A Tech Startup Too “Good” To Be True

Joanna Smith-Griffin, the founder of edtech startup AllHere, was charged with defrauding investors of $10 million. Was she led astray by a Silicon Valley myth?

Joanna Smith-Griffin, founder of the ill-fated AI startup AllHere, which was intended to improve school attendance. It won many awards before it ended up in bankruptcy and Smith-Griffin was charged with fraud.

Welcome to Black Sheep, a spin-off publication of my serialized memoir. SMIRK. While SMIRK was a deep dive into my unusual personal and professional relationship with one unique white-collar fraudster— Martin Shkreli — Black Sheep takes a broader view and tells the stories of a wider range of business crimes and failures.

This publication will examine cultural themes and motives that contribute to lying, cheating, stealing, and related self-inflicted disasters; the impacts of those events; and the people who play starring roles in these dramas. I find these tales both cautionary and fascinating; I hope you will, too.

Don’t be evil.

Google used to proclaim this in the 2000s as it rapidly ballooned into the world’s largest search engine. I remember the period vividly. When I was a local newspaper reporter in my early 20s, I covered a 2007 retail conference where a Google representative was a featured speaker. He illustrated the transformative potential of the internet that Google had unlocked by showing a video of someone offering free hugs to strangers in a park. It was a powerful vignette. Some audience members dabbed their eyes.

That type of messaging fueled a Silicon Valley myth Millennials swallowed like arsenic-laced La Croix: You can get rich by saving the world. We didn’t just assume the objective was theoretically possible; we insisted on companies embodying it. My generation put Corporate Social Responsibility on steroids, and it evolved from a fringe concept in the 1970s and 1980s into an essential business strategy by the 2010s. Today, it’s almost impossible to build a consumer brand without Doing Something Good for Society (at least superficially, anyway).

But clear away the warm fuzzies, and you will find a Milton Friedman-esque reality staring back at you. Business is still business. Investors demand profits. Consumers demand maximum value for the lowest prices. The pressure to grow by double and triple-digit percentages never lets up. Google¹ didn’t become a $2.4 trillion mega-corporation, with a market cap larger than the GDP of most of the world’s countries, by encouraging people to give free hugs. It did so by monopolizing the online advertising market and gutting the revenue of newspapers. So much for not being evil.