30
votes
Linus Sebastian is stepping down as CEO of Linus Media Group, Creator Warehouse, and Floatplane
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- Title
- I'm Stepping Down..
- Authors
- Linus Tech Tips
- Duration
- 9:31
- Published
- May 19 2023
Clearly a good move for the company. Linus is talent, not management. I hope this, plus his well-documented anti-union attitude, doesn't lead to problems for the employees.
I think it’s worth pointing out that Linus’ anti union attitude is much more nuanced than this implies. In short, if his employees felt the need to unionize, he would feel that he, as the manager of the company, would have failed to do what he needed to do to consider the needs of his employees. He would not start union busting.
I don’t agree with him. It’s an attitude that only works if you are the owner of a company. It also provides no protection for employees if that attitude changes. However I can respect his view. If you must be anti union, this is the best anti union attitude to have.
I agree that it’s a bit more nuanced than the GP comment implies. I can understand his position and see why he feels that way, even if I disagree.
That’s the key. As leadership changes, there’s no guarantee that the new leadership will still feel the same way.
Him feeling that way doesn’t legally protect his employees at all like being in a union does.
I think you're giving him too much credit. Anyone who runs a company that unionizes has failed, at least a little, as a capitalist, because they no longer have the ability to produce the optimal amount of value from the company.
And Linus does want to succeed as a capitalist, or at least he acts like it!
If you don't want to extract value from your employees, give them part ownership and encourage them to set up a union. Anything else is intentional, deliberate exploitation, in both the technical and colloquial senses.
I think there’s plenty of room for nuance when an individual has personal decision making power over a company. If you’re talking about the amoral gestalt that is “shareholders” then yeah, it might be fair to assume pure profit maximisation above all else, but individuals are emotional and contradictory and prideful and any number of other things that conflict with that.
I can understand where you’re coming from if you, personally, believe that anything other than a workers’ cooperative is exploitative. I don’t think it’s reasonable to suggest anyone who believes differently, and acts on that different belief, is intentionally exploiting people. Some are, I’m sure, but others just have a different view on what doing the right thing looks like.
In this case, I get the impression that the guy is pretty much in earnest: he genuinely wants to do right by people, he also cares about his own success and prestige, he doesn’t consider it contradictory to prioritise the latter as long as he keeps meeting his own (evidently fairly high) bar for the former, and he’s got a healthy dose of arrogance that gets in the way when anyone suggest his way isn’t the right way. None of that suggests bad intent or a blind adherence “winning” capitalism to me, whatever you might think of the outcomes.
Intent absolutely matters, and I think it’s pretty far from giving him a pass just to say that “deliberate exploiter who sees anything other than total value maximisation as a failure” seems like a mischaracterisation.
Of course outcomes matter more, and yeah, of course there should be a strong union or a co-op in play. But in a world where cartoonish evil seems to be par for the course in a disturbing number of companies, and where gleeful destructive malice is a mainstream political movement, I don’t see it as fair or productive to suggest that all exploitation is purposeful or that all capitalism is absolute. I don’t think his approach is right, but there are many worse levels of wrong, that’s all I’m really saying.
I don't think you're wrong at all; working for others is an inherantly exploitative relationship because the only way for the relationship to be sustainable is for the person to pay the worker less money than the labor is actually worth. I'm also something of an anticapitalist myself, so I think that every business should be a co-op.
That being said, if said worker is happy with the work they are hired to do and is also happy about the amount of compensation they receive, then that could also be viewed as a mutually beneficial relationship. While the worker doesn't get the full monetary value of their work, they receive non-monetary value from the relationship as well; they benefit from being able to convert their labor into money easily, security in the form of regular payments (which has extra benefits such as creditworthyness which raises their buying power), fringe benefits, community from coworkers, a sense of purpose, etc.
So with that being said, I don't think that Linus' position on unions is bad. Honestly, I think that what he wanted to accomplish is to essentially be the union in a way. He didn't seem to want to take away the collective bargaining power from his workers, he wanted to be receptive enough to the needs of his workers so that they wouldn't have the need to unionize in the first place.
I'm not willing to completely disregard the possibility that it may just be an act, but by all measures it seems he actually cares a great deal about the people he hires; he certainly seems to think of them more like partners than underlings.
While I’m sure his employees are happy and well paid - coming from my Silicon Valley perspective it’s a shame they don’t get some equity in the company. LTT is apparently worth at least $100MM and is only growing. Given they’ve bootstrapped without any VC funding that’s really impressive and if I was an employee I’d be a little disappointed that I was only getting salary + bonus while spending a decade building a business with Linus.
Again, they haven’t gotten a bad deal. I get the impression they’re making over market rate. But earning no equity could be rough.
Glad that he and Yvonne are retaining full ownership behind the scenes. It seems like the best of both worlds - they refused a huge sellout offer, retain ownership, but Linus is stepping out of management to do what fits him better- which is being talent- and allowing someone he personally knows and trusts that has management skills to take his place and has managed him before.
Seeing that that new CEO has been in huge corporations (Dell, etc) before in various roles gave me a bit of pause, but I don't think I can make assumptions based on that- those huge corporations are a different beast and he is but one person
It feels more like a class thing, to me, than anything else. Linus is bourgeois now, in the sense that he could sell LTT and live off the proceeds forever, as he admits. He's palling around with other bourgeois - in this case his old boss. It's very on the nose, really.