> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.ceo.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Whose politics count? - URL: https://www.ceo.com/blog/whose-politics-count/ - Published: 2026-02-18T00:42:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-14T00:44:30.000Z - Description: Coinbase, Basecamp, and the backstory. - Author: Clint Betts - Tags: #blog In 1978, a Czech playwright named Václav Havel sat in his summer home outside Prague and wrote an essay while police watched his house from an observation tower across the road. They followed him to the store. They followed him while he walked his dog. They stopped and fined anyone who tried to visit him. The essay was titled [*The Power of the Powerless*](https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/the-power-of-the-powerless/?ref=ceo.com). It was smuggled out by hand, copied on typewriters, and passed from person to person across Eastern Europe. It became one of the most important political documents of the twentieth century. A decade later, the regimes it described collapsed, and Havel became president. The essay opens with a greengrocer. Every morning, this man places a sign in his shop window: "Workers of the world, unite!" He doesn't believe it. He doesn't think about it. He puts it up the same way he arranges his onions, as part of the ordinary routine of getting through the day without being noticed. The sign is the price of being left alone. Havel's insight is that the greengrocer's compliance isn't neutral. By hanging the sign, he helps sustain a system he privately disagrees with. And the moment he takes it down, the moment he stops performing a belief he doesn't hold, he becomes a threat. Not because he's done anything radical. Because he's stopped participating in a fiction. Havel wrote this about totalitarian Czechoslovakia. But the underlying observation extends beyond any single political system. Participation is never neutral. Silence is never empty. Every public act, including the act of saying nothing, is read by the people watching. --- In September 2020, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong published [a blog post](https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-company?ref=ceo.com). The company would be "mission-focused," he wrote. It would not engage in broader social activism unrelated to its crypto mission. It would not take public positions on societal issues. Employees were discouraged from debating political causes internally. He framed it as protecting focus. Those who couldn't accept the new direction were offered [severance packages to leave](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/30/coinbase-ceo-offers-severance-to-employees-leaving-over-politics.html?ref=ceo.com). About 60 people took them. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey [responded the same day](https://twitter.com/jack/status/1311423420274372608?ref=ceo.com). "Bitcoin is direct activism against an unverifiable and exclusionary financial system which negatively affects so much of our society," he tweeted. "This leaves people behind." Translation: You can't build a company on disruption and then tell your employees disruption is a distraction. The backstory is the story. Armstrong's policy came after black employees spoke at an all-hands meeting about their pain following the murder of George Floyd. It came after employees [staged a walkout](https://thehill.com/policy/technology/519133-cryptocurrency-company-coinbase-defends-rule/?ref=ceo.com) because Armstrong initially refused to voice support for Black Lives Matter. He eventually [tweeted his support](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/30/coinbase-ceo-offers-severance-to-employees-leaving-over-politics.html?ref=ceo.com). Then, weeks later, he announced the policy. Many within the company didn't see it as an abstract philosophical position. They saw a response. John Russ, the highest-ranking black executive at Coinbase, was among those who left. Seven months later, Basecamp CEO Jason Fried made a similar move. ["Societal and political discussions"](https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/30/basecamp-employees-quit-ceo-letter/?ref=ceo.com) would no longer be permitted on the company's internal communication platform. Every discussion remotely related to politics, he wrote, was spinning away from pleasant. Again, the backstory is the story. According to [reporting by Casey Newton](https://www.npr.org/2021/05/07/994812274/basecamp-blowup-banning-politics-at-work-prompts-over-a-dozen-employees-to-quit?ref=ceo.com), the real catalyst was an internal reckoning over a long-maintained list of "funny" customer names, many of which were ethnic names of Asian or African descent. When employees began to examine why the list existed and to advocate for diversity initiatives, tensions escalated. Fried's ban came alongside the disbanding of a newly formed employee-led diversity committee. Approximately one-third of the company's 57 employees resigned. The head of design. Head of marketing. Head of customer support. Nearly the entire iOS team. Fried [later apologized](https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/05/basecamp%5Fpolitical%5Fdiscussion%5Fapology/?ref=ceo.com), calling the week "terrible." [Stanford's Graduate School of Business](https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/politics-workplace-aligning-or-alienating?ref=ceo.com) turned both situations into a case study. The central question: does political neutrality promote organizational cohesion, or does it silence marginalized voices? Both CEOs said they were drawing a clean line between the work and the world. Both discovered that the line isn’t perfectly straight. --- A [2025 Bentley University-Gallup survey](https://news.gallup.com/poll/692981/support-businesses-taking-public-stance-rebounds.aspx?ref=ceo.com) found that 51% of Americans now believe companies should take public stances on current events. That's up from 38% one year earlier. A 13-point jump. But buried in the same data is a contradiction: most employed Americans say their own employers shouldn't communicate those stances to workers internally. We want CEOs to speak for us. We don't want to hear about it at work. Rock. Hard place. Nassim Nicholas Taleb would recognize this as a kind of [fragility](https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/0812979680?ref=ceo.com). The expectation is structured so that leaders absorb all the risk. Speak up, and you alienate half your stakeholders. Stay silent, and the other half fills the void with their own interpretation. Every position is punished. Every silence is interpreted. The system is designed so that someone always breaks. Taleb spent his career studying what he calls [Black Swans](https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Improbable-Incerto/dp/1400063515?ref=ceo.com), the highly improbable events that carry massive consequences. COVID was one. But so is every cultural and political flashpoint that arrives without warning and demands a response from people who never claimed expertise on the subject. George Floyd. January 6th. Roe v. Wade. The war in Ukraine. These events don't fit into quarterly objectives. They don't come with briefing papers. And they carry enormous consequences for anyone who leads people through them. Taleb's deeper idea, though, is about what happens after the disruption. He distinguishes between the fragile, which breaks under stress, the robust, which endures it, and the antifragile, which gets stronger because of it. --- In March 2020, the organization I was running went from holding an in-person event nearly every day to holding none. Overnight. We weren't built for pandemic response. We were built for community. For bringing people together in rooms. That was the whole point. But the crisis didn't care what we were built for. We got pulled into government affairs, public health logistics, and federal lending programs. We helped coordinate COVID testing. We tracked down PPE. We became a clearinghouse for PPP loan information so small businesses in our community could survive long enough to reopen. None of it was why we started the organization. What stayed with me after it was all over wasn't the work itself. It was the shift in expectation that followed. Before COVID, leading a tech community meant leading a tech community. After COVID, it meant something broader and more difficult to define. The crisis forced us into unfamiliar territory, and once we operated there, the expectation stuck. Leaders were now supposed to have a position on things far beyond their expertise, their industry, their training. Something changed during the pandemic. Maybe it was that people saw what leaders could do when they mobilized outside their lane. Maybe it was that trust in other institutions was already eroding, and people needed someone to look to. Maybe it was just that the world got loud enough that silence started to feel like a choice. Whatever it was, we didn't go back. No one wants to go backward. --- Havel spent his life arguing that the most powerful act is simply refusing to participate in a fiction. For the greengrocer, the fiction was a Party slogan he didn't believe. For leaders today, I'm not sure which fiction is more dangerous: that you can run a company without acknowledging the world your people live in, or that every CEO owes the public a position on every issue of the day. Both are signs in the window. And the people watching are always reading.