I’m Minh, Nonlinear intern from September 2022 to April 2023. The last time allegations of bad practices came up, I reiterated that I had a great time working at Nonlinear. Since this post is >10,000 words, I’m not able to address everything, both because:
I literally can’t write that much.
I can’t speak for interactions between Nonlinear and Alice/Chloe, because everything I’ve heard on this topic is secondhand.
I’m just sharing my own experience with Nonlinear, and interpreting specific claims made about Kat/Emerson’s character/interaction styles based on my time with Nonlinear. In fact, I’m largely assuming Alice and Chloe are telling the truth, and speaking in good faith.
Disclaimers
In the interest of transparency, I’d like to state:
I have never been approached in this investigation, nor was I aware of it. I find this odd, because … if you’re gonna interview dozens of people about a company’s unethical treatment of employees, why wouldn’t you ask the recent interns? Nonlinear doesn’t even have that many people to interview, and I was very easy to find/reach. So that’s … odd.
I was not asked to write this comment. I just felt like it. It’s been a while since I’ve written on the EA Forum. I generally don’t write, unless I have a unique perspective on the topic.
My internship was unpaid, aside from reimbursements for costs. I honestly never prioritised asking for more pay, because I always valued asking for advice/networking more. I just found that more personally useful/advantageous for my circumstances—no near-term financial pressure, being from a non-EA hub and having to actively network very far in advance to get roles I want, compared to people from EA hubs. So it was unpaid, I just … didn’t really care.
[EDIT]: I’m addressing parts of the post that imply a pattern of behaviour. Maybe it’s unintentional, but this post references a lot of extra details that make the core claims feel much more believable as a pattern of behaviour. If this post was just about “Nonlinear abused this specific employee in this specific context”, that’s one thing. But this post says “Nonlinear abused employees, and they openly brag about how cutthroat/exploitative they are, and they tell employees their problems and time and personal life don’t really matter”. Hell, I’d be convinced.
I don’t say bad things about you, you don’t say bad things about me.
I agree this can sound suspicious, but I’ve always had the same principle. I refrain from creating negative impressions of others, because I think everyone should have a chance to make 1 good first impression. I also think it’s subjectively easier to echo negative rumours than positive rumours. All this can add up to a very warped perception, if most of what you hear about a person is secondhand. Of course, this doesn’t extend to possible harm/abuse, so don’t take any of this as me minimising/refuting Alice or Chloe’s experiences. And, as mentioned, I don’t like assuming ill of others based purely on secondhand information.
Alice and Chloe report that they were advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’, including their families, romantic partners, and anyone local to where they were staying, with the exception of guests/visitors that Nonlinear invited. Alice and Chloe report this made them very socially dependent on Kat/Emerson/Drew and otherwise very isolated.
This is the one part I’m outright skeptical of. It sounds very out-of-character, to the point where I can’t foresee the Nonlinear team ever saying this. My experience with Kat, Drew or Emerson is that they love their families/partners a lot, and frequently communicate/visit. They are extremely intentional, scheduling in time to talk to loved ones every day. And if you think about it … why would someone visit a dozen countries a year, plus all the bureaucracy and hassle involved, if they didn’t like interacting with locals. This daily pattern of behaviour would be really odd/suboptimal from a cold, logical, utility-maximising standpoint, as implied here.
Multiple people who worked with Kat reported that Kat had a pattern of enforcing arbitrary short deadlines on people in order to get them to make the decision she wants e.g. “I need a decision by the end of this call”, or (in an email to Alice) “This is urgent and important. There are people working on saving the world and we can’t let our issues hold them back from doing their work.”
My Occam’s Razor read is that Kat is basically externalising her internal dialogue. Kat naturally tends to procrastinate, so she uses these strategies to get herself to do work, and that self pep-talk sounds really weird when she externalises it to others. I struggle with procrastination as someone with ADHD, so my internal dialogue sounds very similar, I just don’t use that phrasing when talking to others haha.
By the same reasoning, the employees reported that they were given 100% of the menial tasks around the house (cleaning, tidying, etc) due to their lower value of time to the company. For instance, if a cofounder spilled food in the kitchen, the employees would clean it up. This was generally reported as feeling very demeaning.
If it means anything, when I stayed with Kat and Emerson for around 2 weeks, I never experienced anything similar. Driving, dishwashing and laundry I was never asked to do, which somehow felt weird the other way, because I thought I was doing too little.
