Entrepreneurs Call Trump's Election a 'Wake Up Call' and Worry How It Affects the World

LISBON—The morning after the U.S. presidential election, the mood of Europe's largest tech conference was rather somber, mirroring how many Americans themselves felt about Donald Trump becoming the next president of the United States. In the speaker's preparation room at the 50,000-person Web Summit conference, the co-founder of one large tech company sat on the couch with his co-founder, trying to decide how to address the news to their employees back home. "It's like a double-hangover," he told Adweek. Others had less analogous ways of describing how they felt. Dave McClure, the founder of the startup accelerator 500 Startups, went on a profanity-laced rant during an interview on the main stage. "I'm pissed off, I'm sad, I'm ashamed, I'm angry," McClure said. Wow, @davemcclure has a MELTDOWN on #WebSummit stage over Donald Trump election pic.twitter.com/aRJmFpYyQA — Adrian Weckler (@adrianweckler) November 9, 2016 Earlier that morning, another CEO, Ted Livingston of Kik, had the odd experience of learning the winner while browsing the CNN chatbot on the messaging app his company created. While he didn't stay up all night watching the results like many Americans, the Canadian said it was an odd feeling to be informed of the news via artificial intelligence. He had fallen asleep while chatting with the bot the night before, and as Hillary Clinton seemed to pull ahead, he thought it would be safe to sleep. But the next morning, as he pulled up the news, it said "Introducing Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States." "I'm not making that up," he told Adweek. "It literally happened." Livingston said that despite everything Trump had said during the campaign, he said it's tough to forget the millions of Americans who have seen their economic circumstances worsen since the financial crisis; they saw Trump as a way to maybe get it back. "We had the most powerful people in technology, in finance and in media all trying to stop Trump, and yet he still won," he said. "And to me, that's like a real wake-up call to say okay, when we wake up 10 years from now, this is a watershed moment and we need to have a serious conversation about inequality." Livingston said his hope is that having an honest discussion about what breaks the nation apart could be beneficial in the long run. "If the little earthquake gets everybody to reinforce their buildings and update the codes and make things better for everybody, it's much better to have a little earthquake than a big earthquake," he said. Others from Europe were less optimistic about the state of America. Vasco Pedro, co-founder and CEO of Portugal-based Unbabel, spent a decade in the U.S.—first in Pennsylvania while attending Carnegie Mellon and then later while spending time at Y-Combinator in Silicon Valley. Vasco, who moved back to Portugal in 2011, said he's worried what a Trump presidency could mean for globalization. "It's very frustrating for me to feel there's this backlash against globalization," he said. "At least in my generation, we grew up thinking that globalization will lead to a Star Trek future, where there is one planet united and technologically evolved. And suddenly, there's Brexit, and then the U.S., and we'll see what happens in France and in Germany ... It feels like we're going back to the past." Vasco, who had three daughters born in the U.S., mentioned that so many tech entrepreneurs in the U.S. were immigrants. He said it might be good news for places like Portugal, a country that's been working to boost its presence within the tech industry. Unbabel, which just raised its Series A funding, was supposed to receive the money in the form of British Pound. However, during that time, the Brexit vote happened, and they were able to renegotiate the funding to be giving in the form of U.S. dollars. Now, with a Trump win, he wonders what might happen to the value of yet another currency and how it could affect his business, which still has an office in Silicon Valley. "I think the weird thing is that it in the U.S. it feels like it's just the U.S. election, but it affects the world so much," he said. "Both in spirit and leadership and what happens in so many different regions. My real fear is that Donald Trump feels very much like (former Italian Prime Minister Silvio) Berlusconi. People have been saying Hitler, and I think that's a bit extreme, but a Berlusconi is someone who is rich, and who will use whatever he can for his own benefit and will agree to whatever doesn't hurt him personally." Thomas Marty-Lavauzelle, a French entrepreneur based in Paris, said watching the U.S. election from the outside seems "surreal." He said that because it's the U.S. election, it's meant to be a show, but then when the results hit, so did the reality of it. "The tone of the campaign, the level of aggressiveness and vulgarity and violence, ultimately, it's unheard of. We've never seen anything like that." Like Livingston, Marty-Lavauzelle said the tech industry should be more concerned about how innovation changes industry. In an era of Airbnb and Uber, he said tech pioneers need to think more about how disrupting workforces leads to the loss of jobs. "How do we—for lack of a better word—recycle or make them relevant?" he said. "Otherwise you break a society apart. You break the social tissue, which is work." During his talk on stage at Web Summit, McClure said technology—at least those that provide communication platforms—played a role in helping Trump win. "And are allowing shit to happen," he said. "Just like the cable news networks, just like talk radio, it's a propaganda medium. And if people aren't aware of the shit that they're being told, if they're being told a story of fear, if they're being told a story of other, if they're not understanding that people are trying to use them to (expletive) office, then yes, assholes like Trump are going to take office."

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Entrepreneurs Call Trump's Election a 'Wake Up Call' and Worry How It Affects the World

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Marty Swant

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