This Week in Tech, Race, and Gender - DINT 134
Yancey Spruill, former CEO of cloud and data firm Digital Ocean, shared a personal story of unity across beliefs.. Plus, Google bankrolls first AI Institute at an HBCU,
News Feature + Commentary
Black Tech CEO Mentored by KKK Member Incites Employee Protest
Trauma shows up in many ways. Some of us fight back and become well-adjusted. Others enter a kind of Stockholm Syndrome and espouse the ideas of the very people who oppress and despise them.
Such is the case of Yancey Spruil, the one-time CEO of large cloud services firm Digital Ocean. During an all-hands meeting to discuss the fall-out from cultural missteps in Pakistan, Spruill mentioned the time he was mentored by someone he came to discover was a card-carrying member of domestic terror group the Klu Klux Klan. The Klan (or KKK) was responsible for lynchings across the South, from its founding in 1865 until this very day.
Spruill is a Black man. He used the KKK mentor angle to convince his staff they could connect on a professional level without compromising personal beliefs. Here are his statements as reported by 444 Media
"I worked in the electrical engineering, controls engineering group at this manufacturing plant in Wilmington, North Carolina, and not everyone liked that they were integrating Corning.”
“And there was a particular person who I got off to a rough start with who had been at the company for 40 years in North Carolina. And our manager saw this and talked to him and he actually turned a corner and became a mentor of mine," Spruill said.
Later on during the meeting Spruill said:
“I came to find out this person was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and it was a very powerful message in learning for me that we sign up for values [of a company] because we believe in the opportunity.”
It did not go over well with the employees of Digital Ocean.
Responses ranged from calls for Spruill’s resignation to employee-led protests. For his part, Spruill clarified his statements but the mention of a group with such a dangerous history couldn’t be erased, no matter the amount of explanations and attempts to smooth things over.
Spruill made his comments about being mentored by someone he later found out was a KKK member in July 2023. Digital Ocean, a publicly traded company, announced its search for a new CEO in August of that year.
In November 2023, Spruill sold $2.9 million of his shares in Digital Ocean, according to Simply Wall St. That represented only 8.6% of his holdings in the company.
He served as CEO of Digital Ocean until February 2024, when the firm’s newly appointed CEO, Paddy Srinivasan.
Commentary:
I’ve seen this dynamic several times in the tech industry. Black workers enter a historically racist industry that is resistant to making space for, and welcoming, non-White employees. To survive, some put a positive spin on an egregious situation.
One man I knew was a senior director of a department in a tech firm I worked at. He, too, told me of a racist person who eventually became his friend and visited him in the hospital when he was ill.
While these instances have a feel-good tinge to them, they are indeed illusions. If we peel back the curtain we’ll see a plethora of insults Black people overlook on a daily basis in tech to remain sane.
If you read his statement carefully, you’ll see Spruill never really had acceptance from his mentor. Yet Spruill, to this day, regards the relationship with fondness.
“I had a great relationship with him [the mentor],” Spruill said during the July 2023 all-hands meeting at Digital Ocean. The story devolved after his opening sentence describing his great relationship with the unnamed mentor.
“He never invited me to lunch, never invited me to have a drink, never invited me to play golf. We both loved golf,” Spruill said.
While Spruill meant this to mean you don’t have to be close friends to come to an understanding, the underbelly of his mentor’s behavior reveals a lack of acceptance of the soon-to-be CEO.
“I came to find out this person was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, …” Spruill admitted.
“... and it was a very powerful message in learning for me that we sign up for values [of a company] because we believe in the opportunity. We love the company.”
“We can bend as long as we don’t break our personal beliefs, it can work incredibly well,” he concluded.
Black employees must be the ones to bend until the breaking point in this scenario.
While Spruill didn't know the man was a KKK member during their great relationship, what he described alluded to a surface-level connection. It seems Spruill saw that surface level as a solid alternative to what could be happening to him at work: isolation, bigotry, derision.
Could this be why Spruill rose to the level of CEO of a publicly traded company in the tech industry? Is the greatest skill a Black professional can have in the tech industry is the ability to constantly overlook insults and a lack of acceptance?
What some call resilience, others call a blatant ignorance to glaring problems in an industry it claims is growing too fast to care about such frivolous things as equality.
Spruill now serves as a vice president at a private equity firm, according to 404 Media.
More news at the intersection of tech, race, and gender
United Healthcare is in the news this week for exposing an internal bot to the public. The company has since shut down outside access to the tool. Employees use it to search for information about denying health insurance claims. This is in addition to its federal lawsuit claiming the company used an AI algorithm that had a failure rate of 90%.
Startup and venture capital news site Built In profiled Black startup founder Rodney Williams of SoLo Funds. It’s a community finance platform that facilitates peer-to-peer lending and borrowing with favorable terms and flexible approval criteria. Williams highlighted ways to be proactive in shooting down opposition when running a social change startup like SoLo Funds.
IFL Science exposes how facial recognition can accurately identify non-Black criminals in police investigations. This video also breaks down how facial recognition fails many Black and Brown people.
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