Other times when Alice would come to Kat with money troubles and asking for a pay rise, Alice reports that Kat would tell them that this was a psychological issue and that actually they had safety, for instance they could move back in with their parents, so they didn’t need to worry.
OK, I feel this is a misinterpretation. Kat said this to me, but I had a different interpretation. Basically, I was discussing my idea of “the deferred life plan”: that, in my experience, ambitious people who want to start/build/work on meaningful things have a tendency to rationalise not doing it by simply not thinking too hard about the details.
[DISCLAIMER: Taken at face value, Kat’s response to Alice is an insensitive response to a subordinate saying they have money problems and need a pay rise. I’m suggesting that there might have been more context, based on Kat saying very similar things in a very different tone to me.]
I’m sure a lot of EAs have heard/believed some variation of “instead of trying to help the world/pursue meaningful things, you need to first go to a good college, get a good degree, build a good resume/CV, climb the corporate ladder, achieve financial independence and retire with a 3% rate of withdrawal and then do the thing you want”. My background is climate activism in Singapore, so that’s basically the only advice I’d ever heard.
I asked Kat for her opinion, because I knew she basically didn’t do any of that. She didn’t have a college degree, travelled a lot and spent years starting a nonprofit and living on very little. This topic is worth its own very long post, but essentially, she said “you need to break down and plan out exactly what your financial needs are, because intentionally maximising your runway gives you more room for risk tolerance”.
I think that makes sense. I think young EAs, and honestly, most young people, don’t confront themselves on what tradeoffs they need to have the life they want, purely out of discomfort. I’m a guy surrounded by guys from prestigious colleges, I feel all my peers just procrastinate pursuing things that matter to them by seeking high-status, high paying jobs. A lot of them have no goal of “if I make 75k a year for 3 years and rent with 3 roommates, I can pursue what I want for a decade at 25 years old”, even though that’s exactly the kind of calculation you need to … pursue meaningful things. And if you remove rent from the equation by living with parents, your risk tolerance goes way up.
Anyway, that’s my interpretation, based on hearing the exact same words from Kat, but extracting a very different meaning.
Re: Adversarial business practices
As for Emerson, he gives very transparent advice about how sharks operate, and how to survive them. He’s very perceptive (or at least, sounds perceptive) about adversarial strategies in high-growth, highly competitive spaces like online media and Web3, due to his 2 decades of experience in these fields.
Do I think Emerson can sound like a bad actor? Absolutely. It’s hard for a person to explain common manipulative strategies with sounding incredibly suspicious. However, for me, I spent the entire 2 weeks with him writing down notes on my laptop, notes I’ve found incredibly helpful as I’ve been scaling a generative AI startup for the past 4-5 months. Personally, I had to learn to deal with bad actors and adversarial business practices, either by being taught beforehand, or by experiencing it myself, and I vastly,vastly prefer being taught.
Hi Minh, Appreciate you sharing your views publicly here. I think you’re acting in good faith, and if others engage with this comment I hope they see that as well.
I think it’s very possible the Nonlinear team handled different employees very differently, especially since you started interning with them after Alice and Chloe had left and from Nonlinear’s account, it sounds like they made some changes (e.g. not having employees live and work with them).
Overall, I don’t think I’ve updated my views much as a result of this comment. I won’t cite every example in detail to save time, and won’t have capacity to do write it up publicly but happy to talk about it off the Forum, but here’s a quick overview of why I haven’t:
1) Most of the points you comment on here seem to be your interpretation of the accounts of the post. It seems like you don’t necessarily have a unique perspective on at least the first point, and overall I don’t agree with the conclusions you draw based on the evidence provided in the original post (e.g. the point about intimidation and Emerson)
I don’t think you are always engaging with all the context of the post (e.g. I think more so than talking about tactics, Emerson’s dealings with Adorian Deck seemed unnecessarily aggressive and doesn’t seem to be defensive in nature.) I don’t think this is intentional, but I think it could be helpful to engage with the substance of the points.
2) For pieces that you do have your own experiences to draw from, I think your situation was materially different from that of Alice and Chloe - namely, as I understand it you were not co-living and co-working for an extended period with the Nonlinear team, and your scope of work was different (e.g. I expect that house ops was not a part of your internship duties. I think most of the negative dynamics described resulted from the environment. I think it’s a fairly common occurrence that same thing in different contexts can have a very different meaning & consequences (e.g. the safety net point—which you also mentioned was insensitive—or the short deadlines).
It’s possible I could change some of the above views it in light of new evidence.
Oh yeah, don’t take this as a direct refutation of Alice/Chloe’s accounts. I definitely agree that the context was different. If the claims are true, then yeah, that sounds really bad.
