An open letter to Linus Sebastian

For the context which prompted this, you'll need to watch from 55:39 of this video.

Dear Linus,

I think you've misunderstood a great many things about your recent dispute with Ōura. I don't think that the root of their issue with you is that you pronounced their company name "OO-ra" and not "aura." The problem is a) that "aura" isn't correct, either, and b) that you still don't know that.

For the record, the company in question is located in Finland, and their name is also Finnish. Ōura is actually pronounced /ō-ra/, or OH-ra, i.e. with a long "o", much like toe, hoe, and woe. This information wasn't exactly hard to find - I literally Googled "oura pronunciation," which produced three videos for pronouncing the Greek word with the same spelling, followed by a Twitter post by Ōura in which they tell anyone who asks how to pronounce their name.

Pro tip: the dash over the "o" is actually how most English-language dictionaries indicate long "o" sounds in the pronunciation guides which accompany words. Ōura literally give a pronunciation guide to their name in the text of their name. The fact that you still got it wrong is, frankly, indefensible.

And yet, not only did you get it wrong in that moment, in spite of the fact that Ōura was upset enough about this error to cancel their sponsorship with Linus Media Group entirely, you still haven't done this few seconds of Googling to find out who Ōura is, where they're based, or what language they might speak natively. That's a shocking degree of disrespect shown towards a client.

Your failings, however, really only start there.

Because, in spite of the fact that you royally screwed up here, you still haven't actually apologized to Ōura, at least as far as I can tell. Instead of apologizing to them, you instead give excuses for yourself, "explaining" that this was just another in a long line of names that you can't be arsed to learn how to pronounce correctly because you only ever read them, and never hear them spoken. Well, I have that same problem, and I overcame it by reading - specifically, by reading the results of few seconds worth of Google searches. 

So, no, Linus, this doesn't excuse your ignorance here, which is now starting to seem less like simply ignorance, and more like Anglo-centrism combined with a profound lack of cultural sensitivity. In short, it's starting to read less like incompetence, and more like malice; more specifically, it reads like bigotry.

It doesn't help that you go on from this celebration of your own ignorance to criticize Ōura for having not registered aura.com as their company's domain name, and for having used a pretentious hispter mis-spelling of "aura" as their company name instead of sticking to the King's own English... in spite of them being, you know, Finnish, and not English, something which you very clearly still hadn't bothered to learn. What exactly is your message there, Linus? Colonialism, yay?

Don't worry, though -- you actually do proceed to make things much worse for yourself, by criticizing "Newbie McQuickdraw," a.k.a. Colton, and the entire business development team which he heads, for having not resolved the disastrous fallout of your borderline bigotry in a manner that you approved of. You kept coming back to this subject, saying over and over again that if they'd just brought you into the conversation, you might have been able to figure out some sort of a resolution between LMG, Ōura, and YouTube that might have left everyone basically satisfied, if not entirely happy.

This baffling on so many levels, that I hardly know where to start, but let's start with this: business is never just business. Business is always personal. The only people who use the phrase, "it's only business," are people who are screwing you over, and who know they're screwing you over. Everybody else in business understands that personal relationships are the medium through which all business is conducted. Every company I've ever worked for has stressed this to everyone who works for them.

And you should understand this. It was just a couple of weeks ago that the main topic of discussion on the WAN show was EVGA's announcement that they'd severed business ties with NVidia, a company EVGA had been partnered with for two decades, and whose products accounted for eighty percent of EVGA's annual revenue. The reason they cited for that decision wasn't that they were actually losing money selling RTX cards, although that was also true; no, the reason they cited was the disrespect with which NVidia had treated EVGA, and all of NVidia's other AIB partners, for years.

And yet here you are, just a couple of weeks later, complaining that Ōura were taking this all much too personally, and really should be treating it as "just business," which apparently means that they should overlook your total lack of respect for them and what they do, and nonetheless do the work of salvaging a relationship that you don't actually care about all that much.

And you obviously don't care all that much, about Ōura or, presumably, any of your other smaller sponsors. Your Business Development team clearly didn't think that Ōura's anger was worth bringing to your attention; or, alternatively, knew through experience that you wouldn't place nearly as high a priority on the Ōura situation as you clearly do on any number of other projects that you do care about.

If you're often too busy to deal with issues like this Ōura situation, and trust your team's ability to do that on your behalf, then that's fine, but you can't complain later that they didn't consult you before acting. If you want to be consulted, even if it means that action gets delayed, then that's also fine, as long as the conditions under which issues get escalated to your personal attention are well-defined.

