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Here's What Netflix's New 'Culture Memo' Says About How the Company Has Changed
Kristin Snyder
Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Netflix promised change after its poor first-quarter earnings. One of the first targets: the Netflix Culture document.
The changes, which Variety reported on Thursday, indicate a new focus on fiscal responsibility and concern about censorship. While promises to support honest feedback and open decision-making remain, the memo’s first update in almost five years reveals that the days of lax spending are over. The newly added “artistic expression” section emphasizes Netflix’s refusal to censor its work and implores employees to support the platform’s content.
The “artistic expression” section states that the company will not “censor specific artists or voices” and specifies that employees may have to work on content “they perceive to be harmful.” The memo points to ratings, content warnings and parental controls as ways for users to determine what is appropriate content.
Censorship has been a contentious issue within Netflix. Last year, employees walked out in protest after the company stood by comedian Dave Chappelle’s special, “The Closer,” which many said was transphobic. The streaming service has since announced four more specials from the comedian, who was attacked on stage at Netflix’s first comedy festival. The show will not air on the platform, as Netflix did not tape the event.
The reaction to Chappelle’s 2021 special ripples further in the updated memo. After firing an employee who leaked how much the company paid for the special, the new “ethical expectations” section directs employees to protect company information.
The memo also reflects pressure borught by poor first-quarter earnings. Employees are now instructed to “spend our members’ money wisely,” and Variety reported that earlier passages that indicated a lack of spending limits were cut. Variety also found that the updated memo removed promises that the company would not make employees take pay cuts in the face of Netflix’s own financial struggles.
These updates come as employee morale has reportedly dropped and editorial staffers at the Netflix website TuDum were laid off en masse. Those employees were offered two weeks of severance pay—and Netflix has now cut a section in the memo promising four months of full pay as severance.
As the company that literally wrote the book on corporate culture faces internal struggles, it's unlikely that making employees take on more responsibility while prioritizing corporate secrecy and discouraging content criticism will improve morale.
Kristin Snyder
Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
https://twitter.com/ksnyder_db
Rise Together Ventures’ Taylor Adams On Revolutionizing The Philanthropic World
03:17 PM | January 25, 2023
Taylor Adams
On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, Los Angeles native Taylor Adams talks about how his philanthropic work and time in venture capital motivated him to build Rise Together Ventures, a Santa Barbara-based venture franchise combining venture funding with philanthropy.
“My vision is to find ways to accelerate human progress on a multi-generational timeline,” he said. “That’s part of the reason why I think working within the innovation economy, as either a VC or founder is just so compelling because you’re working through this porthole to the future and building things that may or may not exist 10 years from now or could totally change the world.”
The tech and VC scene has been part of Adams’s life since he founded his first real estate development company while completing his undergraduate degree at USC. It was through raising funding for his second venture and “talking to a lot of family offices” that he was suddenly struck with this idea of a “blended approach.”
“Rather than just build a direct venture capital fund with the office, we should probably originate a venture capital allocation and do things like cash flow modeling and portfolio construction at that level,” he explained. “And then what we started to also do is play with this idea of what we call ‘blended platform approach,’ where you combine fund-of-fund investing with a third bucket that is direct investments.”
As opposed to targeting only market coverage and credibility, the new approach allowed him to expand funding to target other areas.
“What we're targeting is coverage, credibility, and then benchmarking,” he said. “And then the next bucket is the direct fund bucket. “
While working in the VC space, Adams was simultaneously serving on the board of Homeboy Industries, a gang rehabilitation and re-entry focused nonprofit in L.A.
“My perspective is that governments and nonprofits tend to scale linearly,” Adams said. “Whereas, for profit startups are capable of scaling exponentially. And with the problems that our society is facing today, we don't need linear scaling solutions.”
This led Adams to create Rise Together Ventures, with the goal of revolutionizing and creating a new paradigm in the philanthropic world.
“We're actually empowering for-profit startups to fully embrace their ambition to change the world by having the right incentives and mechanisms to be able to take their core capabilities and what they do best, and simply leverage those to create value within what we would traditionally deem as philanthropic domains,” he said.
At Rise Together, there are two separate pools of capital. One is a normal venture fund and the second one is a donor advised fund, which is a pool of philanthropic capital.
“We leverage something that we call philanthropic mirroring which is matching an equity investment with an equal amount of philanthropic capital,” Adams says.
Essentially, the funding that comes from the philanthropic capital is to gauge how the company would do. Currently, Rise Together is writing checks between $100,000 to $500,000 for early stage and late stage startups.
“If we create a structure where founders are empowered to effectively expand their product market fit by even just a little bit into more philanthropic domains and any segments of the market that can’t really pay for things, they can really fully embrace their vision for the future,” he said.
dot.LA Reporter Decerry Donato contributed to this post.
Click the link above to hear the full episode, and subscribe to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
This podcast is produced by L.A. Venture. The views and opinions expressed in the show are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of dot.LA or its newsroom.
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Minnie Ingersoll
Minnie Ingersoll is a partner at TenOneTen and host of the LA Venture podcast. Prior to TenOneTen, Minnie was the COO and co-founder of $100M+ Shift.com, an online marketplace for used cars. Minnie started her career as an early product manager at Google. Minnie studied Computer Science at Stanford and has an MBA from HBS. She recently moved back to L.A. after 20+ years in the Bay Area and is excited to be a part of the growing tech ecosystem of Southern California. In her space time, Minnie surfs baby waves and raises baby people.
LA Tech ‘Moves’: MeWe Taps Apple Co-founder, Aspiration Swipes Tesla Director
12:00 PM | August 05, 2022
Photo by James Opas | Modified by Joshua Letona
“Moves,” our roundup of job changes in L.A. tech, is presented by Interchange.LA, dot.LA's recruiting and career platform connecting Southern California's most exciting companies with top tech talent. Create a free Interchange.LA profile here—and if you're looking for ways to supercharge your recruiting efforts, find out more about Interchange.LA's white-glove recruiting service by emailing Sharmineh O’Farrill Lewis (sharmineh@dot.la). Please send job changes and personnel moves to moves@dot.la.
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Aspiration, a sustainable financial services company, appointed former Tesla director Tim Newell as its first chief innovation officer. Prior to leading teams at Tesla, Newell also worked under the Clinton Administration as a deputy director for policy in the White House office of science and technology.
All-electric vehicle manufacturing company Phoenix Motorcars hired industry veterans Lewis Liu as senior vice president of program management office and business development. Phoenix also hired Mark Hastings as senior vice president of corporate development and strategy and head of investor relations.
Counterpart, a management liability platform, welcomed Claudette Kellner as insurance product lead and Eric Marler as head of claims. Kellner served at Berkley Management Protection as vice president, while Marler previously served as an assistant vice president at the Hanover Insurance Group.
Legal tech and eDiscovery veteran Mark Wentworth joined compliance software company X1 as external vice president of sales and business development.
Sameday Health, a testing and healthcare provider, named Sarah Thomas as general counsel. Thomas previously served at digital health company Favor.
MeWe, an ad-free and privacy-first social network, tapped the co-founder of Apple Steve Wozniak to its advisory board, and co-founder of Harvard Connection Divya Narendra to its board of directors.
Internet marketplace Ad.net, welcomed former Interpublic CEO David Bell to its board of directors.
Science and technology company GATC Health, appointed addiction specialist Jayson A. Hymes as a new advisory board member.
AltaSea, a non-profit organization that aims to accelerate scientific collaboration, added South Bay philanthropist Melanie Lundquist to its board of trustees.
Correction:An earlier version stated Divya Narendra was added to MeWe's advisory board.
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Decerry Donato
Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
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