‘At Meta I discovered myself wrestling my deputy in an MMA fitness center’: Nick Clegg on the tradition shock of Silicon Valley

[ad_1] I ’m not a creature of Silicon Valley. I didn’t research laptop science. I’ve by no means written a line of code. I haven’t spent my profession immersed within the processes, debates and science of technological progress. I got here to Meta, Fb because it then was, in 2018 as an emigre from the world of British and European politics. I wasn’t actually certain what to anticipate.

As an Englishman, I by no means stop to be amazed by the sheer scale of America. It’s putting, while you first set foot on this a part of Northern California, how distant it feels from the facility centres of the east coast. It’s not simply the practically 3,000 miles that separate you from Washington DC and New York; the three-hour time distinction means you are feeling out of sync. The day’s information agenda is in full flight on the east coast earlier than the west is awake. The most important European tales broke the evening earlier than. It’s such as you’re distant from in every single place. It’s no surprise individuals who need to strike out on their very own, at a secure distance from the prying eyes of the lads in fits, are drawn to this place. It’s a pure house for idealists who need to stick it to the person.

There’s one thing intoxicating about Silicon Valley. It is a place the place individuals say sure. It’s a magnet for good individuals buzzing with creativity. There are not any limits to ambition. Each impediment is a chance. Each stunning day may very well be the day one thing wonderful occurs. Anybody might have an concept that might change the world – and get filthy wealthy. However additionally it is an industrial-scale breeding floor for hubris, of a largely macho variety, too (it's nonetheless a spot the place, on the entire, assured males with large egos rule the roost and good, succesful ladies should combat for his or her place each step of the way in which). The isolation that makes it the right petri dish for brand new concepts can be what distances it from the lives of atypical individuals. The wealth of the place distances it from their struggles. Its idealism distances it from the messy realities of their lives.

Fb was just like the Lib Dems in coalition – idealists who couldn’t work out why individuals noticed them because the dangerous guys After I arrived at Fb, I discovered a firm in shellshock. Many workers had joined when its popularity was starkly completely different: an thrilling, idealistic place led by a boy genius, making cool issues individuals had been taking on at an outstanding price, producing oodles of money, and with a high-minded mission to attach the world. Going from whiz-kids to public enemy primary was a tradition shock few had been really ready for. It jogged my memory just a little of the Liberal Democrats through the coalition – a set of idealists who needed to vary the world and who couldn’t fairly work out why individuals noticed them because the dangerous guys.

O ne of the most important tradition shocks I skilled in Silicon Valley had nothing to do with variations between the UK and the US, per se. It was as a result of the worlds I had moved in since I first left for college within the mid Nineteen Eighties had been ones the place the first means of succeeding was by way of the facility of phrases. Politics, at its coronary heart, is a contest between completely different tales about how issues needs to be. That’s what liberalism, socialism, conservatism and fascism finally are: tales that give us alternative ways of trying on the world, completely different diagnoses of our issues, and completely different options, too. You win elections if extra individuals sympathise together with your telling of occasions and your imaginative and prescient of the long run than with these of your opponents.

However Silicon Valley is full of people that see the world a distinct means: engineers. Theirs is a world of details and course of. The engineer’s mindset is to establish an issue and repair it, then transfer on to the subsequent downside. They function in a maze of acronyms, as if language itself is a time-wasting train that must be boiled right down to its most abbreviated type. On arrival, I used to be plunged right into a world of XFNs, STOs and FOAs, the place each roadmap has a playbook, each group is a part of an ecosystem, and the place each topic is both a tl;dr or a deep dive. And the whole lot – the whole lot – needs to be quantified. In an early assembly, I bear in mind being requested by one senior engineer what the proportion probability was that authorities X would move a regulation about Y. I laughed. I believed it was a playful joke. The concept political processes may very well be boiled right down to a kind of faux-science appeared foolish to me. He didn’t snigger. So I stated one thing like, “Oh, effectively, 23.67%.” He nodded earnestly. I've since come to understand that, with the intention to persuade individuals in Silicon Valley, compelling tales are ineffective with out knowledge factors for each argument and possibilities for each final result. And it has rubbed off on me. Approaching issues in a scientific means, nonetheless fake the science could be, helps to order your thought course of and information you in direction of clear choices.

