The tech bro playbook is out: there's a new way to do business

The current image of tech leadership and its products isn't flattering. Former Kiwi diplomat Sarah Wynn-Williams, who spent years at Meta, wrote a book about what she witnessed there. The title, Careless People, tells you most of what you need to know. Wynn-Williams was there while Sheryl Sandberg was winning acclaim for urging women to lean in, to adopt the confidence, assertiveness and hunger of men around them, as the price of admission. 

Dex Hunter-Torricke, who spent 15 years spinning hopeful stories for SpaceX, Facebook, Google and Google DeepMind, has since concluded that the AI future currently being built "will not deliver a good life for the vast majority of people". Bleak.

The public seems to agree. In a 2025 survey of more than 1000 Americans, nearly one in three said they don't trust any Big Tech CEO, and 42% named Elon Musk as the least trustworthy leader in the industry. Mark Zuckerberg wasn't far behind. Tesla sales slumped globally amid consumer backlash, and early this year, a broad sell-off of major tech stocks erased trillions in market value. The old playbook of move fast, break things, apologise later is producing diminishing returns. 

My co-founder at Contented, Lucy Pink, and I are proof that there is a different path, and it doesn't involve acting like Musk.

Most AI tools focus on replacing human activities. But humans are the irreplaceable feature. We built Contented to capture the value and possibility in conversations - the ideas, the nuance, the sparks, the risks. It produces structured, business-ready assets and personal insights from voice (I used it to help turn my ramblings into this column). Having entirely bootstrapped to $1m ARR and closed an oversubscribed seed round of $4.1m, we've shown we can build tech differently, and successfully.

It's an interesting challenge: many of the traits we bring as women are rooted in the people side of things. How do you bring empathy into a technology product that is, by nature, emotionless and non-human? By building with care, staying close to the human customer and leading without ego. Whether that's how we raise capital, how we spend it or how we think about the future, the approach is the same. It's not the loudest or the flashiest way to build a company, but it works.

This approach extends to how Lucy and I run the business itself. We treat our co-founder partnership as the defining feature of Contented's success. Genuine mutual respect and a commitment to reflecting and learning together. There is no competition between us, and that is not an accident. It requires deliberate attention: making sure we are both heard, giving each other room to grow, and making sure we still laugh. 

Melanie Perkins at Canva models what this can look like at scale. Canva is now valued at over US$42 billion, built without the ego-driven fundraising circus, and Perkins has pledged to give away the majority of her wealth. You don't hear her tweeting through corporate crises at 2am. She's proof that quiet, purposeful leadership can build something enormous - and durable.

How we grow is also different. The tech bro funding playbook is well established: pitch a dream, sell the vision, raise on potential, and figure out the product later. There are plenty of investors who will back a 20-year-old man to live in a caravan if the dream is big enough. Contented got to $1.4 million ARR before raising a cent of outside capital, because we didn't want to ask people to take a risk on something that wasn't real yet. When we did bring investors in, we invited them to see what we had already built and check for an authentic fit.

There is a tendency to frame empathy and customer focus as the "softer" side of building a business, admirable but ultimately secondary to the hard pursuit of growth. We push back on that. Our drive is to build the best product for the people using it, not to chase the largest total addressable market without thinking it through. 

Classic tech start up vibes are all about features, integrations, APIs. We talk about communication, business impact and human connection. We care about making AI that is accessible to everyone, not just large enterprises with IT teams to roll things out.  

The next decade of tech will be noisy, and a lot will be built that nobody asked for. Just because you can build an avatar that attends your meeting for you doesn't mean you should. We ask different questions: what do humans actually want? How do they actually behave?

The companies that last will be the ones that stay close to the humans they are building for, spend their investors' money with care, and have leadership that can withstand pressure. That is the approach we are backing. And if the current headlines are anything to go by, the old model has already started to speak for itself: the tech bro playbook is out.