Re: Core Claims
For the “core claims”. I have a personal opinion that these claims started from unfortunate, honest misunderstanding, and were substantively exaggerated. But those claims are specific and very sensitive. Clearly, at least one party involved is misleading people. So I’ll let Kat/Emerson represent themselves with whatever evidence they showed me.
Re: Patterns of behaviour
I’m addressing parts of the post that cite other concerning behaviour. Maybe it’s unintentional, but this post references a lot of extra details that make the core claims feel much more believable as a pattern of behaviour. If this post was just about “Nonlinear abused this specific employee in this specific context”, that’s one thing. But this post says “Nonlinear abused employees, and they openly brag about how cutthroat/exploitative they are, and they tell employees their problems and time and personal life don’t really matter”. Hell, I’d be convinced.
Also, … I’m disagreeing with this conclusion on a personal level, as the hypothetical person described in this strongly-worded appeal:
I expect that if Nonlinear does more hiring in the EA ecosystem it is more-likely-than-not to chew up and spit out other bright-eyed young EAs who want to do good in the world. I relatedly think that the EA ecosystem doesn’t have reliable defenses against such predators. These are not the first, nor sadly the last, bright-eyed well-intentioned people who I expect to be taken advantage of and hurt in the EA/x-risk/AI safety ecosystem, as a result of falsely trusting high-status people at EA events to be people who will treat them honorably.
Obviously, small sample size, but I’m already 50% of the pool of people this statement applies to.
Re: Adorian Deck
Honestly, it didn’t even occur to me that Deck was worth addressing. I did a quick read of the post+public linked sources, and came to the conclusion that Deck was supposed to co-manage the account (as stated in the contract), became inactive managing it and regretted it afterwards when it became successful. It’s incredibly common, almost expected, for young content creators who go viral to become inexplicably inactive and neglect obligations, as I’ve already experienced multiple times in my generative AI venture. It happens like … 70-90% of the time you sign such deals.
Yes, maybe Emerson’s account is entirely fabricated, but I find it easier to believe that this is a very common dispute, and not “behaviour that’s like 7 standard deviations away from usual norms in this area”. I mean, mathematically, believing someone is behaving many standard deviations outside the norm is a bit harder than believing a teenager lost interest in maintaining their viral account, which happens most of the time.[1]
I can elaborate, and even cite personal examples. But point is: it’s really common in industries that work closely with content creators/affiliates, which is why it didn’t register as a red flag for me.
In any case, Emerson directly refutes he sent stalkers. This claim sounds really hard to prove/disprove given the information presented, so I … didn’t want to go down that weird rabbit hole.
Edit on Dec 26 2023: not sure it’s worth people freaking this given the new nonlinear updates. I think it makes the below comment outdated. I don’t think I would still endorse the specific claims in this comment if i came back to it.
Re patterns of behaviors—I believe I still disagree here. The way I’d summarize it (poorly) is something like: “Nonlinear have a history of negative behavior towards employees, they have continued to demonstrate some negative behaviors, and have not acknowledged that some of their behavior was harmful to others” (edited)
What I think constitutes a “pattern”:
Two employees had multiple negative experiences across a range of scenarios (e.g. financial, psychological/social, legal) over the course of 7 months.
I think they have demonstrated a consistent pattern with at the very least intimidation tactics (re their email to Ben about this post).
Based on their responses of events (over a year later), it seems like Nonlinear team does not believe they have done any wrong. For many actions which they admit to doing (e.g. the driving or drugs incidents) seem like pretty clear red flags, they don’t see anything wrong with that behavior.
Edit: I no longer endorse the first sentence this based on Violet’s comment below, and agree with her overall take here. I would be keen to see what aspects the Nonlinear team believe to be mistakes and what changes they made.
I think the above is still consistent with current/future employees having a much more positive experience though, since as I said I think a lot of the problems were caused by the environment / co-living situation.
I do think it’s strange / unfortunate that Ben didn’t interview you given how the conclusion is stated. I still agree with the end-line conclusion though, I think it’s possible there could still be situations where others could have negative experiences.
Re Adorian Deck—I hadn’t read much about the Adorian Deck incident, based on what your summary I think it does sound less bad than I would have initially thought. I also think that including that quote about standard deviation seems a bit extreme.
Kat explicitly acknowledges at the end of this comment that “[they] made some mistakes … learned from them and set up ways to prevent them”, so it feels a bit unfair to say that that Non-Linear as a whole hasn’t acknowledged any wrongdoing.
OTOH, Ben’s testimony here in response to Emerson is a bit concerning, and supports your point more strongly.[1] It’s also one of the remarks I’m most curious to hear Emerson respond to. I’ll quote Ben in full because I don’t think this comment is on the EA Forum.
I did hear your [Emerson’s?] side for 3 hours and you changed my mind very little and admitted to a bunch of the dynamics (“our intention wasn’t just to have employees, but also to have members of our family unit”) and you said my summary was pretty good. You mostly laughed at every single accusation I brought up and IMO took nothing morally seriously and the only ex ante mistake you admitted to was “not firing Alice earlier”. You didn’t seem to understand the gravity of my accusations, or at least had no space for honestly considering that you’d seriously hurt and intimidated some people.
I think I would have been much more sympathetic to you if you had told me that you’d been actively letting people know about how terrible an experience your former employees had, and had encouraged people to speak with them, and if you at literally any point had explicitly considered the notion that you were morally culpable for their experiences.
This is only Ben’s testimony, so take that for what it’s worth. But this context feels important, because (at least just speaking personally) genuine acknowledgment and remorse for any wrongdoing feels pretty crucial for my overall evaluation of Non-Linear going forward.
I also sympathize with the general vibe of your remark, and the threats to sue contribute to the impression of going on the defensive rather than admitting fault.
I think given what you know, your level of skepticism is reasonable here.
I mean, obviously, I’m disagreeing based on my subjective experience/knowledge. But these are reasonable concerns for an outside observer to have. My take is that how unreasonable this level of defensiveness is, would vary based on how true the actual claims are. If they’re say, 80% false, vs 80% true.
And honestly, even the most charitable interpretation states that Nonlinear team really dropped the ball on communicating to employees and frequently says a lot of weird, shady stuff. So I’m not gonna pretend like Nonlinear does nothing wrong, just because they’re “my team”.
I mean, for all I know, there’s 2 parties each claiming the other maintains a complex web of deception and lies, and I might be believing the wrong one 🤔
Thank you for sharing Minh, I think this is one of the most important updates.
If our goal is (as I think it should be) only to figure out whether we want to interact with any of these people in the future, and not to exact retribution for past wrongs against third parties, then we don’t need to know exactly what happened between nonlinear and Alice and Chloe. That’s good, since we probably never will. What does seem to be the case is this. (1) Everybody involved agrees that something went badly wrong in the relationships between Kat/Emerson and Alice/Chloe, though they may dramatically disagree about what. (2) Kat/Emerson have changed their behavior in a way that prevents a repeat. Your testimony is good evidence for 2. And given that, I don’t think I will update much on whether I want to interact with them in the future. So thank you for your testimony.
(disclaimers: my past interactions with Kat have been positive but not extensive. I don’t believe I have interacted with Emerson. And I was not asked to comment by anyone involved.)
(2) Kat/Emerson have changed their behavior in a way that prevents a repeat. Your testimony is good evidence for 2.
Here’s what I would need to see from Kat and Emerson to lend any credence to the idea that they’ve changed their behaviour in a way that prevents them from mistreating employees again:
1. They acknowledge the many things they did wrong described in the OP and admit that they were wrong, without trying to downplay or rationalize them.
2. They apologize for these things (and give a good apology that isn’t defensive or weaselly or victim-blaming).
3. They attempt to make amends in some way (e.g. giving a sum of money to Alice and Chloe for emotional damages).
4. They commit to changing their future behaviour in specific ways (e.g. hiring an accountant or bookkeeper for Nonlinear; paying all future employees a salary agreed to beforehand in a binding legal contract — this is just the tip of the iceberg).
Even if we assume that all of the allegations are true (which seems unwarranted when the evidence is hearsay from two anonymous sources), you seem to think that remorse is the only mental state that could cause people to change their behavior. Why do you think that?
the evidence is hearsay from two anonymous sources
I think even with just the behaviours that Nonlinear has publicly confirmed, there is cause for major concern.
you seem to think that remorse is the only mental state that could cause people to change their behavior. Why do you think that?
The emotion of guilt is usually what leads to accountability and behaviour change. See e.g. this video with clinical psychologist June Tangney, co-author of the book Shame and Guilt.
I think even with just the behaviours that Nonlinear has publicly confirmed, there is cause for major concern.
Lets look at one specific claim that you pointed to—whether there was a legal contract agreed beforehand specifying a salary. Unless I’ve missed something, I don’t believe nonlinear has publicly commented on this. All I’m saying is don’t let your confidence exceed the strength of the evidence.
