The Success of Failure
American Work Culture, SNB Capital, TikTok's Riyadh office, Ninja's IPO tease, and Justin Timberlake's DUI.
“If you feel that you are in competition with anyone, for anything, you are a loser.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Disclaimer: none of the information shared should be taken as financial advice. Please do your own research. Furthermore, none of my takes are direct speculations on any company, entity, or person and are simply my thoughts with no evidence.
Everyone needs to experience working with an American. I’ve worked with Saudis, Europeans, North Africans and multiple breeds of Arab—there is nothing, NOTHING like working with Americans. In all of the 3 years I’ve worked in the New York tech scene, I can’t think of a time when I pitched an idea to my American boss that was rejected. When you work with an American, it’s always “yes, let’s do this” and never a constant strain of WIP bullshit excel sheet of futile mini tasks that never get the job started, let alone done. So why are Americans so good at work and getting the job done? It’s because Americans don’t chase success, they chase failure.
Americans embrace failure instead of shying away from it. To an American, failure is inevitable, a prerequisite to getting what you want and indicative that you are on the right path. Taleb wrote about this in his book The Black Swan:
On American failure (success):
The reason I felt immediately at home in America is precisely because American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment. America’s specialty is to take these small risks for the rest of the world, which explains this country’s disproportionate share in innovations.
Trial and error means trying a lot. We have psychological and intellectual difficulties with trial and error, and with accepting that a series of small failures are necessary in life.
On Europeans feeling superior to Americans (spoiler: they are not):
Whenever you hear a snotty (and frustrated) European middlebrow presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as “uncultured,” “unintellectual,” and “poor in math”—Yet the person making these statements is likely to be addicted to his iPod, wear blue jeans, and use Microsoft Word to jot down his “cultural” statements on his PC, with some Google searches here and there interrupting his composition. Well, it so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers. It is also far more tolerant of bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and error.
On America being the “Idea Country”:
There is more money in designing a shoe than in actually making it: Nike, Dell, and Boeing can get paid for just thinking, organizing, and leveraging their know-how and ideas while subcontracted factories in developing countries do the grunt work and engineers in cultured and mathematical states do the noncreative technical grind. The American economy has leveraged itself heavily on the idea generation, which explains why losing manufacturing jobs can be coupled with a rising standard of living.
I remember watching the Kuwaiti owner of Talabat talking about how he used to be so broke while building his company that he himself was not able to even afford the delivery fees for his own app. But, of course, this interview was done after Talabat’s massive success. Well after he became rich. It’s easy to talk about failure after becoming successful, but it is more honorable (and much more difficult) to talk about your own failures as they occur in real time.
How many times have you listened to a podcast episode of an Arab being interviewed for their illustrious career and huge success, wherein they almost always talk about how many times they’ve failed? Too many times, perhaps.
After I got laid off from a tech company in New York in 2023, almost all of my impacted coworkers were a little bit too comfortable posting about (admitting?) getting laid off via LinkedIn. Just airing out their dirty laundry to God knows who. To them, it was a way to get rehired quicker. Failure didn’t matter to them, and in a way it was to be expected. For me, admitting failure meant seeking pity. It meant letting people down and altering people’s professional perception of me. I had two choices: seek a pity job and beg people to hire me (very un-Arab. Highly un-Saudi) or swallow it and find a solution quietly.
I was (and still am) far too weak and way too Arab to admit my failures and publicly embrace the process of trial & error. I didn’t tell a soul, and absconded with a new fake email job the following month.
Today’s Letter includes: TikTok’s Riyadh office, Ninja’s IPO tease, Jake Shane’s Vanity Fair Oscar party “cancelation”, SNB Capital’s Sara Albassam, Justin Timberlake’s DUI, and Clavicular’s arrest in Florida.
NEW SEGMENT: THE BALCONY
What follows is a list of all the things I’d talk to my friends about on a weekly basis. You’ll find pretty much everything from finance to fashion, tech to gossip, Saudi to America—it’s as if we’re sitting on a balcony smoking cigarettes together. Enjoy the inaugural Balcony :)
Justin Timberlake got a DUI and it feels like 2005 again. My favorite part of the bodycam footage was when the police officer asked him what he did for work, and Justin, albeit drunk, still tried to stay humble while talking about his music career. It reminded me of the early days of the internet, when footage of celebrity mishaps was much rarer than it is today. This is why celebrities used to be loved in the 2000s and are despised now. We simply see too much of them.
TikTok’s Riyadh office is real, and they’re hiring. I’ve seen multiple roles on LinkedIn over the past few weeks, some even filled (removed?) before I was able to read through the job description. One active job listing starts by stating that the role is “exclusively open to Saudi nationals.” My only question is: where the fuck is their office? I haven’t seen a TikTok logo on any buildings. The role is “hybrid”, meaning an office definitely exists. I ran a quick LinkedIn search of TikTok employees based in Saudi and I can attest that the office is bigger than I thought. A lot of tech companies have a strong but quiet presence in Saudi, like Snap Inc. If you’re looking for a new job, I’d look into TikTok.
Sara Albassam, a sell-side junior analyst at SNB Capital, was dragged on X because of a video of her talking very neutrally about Nice One—a Saudi company that went public last year and has now plummeted in value significantly. You’d think that users on X claiming to be shareholders of Nice One would go after senior leadership at Nice One or investigate their books, but no. They blamed it on the investment bankers who did the IPO, scapegoating Sara who isn’t even an investment banker (!). I’ve said this once and I’ll say it again, if she wasn’t so pretty and articulate the video of her from last year would not be resurfacing. Also can I just say, it is extremely difficult to speak about finance at such a young age without uttering a word in English, but Sara did so seamlessly. Here’s what one Twitter user responded to me after defending Sara:
