[Dave Heal's] Observations & Reports

Startup Templates: Diversity Initiative Announcement

This is the third in a series of Startup Templates designed to make it easier for you to publish some of the most commonly written pieces of startup copy. You can find the first entry, the Acquisition Blog Post, here, and the second, the Job Description, here.

[Company] Announces Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

To learn more about [Company’s] long-standing commitment to diversity, please see our [press release from 2008] and our [blog post from 2010].

Diversity is a real hot issue in our industry! Which is why here at [Company], we are so excited to be launching our Diversity Commitment initiative today, a six-part roadmap we will use to foster diversity and inclusion amongst our human resources.

We want the makeup of our company to reflect the vast range of people who use our [app for upper middle-class Peter Pans who never learned how to fold their own clothes]. And while we’ve been working towards these goals for a while now — as you can tell by last year’s refresh of [the stock photography on] our website— we wanted to make our goals public today.

As part of our renewed commitment, we’ve appointed an EVP of Diversity and Inclusion, Timmy Winthrop, who has worked with our executive team to conduct a thorough evaluation of where we are today and where we can go moving forward.

“Timmy comes to us after 3 months as a business development manager here at [Company]. After he quickly realized that ‘business development manager’ was a deliberately confusing name for an entry-level sales person, we had to find something else for Timmy to do,” said CEO Chad Dalrymple.

“We’re really excited about Timmy and believe strongly that what he lacks in brownness he makes up for in gayness,” Chad said.

Timmy has agreed that even though he doesn’t represent a group that Silicon Valley traditionally thinks of as an underrepresented minority, he’s more than capable of leading a rising tide of diversity initiatives that will lift all boats. “I have a job opening on my team for a black community strategist to go deep on the blacks, and we will probably follow suit with the ones from West Side Story,” Timmy announced at our All Hands Off-Site earlier this week.

As part of our Commitment, we are pledging to:

1. Include LAY’S® TAPATIO® Limón–Flavored Potato Chips in our industry-leading snack bar

2. Invest in internal and external tools to encourage our employees to interact with diverse people. For example, last week at our First Annual Bl’hackathon, the winning project was a tool that recommends one new black person to follow on Twitter every day

3. Conduct yearly bias mitigation Lunch and Learns

4. Sponsor a Diversity Breakout Session at TechCrunch Disrupt [led by 5 suuuper woke cis-gendered white guys]

5. Copy and paste this blog post into next year’s blog post and include some new charts and [humblebrag mea culpas re: lack of progress]

In addition to revisiting our success towards these goals next year on our Diversity Blog — which you can always find by navigating to our Writings page and then clicking on Blog and then Extras and then More and then Diversity Blog — we will ensure we remain accountable to you by also addressing our progress in the release notes for our iPhone app’s highly anticipated 2017 Dantooine Release.

We are keenly aware that [pablum about how tech is not a friendly place for minorities and how we know our company is no exception]. And not only do we think that a more diverse [Company] is better for our users, but it’s better for our business! [Citation to that one McKinsey report everybody cites].

If you want to join us and make an impact at [Company], you can write to Timmy at diversitydude@[company].com. Nobody else here thinks about these issues now that Timmy’s on the case.

Startup Templates: Acquisition Announcement Blog Post

…with Handy Founder-to-Employee Translation

This is the first in a series of Startup Templates designed to make it easier for you to publish some of the most commonly written pieces of startup copy. Why reinvent the wheel, I say!

[Ed: Cross-posted to Medium.]

This Is Just The Beginning

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — Steve Jobs

To our friends and customers:

Today I am pleased to announce that we are joining forces with [Acquiring Company] and have entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired. The last [# of years since founding] years have been an incredible journey for[Acquired Company], full of ups and downs. But none of this would be possible without our amazing team and our [users/customers]. We couldn’t have done it without you.

We started [x] years ago with the idea that by combining [currently in vogue area of focus] and [extant but no longer sexy area of focus], we could change how you think about [mundane daily task].

