Google CEO’s new memo on employee activism echoes progressive villain Coinbase

It’s hard to overstate what a dramatic turnabout this is for Google, where activism has been part of the corporate culture since its start-up days. It’s also not surprising given that Google has been nearly consumed by internal activism, including a faction of its own employees that occupied the office of a senior executive to protest the company providing cloud services to Israel. This last incident appeared to be the final straw, leading Google to fire 28 employees and Pichai to issue his “mission first” memo.

It’s not clear if Coinbase inspired Google’s recent decisions, though the “mission” phrase and related language is very similar. In any case, Coinbase’s Armstrong praised Pichai’s moves, tweeting: “Life is so much better on the other side. Get back to pure merit and tech innovation like early Google.” His tweet follows another one from several months ago where Armstrong called attention to an episode of hyper-political correctness at Google—namely a ban on using the phrase “all-hands meeting” since it can offend people with no hands—and inviting those fed up to work for Coinbase instead.

The sight of Google’s CEO following in the steps of Coinbase on workplace policy will come as a bitter pill for some at the company, who likely share the popular view of many progressives that crypto is inherently wicked and that people like Armstrong are bad. But for now, such folks are swimming against the tide. Companies of all sorts are moving sharply to rein in activism at work, and to make the workplace feel less like a cultural studies department and more like, well, corporate America.

As for Google, activist employees are hardly the only headache Pichai is facing. Under his leadership, the company is behind in the AI game and there is a growing perception that Google’s once-excellent products—from Search to Maps to Gmail—are starting to suck. Whether or not a new “mission first” HR policy will change that is unclear, though I suspect Armstrong would say it will.

Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts

DECENTRALIZED NEWS

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SBF cut a deal with investors that will see them drop their class-action claims in return for Bankman-Fried testifying against FTX‘s celebrity endorsers. (Bloomberg)

The IRS released a draft of the form that exchanges and others in the crypto space will have to issue to customers, much as traditional brokerages do now. (CoinDesk)

The conspiracy theorist who died setting himself on fire outside the Trump trial wrote crypto is a Ponzi scheme designed to bring about a worldwide coup. (L.A. Times)

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“Why we #bitcoin”: