Comment by wisty
20 hours ago
I haven't seen it, but my opinion is she likely was what lawyers call "reckless", as in she should have known but didn't care (blinded by the upside and a "we'll figure it once we scale" tech attitude that works a lot better for db performance than healthcare).
I've worked for someone very like her.
It's worse than reckless. They make not-knowing part of their operating model.
And they make sure nobody else with power and influence does too much knowing either. Silos, stay in your lane, don't ask questions about how your department's KPIs mesh with the next one over, or what conclusions might be inferred.
When a lawyer says "reckless" it's an extremely strong word. It doesn't mean "negligent", IANAL (and it depends on the state etc) but it's more like if you knowingly run over a pedestrian in your way, and you aren't trying to hurt them but don't care if they get hurt. And often criminal law will treat it as just a little less bad than intent.
It very much depends on where the lawyer is. What you’ve described would be more like “depraved heart” or “wicked recklessness” in jurisdictions that have it, where reckless was that you were doing 90 in a residential area. I think the point is more that the legal term “reckless” may have a specific meaning in given places.
How does this work though. At the end of the day, you can’t as a CEO say “I didn’t know” when your whole operating model is a scam.
Yes. So many of her replies to Nathan's questions were "I don't know" or "I don't remember" or "I don't understand" for questions that were very straightforward.
At her level of responsibility she'd better know. Whatever the case, she's either deceitful or incompetent. Neither answer is flattering or acceptable.
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> At the end of the day, you can’t as a CEO say “I didn’t know” when your whole operating model is a scam.
There's always the chance one could have ridden fake-it-till-you-make-it long enough for the engineers to solve the underlying issues...
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In virtually every company there are questions you intuitively know that your managers don't necessarily want to know the answers to (or at least, they only want to know the answers to them if you have a solution), usually it's something relatively trivial like minor infractions of corporate rules.
There are some leaders who are extremely good at convincing you about the importance of belief in a particular thing to the point where you avoid even thinking up those questions - if they are ever cornered (and they rarely allow it to get to that point) they will wriggle endlessly rather than responding to a line of inquiry that bursts the collective bubble.
Do they know? It's hard to argue about their internal motivations.
It's above reckless, in other legal systems there is a level above gross and reckless negligence where the prosecution argues not only they should have known, in fact they did know and chose to proceed anyway.