Meet the tech companies that keep no secrets

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This week, as reporters perused Facebook Papers, it became increasingly clear that the social media giant is hiding serious secrets. While Facebook attempted to release some internal documents before the press could, the company’s defenses were no match for Frances Haugen. But what if in today’s tech world, the best defense against all scrutiny and criticism isn’t defense at all?

Sam Corcos, co-founder and CEO of healthcare startup Levels, believes the biggest weapon a company has against criticism is transparency. Corcos, for example, has nothing to hide. A self-proclaimed open book, he brings his personal philosophies on transparency into the way he runs his company. “When you can see from the inside, we don’t hide anything,” he told Protocol. “We are not withholding anything.”

Levels is one of the few tech companies that thrives on the concept of radical transparency. The company posts weekly team meetings, strategy documents, and investor updates online, where you can see everything from revenue numbers and fundraising goals to hiring plans and web traffic, albeit with a 12-month delay.

It’s a surprising approach in the wake of the public struggles between private information and the public’s right to know. In the age of tech scandals and Facebook Papers, is radical transparency the answer?

You still need some secrets

Levels puts nothing into the ether. There is still information that the company will not release, such as “time sensitive information, pending agreements and announcements, people in our hiring pipeline, etc.” the team wrote in their transparency strategy, which was published publicly in February of this year.

Even with these constraints, Levels lost investors who felt the company was overly disclosure and even negligent. But Corcos is not afraid of this. “We’re not trying to convince people that transparency and honesty are important. If they don’t agree with that, then that’s fine, we’ll find the ones who are and go from there,” he said.

Not everything Levels releases are raw, unfiltered, or unmodified. In its transparency strategy, the team also wrote that documents should be deleted and receive consent from the author and all contributors before being made public. “I would say that once a quarter we have to edit something in a video or document,” Corcos said. And when that happens, it’s usually related to data privacy issues, such as mentioning a member’s name.

Working in a panopticon

Internally, Level’s ideals of transparency didn’t immediately resonate with everyone. “Getting our culture to this point has been an internal struggle,” Corcos said. “People fought him at every step.”

One of the biggest opponents was Corcos co-founder David Flinner. In the spirit of openness, Levels allows the public to see the team’s thoughts, objections and concerns regarding their own transparency strategy. Flinner, who was opposed to the move to transparency, wrote that “there must be room to be open and not hear your name and everything else will be streamed to the world.”

Mike Ananny, a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, agrees that the relationship between transparency and privacy can be complicated. He noted that Google has a “pretty powerful surveillance system” that can monitor when specific documents are opened. In those cases, Ananny said, “If I know someone knows when I open that document, I might think twice before leaving that trace.”

Levels co-founder David Flinner Photo: Levels

Michael Mizrahi, the chief of operations at Levels, wrote in Notion that making a document public, even after a delay, essentially makes it non-private at first. “If you know that other strangers can or will see space, both now and later, this is no different than a panopticon,” he wrote.

Corcos says transparency hasn’t been an issue for most employees. “I can say that there were only maybe three people in our company who didn’t want to be reported or their information shared publicly,” he said.

However, Levels employees raised some notable objections, particularly when dealing with confidential information that escaped or was taken out of context. Corcos knows that a mistake will happen sooner or later, but is not overly concerned. “What I hope is that we will have enough information available, that people who are well informed can clearly see that whoever is misrepresenting us is doing it in bad faith,” he said.

Even the threat of regulatory scrutiny does not seem to undermine Corcos. At the same time, it recognizes the very real fear that out of thousands of documents, a regulator might focus on one where there is a mistake or someone has spoken badly, and then have the attitude of, “It doesn’t matter, we found that quote. , we’ll stick them to the wall, “he said.

However, Corcos believes the context is its protection. “Being transparent isolates you from criticism stemming from a lack of context because the context is completely available to anyone who sees it,” he wrote in a blog post.

Hailley Griffis, head of public relations at Buffer, a social media management company that is also radically transparent, agrees. When it comes to incidents or challenges the company faces, customers don’t “judge us based on that incident, but judge us based on how they generally know us as a company and the trust we’ve built over time,” she said.

Buffer releases diversity and salary information, and even posts the product roadmap to a public Trello board. The idea of ​​a public spot where users can comment on product ideas online came from Trello itself, which also hosts the online product roadmap. Another thing the company is willing to share, even when it’s harmful, is internal research. In a report, Buffer shared that in terms of uncontrolled numbers, men were paid nearly $ 10,000 more than women in 2016. Rather than hide it, they posted it for all to see. The gap has narrowed significantly since then, but “we’ve been working for many years to improve that number and I think transparency is part of that,” Griffis said. “External responsibility is quite a powerful responsibility.”

While transparency is great, it can be overrated. Ananny, for example, is wary of the “theater of transparency”, in which companies release information that is not necessarily impactful or beneficial in the sense of transparency. He is also skeptical of information that is not timely or does not provide enough information to make decisions. “It has to be meaningful transparency, it can’t just be transparency as a theater or as a performance,” he said. Ananny still thinks the tech industry should be more transparent, “but that’s not enough,” he said. “In a way it is potentially a red herring.”

Through the mirror

As private companies, Levels and Buffer don’t have to be so transparent to anyone.

Mizrahi said this in a post on Notion. If Levels were a public institution, it should not keep secrets from the public unnecessarily, “but we are a private company and we do not owe this mirror to anyone outside our team / investors,” he wrote.

Although there is no obligation, Ananny believes that the public has a right to know some private information. “The kind of transparency we need [Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon] it’s pretty massive and needs to be connected to different parts of what they do, “Ananny said. But there are also smaller companies that should be transparent, he says. He gave the example of a company that has access to health data and how it should provide visibility into the ways they use consumer information. “So it’s a different kind of transparency than a giant giant like Facebook or Google,” he said.

The risks of transparency can greatly increase with scale. Corcos knows that at Levels, sustaining its radical transparency value can become more difficult as the company grows. He knows that if it were a bigger tech company like Google, things would already be very different. “People are paying attention to the things Google is doing. Nobody is paying attention to what we’re doing,” he said.

Nobody can pay attention now, but what happens when they do? As businesses grow, the level of criticism and scrutiny rightfully increases. And when that happens, the temptation to keep secrets can increase. But the bigger the secret, the harder the fall.

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