The emotion of guilt is usually what leads to accountability and behaviour change. See e.g. this video with clinical psychologist June Tangney, co-author of the book Shame and Guilt.
It is certainly one emotion that can. But your video just talks about guilt and shame, it doesn’t talk about other emotions. I would expect all emotions have the potential to change behavior under the right circumstances—otherwise, they wouldn’t serve an evolutionary purpose. I can think of instances where I’ve altered my behavior after social drama out of fear of getting hurt again, rather than guilt or shame. So when I look at someone else, I don’t need to settle on a particular explanation of why they’ve changed their behavior to accept evidence that they have.
I read your comment carefully and then went back and skimmed it, to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.
As far I can tell, this is the only new information that is both germane to the substantive points of the OP and that comes from your direct personal experience with Nonlinear:
As for Emerson, he gives very transparent advice about how sharks operate, and how to survive them. He’s very perceptive (or at least, sounds perceptive) about adversarial strategies in high-growth, highly competitive spaces like online media and Web3, due to his 2 decades of experience in these fields.
If anything, this lends slight credence to the accounts of Emerson’s behaviour recounted in the OP. This isn’t much of an update, though, since Emerson himself already admitted to talking like this.
Hello!
I’m Minh, Nonlinear intern from September 2022 to April 2023. The last time allegations of bad practices came up, I reiterated that I had a great time working at Nonlinear. Since this post is >10,000 words, I’m not able to address everything, both because:
I literally can’t write that much.
I can’t speak for interactions between Nonlinear and Alice/Chloe, because everything I’ve heard on this topic is secondhand.
I’m just sharing my own experience with Nonlinear, and interpreting specific claims made about Kat/Emerson’s character/interaction styles based on my time with Nonlinear. In fact, I’m largely assuming Alice and Chloe are telling the truth, and speaking in good faith.
Disclaimers
In the interest of transparency, I’d like to state:
I have never been approached in this investigation, nor was I aware of it. I find this odd, because … if you’re gonna interview dozens of people about a company’s unethical treatment of employees, why wouldn’t you ask the recent interns? Nonlinear doesn’t even have that many people to interview, and I was very easy to find/reach. So that’s … odd.
I was not asked to write this comment. I just felt like it. It’s been a while since I’ve written on the EA Forum. I generally don’t write, unless I have a unique perspective on the topic.
My internship was unpaid, aside from reimbursements for costs. I honestly never prioritised asking for more pay, because I always valued asking for advice/networking more. I just found that more personally useful/advantageous for my circumstances—no near-term financial pressure, being from a non-EA hub and having to actively network very far in advance to get roles I want, compared to people from EA hubs. So it was unpaid, I just … didn’t really care.
[EDIT]: I’m addressing parts of the post that imply a pattern of behaviour. Maybe it’s unintentional, but this post references a lot of extra details that make the core claims feel much more believable as a pattern of behaviour. If this post was just about “Nonlinear abused this specific employee in this specific context”, that’s one thing. But this post says “Nonlinear abused employees, and they openly brag about how cutthroat/exploitative they are, and they tell employees their problems and time and personal life don’t really matter”. Hell, I’d be convinced.
I agree this can sound suspicious, but I’ve always had the same principle. I refrain from creating negative impressions of others, because I think everyone should have a chance to make 1 good first impression. I also think it’s subjectively easier to echo negative rumours than positive rumours. All this can add up to a very warped perception, if most of what you hear about a person is secondhand.
Of course, this doesn’t extend to possible harm/abuse, so don’t take any of this as me minimising/refuting Alice or Chloe’s experiences. And, as mentioned, I don’t like assuming ill
of others based purely on secondhand information.
This is the one part I’m outright skeptical of. It sounds very out-of-character, to the point where I can’t foresee the Nonlinear team ever saying this. My experience with Kat, Drew or Emerson is that they love their families/partners a lot, and frequently communicate/visit. They are extremely intentional, scheduling in time to talk to loved ones every day. And if you think about it … why would someone visit a dozen countries a year, plus all the bureaucracy and hassle involved, if they didn’t like interacting with locals.
This daily pattern of behaviour would be really odd/suboptimal from a cold, logical, utility-maximising standpoint, as implied here.
My Occam’s Razor read is that Kat is basically externalising her internal dialogue. Kat naturally tends to procrastinate, so she uses these strategies to get herself to do work, and that self pep-talk sounds really weird when she externalises it to others. I struggle with procrastination as someone with ADHD, so my internal dialogue sounds very similar, I just don’t use that phrasing when talking to others haha.