What you can't do, at not not effectively, is both of these at the same time. Either you want to be consulted when a sponsor has a problem, especially when you are that problem, and are willing to take that time away from other, funner projects, or you don't and aren't. Either you trust your team to handle problems like LMG's deteriorating relationship with Ōura, and have empowered them to do so, or you don't and haven't. But to trust people to just handle things because you're too busy and can't be bothered, except when you really do want to be consulted because you don't actually trust them handle things correctly, is exactly how you produce paralysis in your people, who now don't know what your expectations are.

In short, the viewer who took you to task for criticizing Ōura for your mistakes while throwing your staff under the bus, was correct. Your response to that criticism, which was to claim that you had taken responsibility, even though you hadn't actually, and do still not apologize to the team at Ōura for royally screwing this up, was not correct. You acknowledged that mistakes were made, so to speak, but not that you'd actually made any of them, you didn't apologize to Ōura or to your own people, and you didn't take responsibility for your own leadership failures which had made the entire situation worse.

You were right about one thing; your business development team should have brought you in on this one. Ōura's complaint wasn't with LMG, generally; it was with Linus Sebastian, specifically. Their problem was the disrespect with which you'd treated them; your total disinterest in who they are, where they were, and what their stated goals were; and the fact that, rather than pick up the phone when they called and apologize to them directly, CEO to CEO, you left the doing of that to subordinates. 

The message you sent was that Ōura weren't important enough to deserve your time. The message you sent was that you didn't care. And, let's be honest, here -- you still don't care, do you? If you cared, you'd have learned that Ōura were Finnish; you'd have learned how to pronounce their name; you'd have learned that it wasn't just a hispter misspellling of aura, but actually meant something to them.

Ōura, by the way, means "rock" -- it can refer to a single rock or boulder, or it can refer to any terrain full of rocks or boulders. Ōura is the ground, which is very much a physical thing, and thus diametrically opposed to the ethereal mist or energy field that one might describe as an "aura." They picked the name because they wanted people to reconnect with the physical -- in particular, to become more consciously aware of their own physicality. Ōura stresses the human need to be "grounded" in their own bodies as a contrast with our near-constant information-age fixation on the ethereal, i.e. cyberspace.

This information was also not hard to find. Just Google, "What does Ōura (Finnish) mean?"

 

This was about literally the third Google search I did here. In total, those few Google searches, and the reading that resulted from them, took maybe a few minutes, total. And yet I'm willing to bet that you still haven't done them.

Here's what you should do, starting now:

1. Quickly shoot and publish videos, on both the main Linus Tech Tips channel, and also the Short Circuit channel on which the problematic video was originally posted, in which you publicly apologize to Ōura, and also to your team, for all the reasons I've already listed. This apology should explicitly take personal responsibility for the error itself, for the leadership failures which led to the error, and also for tone-deafness and cultural insensitivity with which you discussed the subject on WAN Show.
2. Immediately implement changes with James and your writing team so that proper nouns (i.e. names) which do not originate in English can be identified, their correct pronunciations learned, and pronunciation guides for those names be included in all shooting scripts and teleprompters going forward. Because this isn't the only such mistake that you ignorantly make on the regular. (Free Tip: You might want to check Canonical's "about" page for the correct pronunciation of Ubuntu.)
3. Immediately formulate an implement policies which identify for your business development team when they should be interrupting you in the middle of whatever you're doing to take a phone call when they have a crisis that really should be brought to your attention. Make it clear that this change is not a result of you not trusting their judgment, and that you trust them to know what those crisis situations are, but do want them to treat you like a resource that can help resolve a crisis in the moment, rather than feeling like they can't call on you for help, ever, because you're always too busy with other things.

Note that these are just things that I think you should do, not things that I expect you to do. Based on the attitude you display in the above video, I expect you to do... nothing, really, except gradually lose more sponsors over time, because you don't see them as important enough to your business to actually behave as if you value those relationships.

It should go without saying at this point, but I've asked for refund on my screwdriver order, and unsubscribed. You still have a lot to learn Linus. I sincerely hope that you do so, but I won't be holding my breath waiting.

UPDATED  NOV. 7TH: 

About that "aura.com" dig...

It turns out that aura.com was actually not available for the team Ōura, because it was already taken by the Āura team. Which, yes, really does exist, and who really did do the "hipster mis-spelling of a standard English word" thing.

Fucking tech people, man.