‘He will be the best individual I’ve ever met’: with Fb CEO Mark Zuckerberg in April 2019. {Photograph}: Niall Carson/PA However additionally it is reductive. It commodifies the whole lot, removes nuance and intuition and all of the intangible features of human nature. After I talked to engineers in my early days on the firm about knowledge, they talked about it the way in which a carpenter would discuss wooden – a cloth for use to make wonderful issues, not individuals’s valuable private info. That mindset has modified since, partially due to a wider cultural shift in individuals’s expectations of privateness and knowledge safety, and partially as a result of change has been compelled upon the corporate by regulators. However the primacy of logic and purpose over emotion and intestine intuition provides a clue, maybe, as to why Silicon Valley can usually appear tone deaf to the considerations of individuals past the partitions of its primary-coloured campuses.

Nobody – I imply nobody – can maintain a silence like Mark. He'll let it cling as he muses, usually to an excruciating diploma I'm most likely not the kind of individual you'd look forward to finding in Silicon Valley. I spent my profession in a go well with and tie, not a hoodie and flip-flops. My first intuition, when confronted with the tons of of brightly colored sloganeering posters that adorn the partitions of each assembly room and hall of Fb’s extraordinary MPK campus (one other acronym, this one a considerably pointless shortening of Menlo Park), was to do one thing very English: apply light mockery. In one of many first conferences I held with one of many groups I had simply taken cost of, a poster on the wall declared the ever-present Silicon Valley mantra: Convey Your Genuine Self to Work. To attempt to break the ice, I stated, “Please don’t convey your genuine self to work. You wouldn’t like my genuine self if I introduced it to work. So simply convey your inauthentic self to work from 9 to 5 after which you'll be able to go house and be your self and we’ll get on completely effectively.” Stony silence. One of many workforce got here as much as me fairly coyly afterwards to say that the message had been fairly disconcerting for them. I knew then that I wasn’t in Kansas any extra.

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It's generally understood that Mark Zuckerberg is a visionary innovator, however the two issues that struck me most about him are his limitless curiosity and his indefatigable competitiveness. Heaps of people that obtain nice success, particularly at a younger age, can are inclined to get caught of their methods and relaxation on their laurels. Mark, alternatively, has the humility, drive and urge for food to continue learning. If he thinks he doesn’t know one thing, he'll grill the individuals who do and devour each little bit of knowledge and perception he can on the topic. He’ll assume lengthy and onerous and think about each angle. And nobody – I imply nobody – can maintain a silence like Mark. I’m a talker – if there’s a second of silence in a dialog, I’ll burble on witlessly to fill the void. Mark will let the silence cling within the air as he muses, usually to an excruciating diploma. However when he does open his mouth, the response is invariably considerate and thought of. He could also be perceived because the epitome of the engineer’s mindset – all logic, no emotion – however that shouldn’t be mistaken for an absence of depth or curiosity. Fairly the alternative.

On the similar time, he will be the best individual I’ve ever met. And I say that as a former frontline politician and a product of the British non-public faculty system, so I’ve met some fairly aggressive individuals in my time.

One of many methods this aggressive streak expresses itself is thru Mark’s love of combined martial arts (MMA). He's an enormous fan of UFC and takes his personal coaching extraordinarily severely – a lot in order that his MMA preventing needed to be disclosed to buyers as a potential enterprise threat. He could have emerged into the general public consciousness twenty years in the past as a thin nerd, however he’s actually bulked up since then. Simply ask Elon Musk, who challenged Mark to an MMA combat in an trade on X, after which made all method of excuses to keep away from truly getting within the cage with him. Mark’s dedication to MMA is so robust that he insisted one morning, throughout a administration offsite, that a few of his most senior executives be part of him for a coaching session at his purpose-built fitness center. All of us paired off to practise some strikes below the watchful eyes of Mark’s skilled instructors, which meant I discovered myself wrestling with my then deputy, Joel Kaplan. At one level this concerned a manoeuvre often known as the Domination Mount, during which Joel straddled me and we grappled awkwardly in a means that was, let’s simply say, just a little too shut for consolation. It was company bonding taken to an entire new degree.

Joel later jokingly confessed he had thought of reporting it to our then head of HR, Lori Goler, however when he appeared as much as discover her, he noticed that she had Mark Zuckerberg in a chokehold. A minimum of surviving such an ordeal meant that Joel was battle hardened, if considerably bizarrely, to satisfy the problem of succeeding me as head of the corporate’s international affairs operation once I left Meta a while later.

That is an edited extract from Find out how to Save the Web by Nick Clegg, printed by Bodley Head at £25. To assist the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Supply costs could apply.