If it means anything, when I stayed with Kat and Emerson for around 2 weeks, I never experienced anything similar. Driving, dishwashing and laundry I was never asked to do, which somehow felt weird the other way, because I thought I was doing too little.
OK, I feel this is a misinterpretation. Kat said this to me, but I had a different interpretation. Basically, I was discussing my idea of “the deferred life plan”: that, in my experience, ambitious people who want to start/build/work on meaningful things have a tendency to rationalise not doing it by simply not thinking too hard about the details.
[DISCLAIMER: Taken at face value, Kat’s response to Alice is an insensitive response to a subordinate saying they have money problems and need a pay rise. I’m suggesting that there might have been more context, based on Kat saying very similar things in a very different tone to me.]
I’m sure a lot of EAs have heard/believed some variation of “instead of trying to help the world/pursue meaningful things, you need to first go to a good college, get a good degree, build a good resume/CV, climb the corporate ladder, achieve financial independence and retire with a 3% rate of withdrawal and then do the thing you want”. My background is climate activism in Singapore, so that’s basically the only advice I’d ever heard.
I asked Kat for her opinion, because I knew she basically didn’t do any of that. She didn’t have a college degree, travelled a lot and spent years starting a nonprofit and living on very little. This topic is worth its own very long post, but essentially, she said “you need to break down and plan out exactly what your financial needs are, because intentionally maximising your runway gives you more room for risk tolerance”.
I think that makes sense. I think young EAs, and honestly, most young people, don’t confront themselves on what tradeoffs they need to have the life they want, purely out of discomfort. I’m a guy surrounded by guys from prestigious colleges, I feel all my peers just procrastinate pursuing things that matter to them by seeking high-status, high paying jobs. A lot of them have no goal of “if I make 75k a year for 3 years and rent with 3 roommates, I can pursue what I want for a decade at 25 years old”, even though that’s exactly the kind of calculation you need to … pursue meaningful things. And if you remove rent from the equation by living with parents, your risk tolerance goes way up.
Anyway, that’s my interpretation, based on hearing the exact same words from Kat, but extracting a very different meaning.
As for Emerson, he gives very transparent advice about how sharks operate, and how to survive them. He’s very perceptive (or at least, sounds perceptive) about adversarial strategies in high-growth, highly competitive spaces like online media and Web3, due to his 2 decades of experience in these fields.
Do I think Emerson can sound like a bad actor? Absolutely. It’s hard for a person to explain common manipulative strategies with sounding incredibly suspicious. However, for me, I spent the entire 2 weeks with him writing down notes on my laptop, notes I’ve found incredibly helpful as I’ve been scaling a generative AI startup for the past 4-5 months. Personally, I had to learn to deal with bad actors and adversarial business practices, either by being taught beforehand, or by experiencing it myself, and I vastly,vastly prefer being taught.
Hi Minh, Appreciate you sharing your views publicly here. I think you’re acting in good faith, and if others engage with this comment I hope they see that as well.
I think it’s very possible the Nonlinear team handled different employees very differently, especially since you started interning with them after Alice and Chloe had left and from Nonlinear’s account, it sounds like they made some changes (e.g. not having employees live and work with them).
Overall, I don’t think I’ve updated my views much as a result of this comment. I won’t cite every example in detail to save time, and won’t have capacity to do write it up publicly but happy to talk about it off the Forum, but here’s a quick overview of why I haven’t:
1) Most of the points you comment on here seem to be your interpretation of the accounts of the post. It seems like you don’t necessarily have a unique perspective on at least the first point, and overall I don’t agree with the conclusions you draw based on the evidence provided in the original post (e.g. the point about intimidation and Emerson)
I don’t think you are always engaging with all the context of the post (e.g. I think more so than talking about tactics, Emerson’s dealings with Adorian Deck seemed unnecessarily aggressive and doesn’t seem to be defensive in nature.) I don’t think this is intentional, but I think it could be helpful to engage with the substance of the points.
2) For pieces that you do have your own experiences to draw from, I think your situation was materially different from that of Alice and Chloe - namely, as I understand it you were not co-living and co-working for an extended period with the Nonlinear team, and your scope of work was different (e.g. I expect that house ops was not a part of your internship duties. I think most of the negative dynamics described resulted from the environment. I think it’s a fairly common occurrence that same thing in different contexts can have a very different meaning & consequences (e.g. the safety net point—which you also mentioned was insensitive—or the short deadlines).
