Maëlle Gavet, the Frenchwoman who wants to give heart to unicorns

Maëlle Gavet may be passionate about the issues of tech, she did not expect, by her own admission, to publish a book. “It was done organically. I have written several articles, spoken about the place of humans in tech at conferences, and a Harvard Business Review editor advised me to make a book about it. The process lasted a little over 18 months ”.

His first work, entitled “Trampled by unicorns – Big tech’s empathy problem – How to fix it”, is not an autobiography, she says straight away. But rather the fruit of his reflections after nearly 15 years in tech. Because this rising French star in the sector knows the subject very well: after having managed Ozon, the Russian Amazon, then dividing her time between Europe and the United States with the online tour operator Priceline, she has just spent nearly three years as COO of Compass – a real estate unicorn – which she left last fall.

In this book, she wanted, as a first step, to provide an in-depth analysis of the issues at present. “It’s easy enough to be cartoonish about tech issues. It’s not just the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other, I found it important to take into account the complexity of this ecosystem ”. Then in a second step, to provide answers, pragmatic solutions according to the needs. Because she does not believe in the liberal school, which believes that tech will succeed in self-regulation without public intervention. Nor to the nuclear option, to split the behemoths of Silicon Valley, according to the wishes of the senator and former presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren.

Maëlle Gavet believes that all stakeholders – managers, employees, boards, customers – have their role to play, and that a partnership between the public and the private sector must be organized. A fortiori between the United States and Europe, which oppose and demonstrate their differences on crucial subjects such as freedom of speech and taxation. She thus identifies five needs: cultivating empathy and putting people back as the starting and final point of any decision, regulating the economy of surveillance and data collection, defending the facts and the accuracy of information, limit the excessive power of tech companies and finally make these actors better citizens, for example by stopping working with autocratic governments.

To answer it, it proposes two lines of conduct. On the one hand, zero tolerance for disinformation and cyber-harassment. Because if Facebook and other Twitter have exhaustive codes on their content, they do not always apply them. And on the other hand, completely overhaul the recommendation algorithms, the sinews of the traffic war for social networks, which today are based on offense to trigger more reactions and sharing. “We must not confuse ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘freedom of reach’. Tech is never neutral ”, argues Maëlle Gavet, for whom these tech companies can very well control the content they promote and what they eliminate.

Food for thought for the next American administration, but also for French Tech, of which Maëlle Gavet just took over the presidency of the New York board last July.

“Trampled by unicorns – Big tech’s empathy problem – How to fix it” by Maëlle Gavet