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Notes -
A personal anecdote that lines up with the timing.
As part of a contract I'm on, I had to do some interviews with various CEOs of small / mid-size businesses. Several were Indian-American and one was very much an Indian-Who-Now-Lives-In-America.
The Indian-American CEOs were very much like all of the other CEOs (largely white, a few asian-americans, none block, one mixed white-hispanic. Probably 70/30 male-female).
The Indian-Who-Now-Lives-In-America CEO was repeatedly lying about all of his financials. I know this because as part of this contract, we get to review the financials of all these companies. That's how fucking strange this experience was. We're not at the beginning of the engagement. We've been around for a little more than a month. The NDAs and statements of work were signed, sealed, delivered way before all of that. This CEO - all of the CEOs - know that we've been reviewing financials and other docs and now it's interviews.
And he would just make shit up.
"Yes, that client will deliver us between $350,000 and $500,000 this year"
Billed services thus far in 2026: $64k
"We've got a 100% renewal rate on contracts. No cancellations."
25% annual customer churn. It's a problem
"[Redacted large corp] Is a client. Yes"
Fucking NOPE.
We confronted him about this, gently, during the interview process. We'd point to printouts and highlight that what he was saying didn't match their documented (and audited) numbers.
"Yes, well, I think maybe these are outdated reports"
Just a constant denial of reality.
The company is a little shaky, but is making real money. Like, somehow, this CEO was doing more or less ok. *
This is "Izzat." The Motte had a discussion about it a while ago and there's a bunch of online discourse about it. This CEO was going to say whatever he needed to say in the moment to "win" the interview. Presenting your company as amazingly awesome is the whole point, the facts be damned.
And this is what, I think, the online
racistsHeritage Americans are reacting to so viscerally. It's not the skin tone or melanin content, but the signaling of a culture (not the whole culture, of course) that is so incompatible with western judeo-christian social ethics. You don't see the same hate (or, do you?) for Asians in, say, the Bay Area because those ancient Confucian-influenced ethics line up a lot better with western ones.It's not "the thing" that's being despised, but the the other thing that "the thing" points to. Hyderbad, Texas isn't bad because Texas should be only be white, it's bad because Hyderabad is awful because of these cultural specifics.
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