases (think machines recognizing arrest patterns that reflect racism and then incorrectly drawing conclusions on criminality based on that racism-tinged data), he talked around the question and seemed to imply that the questioner's concern was one of political correctness.
“Statistically what the machines do pick up are patterns and sometimes we don’t like these patterns," he said. "Sometimes they’re not politically correct. When we apply machine learning methods sometimes the truth we learn really surprises us, to be honest, and I think it’s good to have a dialogue about this.”
Right.
And then of course there was the racist old elephant in the room in the form of Trump. In a perhaps misjudged attempt at displaying empathy, AOL co-founder Steve Case told the Democrat-skewing crowd that he totally gets the whole Trump thing. “I do understand what’s driving a lot of Trump support,” Case explained. “There are a lot of people that are frustrated and scared and fearful and feel left out, got left behind by globalization, digitalization, and are really concerned about the future.” That data suggests the average Trump supporter is actually financially better off than the average American appears to have had little effect on Case's opinion.
The Summit ended with fancy cocktails, and, we're sure, plenty of back-patting. Adieu, "new establishment," until next year!
Related: Venture Capitalists Funding Anti-Homeless Encampment Measure
