Greg Gopman is this season's Peter Shih.

[randomness]

Here's his now deleted Facebook post, as quoted in Valleywag:

Just got back to SF. I've traveled around the world and I gotta say there is nothing more grotesque than walking down market st in San Francisco. Why the heart of our city has to be overrun by crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash I have no clue. Each time I pass it my love affair with SF dies a little.

The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, the lower part of society keep to themselves. They sell small trinkets, beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way. They realize it's a privilege to be in the civilized part of town and view themselves as guests. And that's okay.

In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the city. Like it's their place of leisure... In actuality it's the business district for one of the wealthiest cities in the USA. It a disgrace. I don't even feel safe walking down the sidewalk without planning out my walking path.

You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of town for the working class. There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us. It's a burden and a liability having them so close to us. Believe me, if they added the smallest iota of value I'd consider thinking different, but the crazy toothless lady who kicks everyone that gets too close to her cardboard box hasn't made anyone's life better in a while.

--Greg Gopman, CEO of AngelHack, to his thousands of Facebook friends.

Hilarity ensued on Twitter, reports the Daily Mail:

His company's Twitter feed was bombarded with messages from people keen to share their view and tell Gopman exactly what they think of his controversial views.

Unfortunately for AngelHack, the firm's Twitter feed was reportedly set up to automatically retweet messages every time the company got a mention.

AngelHack's Twitter feed since appears to have been taken down from the site.

Slate adds:

The sentiments are so risibly retrograde that, were they uttered by some mustachioed baron on Downton Abbey, you’d worry that the show’s writers were getting lazy, falling back on hackneyed stereotypes of villainous aristocrats. They wouldn’t sound out of place coming from the lips of Billy Zane’s character in Titanic, or the bigot Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. And yet, unless there has been some truly elaborate hoax, it seems that Gopman actually wrote those words—he apologized for them today on Twitter and Facebook.

But wait—Gopman’s friends aren’t having it! Below his Facebook apology post are a series of comments from fellow techies defending Gopman’s original homeless-phobic rant.

• One friend said he was glad Gopman spoke his mind, because even though he disagreed with the post's tone, “It isn’t like you said anything many others in the startup community aren’t saying." His comment had 14 likes at last check.


• “No way!!! Do not sorry to anyone,” added another Facebook friend.


• "I don't think you need to apologize for anything," agreed a third.


• The hate for the homeless wasn’t limited to San Franciscans: A New Yorker chimed in, “I agreed with you Greg. The city has created an unfortunate situation where they rely on it for handouts vs rising above and creating their own value and contributing to society. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t base my company there and do not live there full time.”

I'll be the first to agree that San Francisco has a problem with homelessness. No question.

Do Gopman's and Shih's attitudes reflect the community they're part of? I don't know. But this I do know. Gopman's business depends on social media. Yet the guy posts something mindlessly tone-deaf using those same tools, and gets surprised by the blowback. He joins a whole parade of people who should avoid posting without adult supervision.

I guess this technology is harder to use than it looks.

Comments

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

the firm's Twitter feed was reportedly set up to automatically retweet messages every time the company got a mention

Can you spot the error here?

Basically, startups flourish in the Bay Area the same reason the homeless do: decent weather, relatively cheap living, and no stigma attached to your lifestyle.
-- "New York will always be a tech backwater" by Antonio

Actually, in its bureaucratic form, "civil liberties" helps keep the streets of San Francisco covered with turds and shambling zombies - two phenomena which constantly challenge and entertain my delightful precocious toddlers. "Why? Why, Pop?" Alas, though precocious, my offspring are nowhere near precocious enough to absorb the concept of the ACLU.
-- "Unqualified Reservations"

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

ISTM that the big difference is that SF is one of the few places where people with money live that the homeless are allowed to congregate, or even are able to access and live in. In most places, as soon as you've got an income, you decamp to a suburb that is inhospitable to people without incomes, often deliberately zoned to be inaccessible without an automobile.

In regard to blowback, the critical question is Who is your target market? Are the complainers people you care about? If not, the complainers are just part of the myriad assholes in the New Global Neighborhood. If your target market is middle-class people with kids, they want the streets clean and safe, and won't apologize for the measures needed to attain that. It's to keep the children safe! But there aren't many people with kids in SF...

[ulfhirtha.livejournal.com]

Ah, tech - providing new and broader tools to show the rest of the world just what an entitled and self-absorbed Dickensian character one is. I predict he may get visited by 3 Ghosts + a deceased partner some Christmas Eve.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

What gets me is the bit about "Like it's their place of leisure". Why, yes, it *is* their place of leisure, not your private preserve. He genuinely appears to believe that only the rich should be allowed to use public areas as they like.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to being uncomfortable with large numbers of homeless people, especially when many of them may be aggressive due to being mentally ill, but wowza. Talk about being in the 1 percent bubble...

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

You know, I think one of the reasons we've seen a couple of outbreaks of this from dudebro startup owners in SF is that they think it's not cool to hide in the suburbs so they want to stay in the city, but they have this urge to be surrounded by similarly affluent people and not think about those less fortunate or, you know, less socially acceptable. And since the SF housing market is already FUCKING NUTS, they can't afford modern palaces that separate them from hoi polloi, so they take it out on the poor around them like this in some attempt to get everyone around them to affirm that OMG POOR PEOPLE ARE GROSS AMIRITE?

I'm sure it doesn't help that there was recently a high profile case of a mentally ill person shooting someone else on MUNI, but I don't get the impression that SF has way more homeless folks than anywhere else. It has _some_ more homeless folks because the climate doesn't have as many killing freezes as some cities, but it still has killing freezes: there have been multiple deaths from hypothermia in the Bay Area since Thanksgiving.

I think this keeps popping up in SF because the dudebro startup CEOs are thicker on the ground there and because housing is already so screamingly expensive, not because there are more homeless people scaring the wealthy.

[contrariety.livejournal.com]

Why can't those miscreants just get a job so they can pay for their $1500 a month studio apartments and/or commute three hours each way from Stockton on BART/bus for $16 round trip???

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

Eh, SF apparently isn't *that* wealthy. I mean, they can't even afford to provide food and shelter for their homeless population. A truly wealthy city, filled with truly innovative thinkers, would be able to do something clever about this. [/sarcasm] I mean, *how* much loose money is sloshing around the Bay Area? How much would it cost to provide free food in a location far from downtown?

But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if SF were a magnet for the area's homeless population. I think that just happens with big cities; the bigger and wealthier the city, the more social services they can afford, and the more opportunities for homeless survival there are. Back where I'm from, my hometown is the biggest city in its half of the state, and for many of the surrounding counties, their social services consist of a one-way bus ticket. Which sounds bad in a lot of ways, but really isn't - an entirely rural county with a population of 5,000 people who are already mostly at poverty level is not going to be able to provide much in the way of social services, and sometimes not even protection from predatory wild animals. Whereas a city of 100,000 in a county of 250,000 more people, can and does. *shrug*