Playwright Joseph Charlton, also a writer on HBO’s Industry, talks about his stage show, Brilliant Jerks.
(Bloomberg) — A multibillion-dollar startup with a “genius” founder has a very public fall from grace. The topic has spawned many a cover of Bloomberg Businessweek and more than enough specialty streaming series, from Hulu’s The Dropout to Showtime’s Super Pumped. Now it’s the plot behind a stage play, Brilliant Jerks, coming to London’s Southwark Playhouse this March.
Playwright Joseph Charlton (HBO’s Industry) says that as a user of Uber, he was struck by how it often seemed too cheap and good to be true. He was formerly a journalist, where he’d chronicled his worries about the drivers ferrying him around London.
“The play is about a fictional technology company, but I was curious about Uber,” says Charlton. He was interested in the company’s drive for market share and the influence private equity seemed to have over its leadership’s decision-making. “And at the same time I wanted to know what it was like to drive for Uber, and how a San Francisco startup ended up on streets all over the world,” he says. He interviewed drivers and people working at the London head office to get a feel for what the business was like in the UK.
The result of his research is a fast-paced three-hander that zips around the globe, following an Irish coder in London, a female driver in Manchester and the founder/chief executive officer in San Francisco. The vignettes explore the company’s rise and very public missteps. Coder Sean knows he’s getting better pay and preferential treatment than his female colleagues, but he doesn’t try to rock the boat to help them. The founder, Tyler Janowski, hangs out with managers in an escort bar in Seoul—a visit that sparked an HR complaint when Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick did it in real life. In Manchester, driver Mia ferries around drunken passengers who hit on her while she tries to shift the gears of her own life.
The takeaway? One “brilliant” idea can change millions of lives, though not necessarily for the better. En route, the play dives into the grim workplace dynamics in a male-dominated startup culture.
“When I was writing it, there was a blog post published by a former Uber employee, Susan Fowler, who leveled endemic accusations of workplace sexism at the company,” says Charlton. Some of those made it into the show, including a “comically absurd” bit of sexism that involved the team ordering leather jackets for more than 100 male employees, but not finding any room in the budget for the six women on the team.
“At that point there was sort of scandal after scandal following Kalanick, the then-CEO of Uber, and I was just interested in how the culture of a tech company from top to bottom was shaped by a personality,” says Charlton.
The play’s title comes from a comment Ariana Huffington made in 2017 by saying Uber will improve its work environment by eliminating “brilliant jerks.” Still, despite the show’s scathing critique of the bro culture at the unnamed app in the show, its writer knows his audience will still likely take an Uber home.
Joseph Charlton spoke to Bloomberg about the reasons he finds founders such great source material for the stage, how there can be a thin line between success stories and scammers, and why tech makes finance look old-fashioned.
The name of the play is Brilliant Jerks, a reference to Travis Kalanick at Uber, and there’s probably a few other high-profile founders who that title could be thrown at. What about founders in particular appeals to you? I’m really interested in writing about them. I had a play called Anna X (at the Harold Pinter, starring The Crown’s Emma Corrin), which was based on the scandal of Anna Delvey, this person who pretended to be someone else. And it was partly about an invented romance that she was having with a tech founder based on the founder of Raya, an exclusive dating app. I find founders a really rich place for characters, because I think the desire to really get ahead and make your mark on the world is indicative of someone who’s lacking in another area. Or who wants to prove their point against the world in a really dogged fashion. Do you think there’s a similarity between founders and people like Anna Delvey? That was kind of the point of the play, who gets ahead in America and who gets ahead in capitalism. The language used around founders and technology is interesting: We have all these words relating to magic, like “unicorn.” And in a way, I think investors actually want a magic trick to be played. They want the hockey stick moment of investment where you go from nothing to something in this really miraculous fashion. And so I think it does have something in common with amazing scam artists.
But Anna Delvey wasn’t far from completing her goal; she might have legitimized herself in society and have had this amazing art foundation. If you get to the top and win, then you’re not a scam artist, you’re an entrepreneur, right? That’s a contemporary phenomenon that’s slowing down a bit with markets like tech bursting a little.
Let’s talk a bit about HBO’s Industry. You’ve just finished Season Three. How have you found that transition from writing about tech to writing about finance? In some ways, I think finance has been humiliated by tech. It’s no longer the place that you necessarily go to become a rock star and really sell out and become part of the three-comma club in terms of, like, how much money you’re trying to make. You have to respect chain of command in finance in a way that’s more like the army than the tech world. Tech has made finance look rather old-fashioned, and almost sweet in a way. It’s actually got much better systems of HR in place, and I think it’s probably a more meritocratic employer than tech companies, which are still catching up with them. So there’s differences and similarities, but I think the financial crisis humbled it a bit 15 years ago.You think the financial crisis humbled the finance industry in a way tech hasn’t been?I don’t think it stopped people wanting to go into finance. I finished university in 2011, pretty soon after everything had gone to hell and everyone was still very keen to get into finance. But I hope tech might be allowed to fail in a way that finance doesn’t seem to be allowed to.
We’re having this great tech selloff at the moment, and it’ll be interesting to see the result of that and how tech survives. I think if I had money to put somewhere, I’d put it in Tesla stock when it’s down like this. I don’t think it’s going to fail, I think it’s a blip. But it’s funny that in my lifetime, we went from the idea of banking and finance being this edgy, difficult industry to actually looking quite old-fashioned compared to tech, where you don’t have to wear a tie or follow a set path. So one of the interesting things working on Industry now is seeing that the sector may not be attracting the best grads now the way it was 15 years ago.
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