A selfie with Netanyahu turns into an employee exodus
Employee resignations from AI coding company Vercel may signal changing tide in tech's attitude towards the Gaza war
A few days ago, the CEO of Vercel—an AI coding startup that, as of Tuesday, raised a $300 million Series F at a $9 billion—posted a selfie with Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. Vercel is a product for AI developers that companies like Meta are investing heavily in in order to develop their AI faster than competitors. Israel has been a key part of the tech ecosystem, accounting for 20% of its GDP—and in the selfie with Netanyahu, Vercel’s CEO wrote that he wished for “peace, safety, and greatness for Israel.”
I suppose this CEO did not have a strong enough communications team (if he had communications team at all) to read the room—or the self-awareness to recognize that a selfie with Netanyahu might not land so well, as we are all inundated with images of decapitated women delivering babies and children bloodied and dirtied in Gaza.
But people who saw the post, including employees and software developers in the general AI ecosystem, made their displeasure pretty instantly known. Employees began resigning from the company, while video tutorials explaining how to use other competitive products saw hundreds of thousands of views. Reddit exploded with snarky comments about “AI speeding up your next genocide,” while Vercel’s competitor Replit capitalized on the moment over X, encouraging people to onboard to their product.
Former Vercel employees even began posting publicly and boldly about their resignations, even if somewhat cryptically:
We’ve written at Hard Reset before about tech workers leaving long-time employment at companies like Oracle and Cisco, driven away by their employers’ blind corporate advocacy of Israel and retaliation against any form of pro-Palestine activism. One former Oracle employee told us that she is leaving tech and the idea of “girl-bossing” altogether, instead traveling around in a camper van and buying a vineyard in Porto, Portugal.
Of course, when we look at these resignations, we have to factor in the idea that only some people can afford to just resign out of principle. If you just raked in a big bonus or have significant equity in a rich company, leaving Larry Ellison for your own farm sounds like a dream within reach. Meanwhile, if you’re an hourly worker training the AI models, or someone working at the data centers (though job creation at data centers isn’t exactly abundant)—you may not be in a position to resign or protest the moral, political, and social decisions of an employer. Especially in this economy.
But I think what’s changed with the Vercel example—drawing on my past experience working with whistleblowers and tech workers generally speaking out—is that there’s a certain level of boldness and freeness to those who are leaving and making their departure known.
Before, tech workers considering going public or resigning might spend hours, days, or even weeks strategizing how to voice discontent—whether through a curated LinkedIn post, a lawsuit, or a next job lined up. Now, they may be firing off a quick post on X and giving their immediate notice.
When it comes to Israel-Palestine, public opinion is certainly shifting against Israel—and this may be part of the reason why people are speaking out, because they feel it’s a more popular thing to do, and therefore more safe.
Outside tech, public support for the war and Israel’s militaristic actions has declined in recent weeks, as Israel ramps up its occupation of the West Bank and horrific images of dead Palestinians proliferate. In a New York Times poll published last week, support for Israel has dwindled, with slightly more voters in their poll siding with Palestinians over Israelis for the first time since The Times began asking about allegiances in 1998:
In the aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, American voters broadly sympathized with Israelis over Palestinians, with 47 percent siding with Israel and 20 percent with Palestinians. In the new poll, 34 percent said they sided with Israel and 35 percent with Palestinians. Thirty-one percent said they were unsure or backed both equally.
My colleague William Fitzgerald posed the question a few weeks ago, Will Big Tech follow public opinion on Gaza?
His piece was prescient. Just last month, Microsoft announced that they would stop providing cloud services to Israel, a decision driven by the reporting mentioned in William’s piece—a report in The Guardian revealing Israeli military recordings of millions of Palestinian cell phone calls, enabled by Microsoft’s cloud.
Microsoft’s decision to stop providing services also comes after enduring pressure and activism from No Azure for Apartheid, a group launched by current and former Microsoft employees with the goal of forcing Microsoft to stop providing cloud services to the Israeli military. (Hard Reset interviewed one of the key worker activists, Hossam Nasr, a few months back.)
It remains to be seen how many customers will boycott Vercel or what will happen next as the Israel-Palsetine conflict unfolds. With Vercel’s recent Series F fundraise, I suspect the CEO may be communicating internally to its people that this is just a brief narrative blip, that the company is on an upward trajectory and that those who stay will be royally compensated. A “rally the troops” cry, or a don’t pay attention to the “haters” kind of a speech.
But I am not sure that Vercel should ignore this or write it off as just one episode. Loyalty to a brand or product or employer can be fleeting, so long as people have enough options—and here, Vercel employees and customers have now found themselves emboldened and with new options for both employment and product usage. In this climate, that could happen with the workforce or product at any big tech company.
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