It’s possible I could change some of the above views it in light of new evidence.
Oh yeah, don’t take this as a direct refutation of Alice/Chloe’s accounts. I definitely agree that the context was different. If the claims are true, then yeah, that sounds really bad.
Re: Core Claims
For the “core claims”. I have a personal opinion that these claims started from unfortunate, honest misunderstanding, and were substantively exaggerated. But those claims are specific and very sensitive. Clearly, at least one party involved is misleading people. So I’ll let Kat/Emerson represent themselves with whatever evidence they showed me.
Re: Patterns of behaviour
I’m addressing parts of the post that cite other concerning behaviour. Maybe it’s unintentional, but this post references a lot of extra details that make the core claims feel much more believable as a pattern of behaviour. If this post was just about “Nonlinear abused this specific employee in this specific context”, that’s one thing. But this post says “Nonlinear abused employees, and they openly brag about how cutthroat/exploitative they are, and they tell employees their problems and time and personal life don’t really matter”. Hell, I’d be convinced.
Also, … I’m disagreeing with this conclusion on a personal level, as the hypothetical person described in this strongly-worded appeal:
Obviously, small sample size, but I’m already 50% of the pool of people this statement applies to.
Re: Adorian Deck
Honestly, it didn’t even occur to me that Deck was worth addressing. I did a quick read of the post+public linked sources, and came to the conclusion that Deck was supposed to co-manage the account (as stated in the contract), became inactive managing it and regretted it afterwards when it became successful. It’s incredibly common, almost expected, for young content creators who go viral to become inexplicably inactive and neglect obligations, as I’ve already experienced multiple times in my generative AI venture. It happens like … 70-90% of the time you sign such deals.
Yes, maybe Emerson’s account is entirely fabricated, but I find it easier to believe that this is a very common dispute, and not “behaviour that’s like 7 standard deviations away from usual norms in this area”. I mean, mathematically, believing someone is behaving many standard deviations outside the norm is a bit harder than believing a teenager lost interest in maintaining their viral account, which happens most of the time.[1]
I can elaborate, and even cite personal examples. But point is: it’s really common in industries that work closely with content creators/affiliates, which is why it didn’t register as a red flag for me.
In any case, Emerson directly refutes he sent stalkers. This claim sounds really hard to prove/disprove given the information presented, so I … didn’t want to go down that weird rabbit hole.
Edit on Dec 26 2023: not sure it’s worth people freaking this given the new nonlinear updates. I think it makes the below comment outdated. I don’t think I would still endorse the specific claims in this comment if i came back to it.
Re patterns of behaviors—I believe I still disagree here. The way I’d summarize it (poorly) is something like: “Nonlinear have a history of negative behavior towards employees, they have continued to demonstrate some negative behaviors, and have not acknowledged that some of their behavior was harmful to others” (edited)
What I think constitutes a “pattern”:
Two employees had multiple negative experiences across a range of scenarios (e.g. financial, psychological/social, legal) over the course of 7 months.
I think they have demonstrated a consistent pattern with at the very least intimidation tactics (re their email to Ben about this post).
Based on their responses of events (over a year later), it seems like Nonlinear team does not believe they have done any wrong.For many actions which they admit to doing (e.g. the driving or drugs incidents) seem like pretty clear red flags, they don’t see anything wrong with that behavior.Edit: I no longer endorse the first sentence this based on Violet’s comment below, and agree with her overall take here. I would be keen to see what aspects the Nonlinear team believe to be mistakes and what changes they made.
For the second sentence, I still endorse it based on Nonlinear’s interview with Ben
I think the above is still consistent with current/future employees having a much more positive experience though, since as I said I think a lot of the problems were caused by the environment / co-living situation.
I do think it’s strange / unfortunate that Ben didn’t interview you given how the conclusion is stated. I still agree with the end-line conclusion though, I think it’s possible there could still be situations where others could have negative experiences.
Re Adorian Deck—I hadn’t read much about the Adorian Deck incident, based on what your summary I think it does sound less bad than I would have initially thought. I also think that including that quote about standard deviation seems a bit extreme.
I don’t quite agree with your summary.
Kat explicitly acknowledges at the end of this comment that “[they] made some mistakes … learned from them and set up ways to prevent them”, so it feels a bit unfair to say that that Non-Linear as a whole hasn’t acknowledged any wrongdoing.
OTOH, Ben’s testimony here in response to Emerson is a bit concerning, and supports your point more strongly.[1] It’s also one of the remarks I’m most curious to hear Emerson respond to. I’ll quote Ben in full because I don’t think this comment is on the EA Forum.
This is only Ben’s testimony, so take that for what it’s worth. But this context feels important, because (at least just speaking personally) genuine acknowledgment and remorse for any wrongdoing feels pretty crucial for my overall evaluation of Non-Linear going forward.
I also sympathize with the general vibe of your remark, and the threats to sue contribute to the impression of going on the defensive rather than admitting fault.
That’s fair point regarding Kat’s comment—I would be curious to know what kind of changes they made.
I hadn’t seen the testimony re Ben so thanks for sharing that, would definitely like to see response / engagement on this point from Emerson as well.
I think given what you know, your level of skepticism is reasonable here.
I mean, obviously, I’m disagreeing based on my subjective experience/knowledge. But these are reasonable concerns for an outside observer to have. My take is that how unreasonable this level of defensiveness is, would vary based on how true the actual claims are. If they’re say, 80% false, vs 80% true.
And honestly, even the most charitable interpretation states that Nonlinear team really dropped the ball on communicating to employees and frequently says a lot of weird, shady stuff. So I’m not gonna pretend like Nonlinear does nothing wrong, just because they’re “my team”.
I mean, for all I know, there’s 2 parties each claiming the other maintains a complex web of deception and lies, and I might be believing the wrong one 🤔
Guess we’ll find out.
Yeah, I hope we will! Thanks for engaging with me in a productive and open way, this conversation has been helpful.
Thank you for sharing Minh, I think this is one of the most important updates.
If our goal is (as I think it should be) only to figure out whether we want to interact with any of these people in the future, and not to exact retribution for past wrongs against third parties, then we don’t need to know exactly what happened between nonlinear and Alice and Chloe. That’s good, since we probably never will. What does seem to be the case is this. (1) Everybody involved agrees that something went badly wrong in the relationships between Kat/Emerson and Alice/Chloe, though they may dramatically disagree about what. (2) Kat/Emerson have changed their behavior in a way that prevents a repeat. Your testimony is good evidence for 2. And given that, I don’t think I will update much on whether I want to interact with them in the future. So thank you for your testimony.
(disclaimers: my past interactions with Kat have been positive but not extensive. I don’t believe I have interacted with Emerson. And I was not asked to comment by anyone involved.)
Here’s what I would need to see from Kat and Emerson to lend any credence to the idea that they’ve changed their behaviour in a way that prevents them from mistreating employees again:
1. They acknowledge the many things they did wrong described in the OP and admit that they were wrong, without trying to downplay or rationalize them.
2. They apologize for these things (and give a good apology that isn’t defensive or weaselly or victim-blaming).
3. They attempt to make amends in some way (e.g. giving a sum of money to Alice and Chloe for emotional damages).
4. They commit to changing their future behaviour in specific ways (e.g. hiring an accountant or bookkeeper for Nonlinear; paying all future employees a salary agreed to beforehand in a binding legal contract — this is just the tip of the iceberg).
Even if we assume that all of the allegations are true (which seems unwarranted when the evidence is hearsay from two anonymous sources), you seem to think that remorse is the only mental state that could cause people to change their behavior. Why do you think that?
I think even with just the behaviours that Nonlinear has publicly confirmed, there is cause for major concern.
The emotion of guilt is usually what leads to accountability and behaviour change. See e.g. this video with clinical psychologist June Tangney, co-author of the book Shame and Guilt.
Lets look at one specific claim that you pointed to—whether there was a legal contract agreed beforehand specifying a salary. Unless I’ve missed something, I don’t believe nonlinear has publicly commented on this. All I’m saying is don’t let your confidence exceed the strength of the evidence.
It is certainly one emotion that can. But your video just talks about guilt and shame, it doesn’t talk about other emotions. I would expect all emotions have the potential to change behavior under the right circumstances—otherwise, they wouldn’t serve an evolutionary purpose. I can think of instances where I’ve altered my behavior after social drama out of fear of getting hurt again, rather than guilt or shame. So when I look at someone else, I don’t need to settle on a particular explanation of why they’ve changed their behavior to accept evidence that they have.
I read your comment carefully and then went back and skimmed it, to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.
As far I can tell, this is the only new information that is both germane to the substantive points of the OP and that comes from your direct personal experience with Nonlinear:
If anything, this lends slight credence to the accounts of Emerson’s behaviour recounted in the OP. This isn’t much of an update, though, since Emerson himself already admitted to talking like this.