Unfiltered: The rise and fall of a tech mogul

The founder myth

The truth about tech founders is they are rarely the self-made individuals they style themselves to be. Most rely on a mix of personal privilege that insulates them from failure and a network of institutional support that helps them rise through the ranks regardless of their true talent. But when it comes to their official founders’ tale — the public account that explains their rise and justifies the wealth and power that accompanies business success — any support received needs to be written out. The illusion of a self-made entrepreneur must be maintained, and it’s far more common than most people realise.

The tech CEO of the current moment is Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, the company leading the charge on the artificial intelligence boom. His first startup Loopt was a flop, but it helped him get close to Paul Graham, who started one of the most influential startup incubators in Silicon Valley, Y Combinator. That relationship was Altman’s path to becoming a partner there, before taking on the role of president in 2014 before his 30th birthday. Five years later, Graham was forced by the Y Combinator board to give Altman a choice between leaving or being fired due to internal frustrations over his use of his position for self-gain — but by then he’d already cemented his position within the industry.

Elon Musk’s tale isn’t so different. He was removed as CEO of his first company Zip2, then again at PayPal. But after PayPal was acquired by eBay, Musk had enough in his bank account to ensure that wouldn’t happen at SpaceX and Tesla — companies that went on to benefit immensely from public contracts and funding at make-or-break moments in their life cycles, thus ensuring they could survive to become juggernauts. Today, Musk is a media sensation — and an increasingly polarising one — but, back in 1999, few people knew his name and he was desperate to change that. Harris Fricker, a Canadian financial executive who helped Musk start the company that became PayPal, told journalist Jimmy Soni that when he walked into Musk’s bedroom that year, he saw a mountain of business books with one by Richard Branson at the very top. “It kind of clicked to me that Elon was prepping himself and studying to be a famous entrepreneur,” he told Soni.

Millar never got to fly as high as Altman or Musk — and we’ll never know if he ever would have. But he had already found his way onto that familiar ladder of founder ascension. Not unlike Musk, it was reading a book by Richard Branson that Millar said gave him the confidence to turn down a $40,000 scholarship to law school and later to preemptively take Unfiltered to America. Like Musk, Millar also seemed to take the idea from Branson that building a media profile was key to entrepreneurial success.

The story Millar spun about himself was perfectly designed for media consumption and dissemination, and his success appeared almost preordained; he was meant to rapidly become one of New Zealand’s business leaders, who would go out and represent the country on the world stage. He often described how he started a business selling fridge magnets as a child, apparently something Branson had done as well. The death of Millar’s father in 2010 in the terrible Fox Glacier plane crash when Millar was just fifteen years old was an important part of it too. The loss had a deep and lasting effect on him, but also served as his introduction to Prime Minister John Key and other prominent business leaders. He would later describe them as becoming father-like figures in his founder’s journey.

A couple of years later, as a high achiever at Christchurch Boys’ High School, he hit up influential figures throughout the country to join a speaker series called Project Spark that would provide inspiration to students in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake. That experience allowed him to foster relationships and set a model for his future entrepreneurial endeavours: interviewing high-profile people and positioning those conversations as a service to the viewer, rather than the interviewee. But it’s not hard to see how his interviews were designed to stroke the egos of the powerful people whose help he’d need to succeed.