Dave5

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It’s not “tall poppy” syndrome, people don’t like dealing with you

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There has been a spate of “tall poppy” cry-wanks1 in the NZ entrepreneurial community over the past week. The theme is: I’m a tall poppy and I keep getting knocked down. Turns out that the people getting this coverage are generally: really unpleasant to deal with, they hurt people as their managerial MO, their achievements questionably impactful and in some cases they are famously litigious.

NZ has a rich vein of broken & insecure men who think they should be respected for being nasty people. These guys are not blameless victims, they have left a trail of human debris behind them. The NZ venture funding community pattern match on *exactly* that personality type2. Those broken men are given money to manage people. They treat people like shit and people get sick of dealing with them. What they don’t understand is that they are part of an eco-system. The eco-system is done with their bad behaviour. They are not experiencing “tall poppy” syndrome – they are experiencing consequences.

One of the writers I count as a friend, but I am clear-eyed enough to know his actions directly contribute to his perceived victimhood and his personal pain. Hurt people hurt people and people who hurt get hurt.

Instead of wasting money placing high profile opinion pieces, invest in therapy – you’ll thank me3. When you’re all in a better place I’ll tell you about the seven years of work I had to do after a notable start up.

“If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”
― Raylan Givens, Justified

  1. It sounds harsh, sorry. The rhetorical trick they use is to glom their treatment onto the fates of people who really have been treated poorly. It’s not a justified equivalence and so must be called out for the emotional carpet-bagging that it is. ↩︎
  2. The NZ community cargo-cults the US community. The US community is self-aware enough to articulate that they “look for a certain type of ‘broken’”. That makes them money.  ↩︎
  3. Do the mahi, get the treats ❤️ ↩︎

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