The fall of OneTaste: Ellen Huet on Nicole Daedone's sentencing and Silicon Valley's culture of belief

• Ellen Huet's book "Empire of Orgasm" explores OneTaste's rise and fall and Nicole Daedone's role.
• Daedone was recently sentenced to nine years in prison.
• Huet discusses OneTaste's impact and Silicon Valley's grandiose startup culture.

Ellen Huet is a tech reporter I used to work with in San Francisco. She wrote a book called "Empire of Orgasm," about the rise and fall of startup OneTaste and its controversial founder, Nicole Daedone.

Recently, Daedone was sentenced to nine years in prison after being convicted of forced labor conspiracy tied to a scheme that prosecutors said coerced people into unpaid work and sexual services.

When I saw the news, I immediately reached out to Ellen to chat, as part of the Tech Memo Interview series.

Ellen was also the creator of an award-winning podcast about WeWork, which I appeared in very briefly. She's also famous in tech journalism circles for breaking news on Juicero, a startup that sold a machine that squeezed packets of fruit into drinks. Ellen and Olivia Zaleski showed in a viral video that you could actually squeeze Juicero's packets more effectively with your own hands.

There are a few threads that run through all these quintessential Silicon Valley yarns. I like to think of Ellen as an expert on tech companies that believe, rightly or wrongly, that they have a higher mission than just making money.

The OneTaste case and Ellen's book have drawn national attention not only for the startup's unusual mission but also for what this all says about power, belief, and influence in modern tech culture. Here are highlights of our discussion, edited for length and clarity.

You were in the courtroom. What was it like to see the sentence handed down?

"Intense. Nicole still has a lot of devoted supporters. So the courtroom was very full, and they used an overflow courtroom, and there were probably 50 or 60 more supporters who came to show their support."

Ellen told me the sentence itself reflected a middle ground between prosecutors' demands and the defense's push for leniency.

"The judge was very clear that she had not seen indications of remorse. That's not the only factor to take into consideration when you're sentencing, obviously, but it seemed like the judge wanted to make that statement on the record. And it does match some of the rhetoric that OneTaste's current leadership and Daedone's defense attorneys made in statements outside of court and online. They maintain that this was an unfair criminal prosecution, and they are appealing and advocating for a pardon."

What was your personal reaction in that moment?

"A sense of closure. It's been a strange experience as a reporter because when I first started working on this story eight years ago, I was not coming at it with the angle of like, 'oh, I think laws have been broken here.' It was simply this startup, or quasi-startup, with an interesting charismatic leader by whom many people were telling me they'd been harmed."

"The criminal investigation was always happening in parallel, but that was never something that I was involved with in any way. In the book, I was trying to tell a story about the psychology that drove this group, what drove Nicole, what made people join, and what was the experience of being part of a group like this? How can we all learn what it means to be drawn in by the promise of belonging and healing and all these things that I think apply to all humans? And then the prosecutors had a different goal, which is they wanted to interview and find evidence to support a conviction at a jury trial. And so we were often talking to similar people, but with very different outcomes."

Do victims feel justice was served?

"For many people, the conviction and the sentencing do give them a sense of closure. There's a sense that the justice system managed to at least show harm and hold people accountable. Other people have expressed feeling like they wanted the truth or they wanted some accountability to be made public, but felt that a criminal prosecution went too far. And then of course, there are still many OneTaste defenders who feel like the entire thing is a witch hunt and that these things should have never been considered a crime. It just speaks to the complexity of the emotional experience of being in a group like OneTaste. We often assume that everyone who joined a group like this has the same experience, and that's not true at all."

You've also reported on WeWork and Juicero, two other infamous Silicon Valley startups. Are there common lessons here?

"A major difference: OneTaste was very controlling through explicit and implicit norms and pressures, people's sex lives, and people's bodies. And there was a more explicit promise, that drew people in, of sexual healing and emotional healing, and they promised to help people heal their trauma."

"There were parallels as well. OneTaste had a mission statement to bring capital-O Orgasm to a billion people. And I remember the era in which WeWork's mission statement was to elevate the world's consciousness. These are equally vague, grandiose, and inspiring to the right people. WeWork talked so much about community, connection, and they were really an emotional promise. In one way, OneTaste was doing the same. They were promising to help people connect. They were promising intimacy, connection, community."

"I think they all represent, in different ways, this grandiosity that can infect the minds of people in and around Silicon Valley. There's something about the Silicon Valley mentality that I love and admire, which is really trying to reinvent the world, thinking of big ideas. I think it has led to incredible innovations that benefit so many people. And at the same time, when it goes off the rails, the results can be anywhere from funny to really damaging."

What do you want readers to take away from your book?

"The one that has stuck with me the most is a real understanding of how much we as humans seek status within our specific social environments and how much those social pressures around status can drive our behavior."

"Many people involved with OneTaste took actions that might be incomprehensible to someone who is outside of that social bubble, but made perfect sense for those who were inside."

"If you ever think that you'd be immune to this kind of thing, think again, because under the right set of social pressures, you have no idea what you would do."

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