Heaven and Hell and the Ethics of Disruption
Craig Hatkoff isn’t a famous guy. But the Tribeca Film Festival, which he co-founded with his wife Jane Rosenthal and friend Robert DeNiro, is pretty well known. So too is his friend Clayton Christensen, the Harvard professor with whom he founded the Disruptor Foundation in 2009. Mr. Hatkoff, 60, had been a banker at Chemical Bank (now JPMorgan Chase) and a very successful real estate financier in New York City before quitting in 2000 to write children’s books and dive into more creative and entrepreneurial endeavors.
Today his foundation gives out annual Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards to people and things that represent “radical innovations of consequence.” Past honorees include Google’s Regina Dugan, YouTube star Psy, Square founder Jack Dorsey, Uber, DARPA, and the Cronut (for shaking up pastry). It’s a New York event, but it tries to capture Silicon Valley’s weird blend of significant and self-serious, whimsical and ridiculous.
Mr. Hatkoff, whose close friends include author Rabbi Irwin Kula and the devoutly Mormon Mr. Christensen, likes to talk about the moral dimensions of innovation. (“A banker, a Rabbi and a Mormon walk into a bar,” he quips.) The idea is unrecognizable to most entrepreneurs, who largely see tech as ethically neutral. Ethics, however, has lately been thrust upon the Valley thanks to spate of troubling incidents. Gurbaksh Chahal lost his job as RadiumOne CEO after pleading guilty to domestic violence and battery charges. NextDoor CEO Nirav Tolia is contesting a felony hit-and-run charge. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has recently apologized for sending misogynistic emails that were leaked to the press.
Mr. Hatkoff commended Stanford University Provost John Etchemendy for making Mr. Spiegel’s emails an opportunity to tell students that it matters for them to challenge “crude or hateful language, and the attitudes that give rise to it.”
In an interview with The Information, Mr. Hatkoff expounded on tech and ethics, new types of disruption and the New York tech scene.