I want to assure you that [main product that our customers love and cannot do their jobs without and/or have not been convinced to pay for] will remain [available and/or free] and that we are not going anywhere. Both [Acquired Company] and [Acquiring Company] share a vision to change the world by allowing you to [buzzword your buzzword’s buzzwords]. We have long admired [Acquiring Company]’s [flowery adjective indicating uniqueness] desire to craft value-add, customer-focused solutions while also building a great team and culture.

Going forward, I want to assure you that [Acquired Company] will still be the same old [Acquired Company] that you have grown to love. Our mission remains unchanged. We will simply have more resources to continue building products that delight our customers.

We are excited to share more about what we’ll be working on together in the coming months. The possibilities are [word suggesting implausible infinitude] and we are only just getting started…:)

Stay tuned!

In the meantime, please join us and the [Acquiring Company] Family for a webinar on [date].

Onwards and upwards,

[White Guy Name] & [White Guy Name], Founders

Note that the transaction remains subject to satisfying customary closing conditions

Translation:

This Is The Beginning of The End But Some of Us Are Rich Now and Don’t Care.

“The [key emoji] is to enjoy life, because they don’t want you to enjoy life.” — DJ Khaled

To the families and friends of our employees, PR professionals, and the 42 people who still read TechCrunch:

Today I am pleased to announce that we are getting drunk before breakfast at a party we are throwing so our employees will think this acquisition is an unqualified good when it is likely so only for a small percentage of us.

The years since our founding have been full of stress-induced anal fissures and no small number of near-divorces and we have decided we need to chill the fuck out and get the VCs off our backs.

None of this would be possible without our amazing team. No, seriously, we *literally* couldn’t have done it without them. It’s really hard to build a venture-scale business as two dudes in a dorm room and if we had not been incredibly good salespeople with a plausibly good idea we never would have convinced this many talented, hard-working people to work here in exchange for free beer and soft t-shirts. We will be forever grateful and richer than you.

We started [x] years ago with one idea and then that kind of sucked and we were about to run out of money one night and spent 50 of our last dollars on mushrooms and drove [White Guy Name]’s leased Tesla into the desert and looked at the stars until we came up with another idea that we could repurpose our technology for and seemed different and maybe better but we couldn’t tell. Then we got TechCrunch to do a big write-up about how disruptive it was to a stodgy old industry that people secretly hated and we were off to the races!

That product became our bread and butter. And we are going to keep it available until such time as the press has mostly forgotten about us and it starts to get buggy and frustrating for our users, and then we’re going to write another blog post in this space announcing that it’s going to disappear and be folded into some boring, underfunded initiative with a crappy corporate name and a trademark.

We have no idea what a “solution” is, but we are going to grit our teeth through our vesting period while having a lot of 10am coffees with venture capitalists and talking incessantly but privately about our Next Thing.

[Acquiring Company]’s culture sucks real bad, and they acquired us in part to try and change that, but in actuality we are likely to be subsumed by the Borg. It’s really hard to change a large company’s culture. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. We saw this coming during the negotiations and also because we’re not stupid, but [Acquiring Company] assured us things would change and really there is very little we can do.

Going forward, you’ll get to use our product until our corporate overlords decide that it no longer makes sense to offer it and we get asked to work on other stuff. Our mission will change whenever they say so because them’s the breaks! We have been promised more resources and the ability to remain autonomous, but keeping both those promises would obviate the need to do this deal at all and would mean that [Acquiring Company] is full of morons. So that’s probably not going to happen.

This deal is going to take a while to close and we’re not allowed to say anything even remotely interesting to you until that point. But we promise you a banal, substance-free update at least once before then. It seems highly unlikely that this acquisition will actually result in anything good for our existing customers or employees, but we do retain a shred of hope that we can prevent [Acquiring Company] from totally destroying what we’ve worked so hard to build.

Stay tuned!

If you sign up for our joint webinar, you should just go ahead and delete your account.

Up and to the right,

[White Guy Name] & [White Guy Name], TEDx Speakers and Burners Without Borders Executive Committee Members

Note that the transaction remains subject to satisfying customary closing conditions