Review: BlackBerry

The Greatest business film ever made... in Canada

So I saw a movie with my mom…

And we were the only ones in the theatre. I’d heard nothing about this movie at all. Just “oh are you up to anything, maybe there’s a movie on”… *let’s see* “Nope nothing… Just Guardians of the Galaxy 3. Oh wait… there’s a movie about Blackberry? Was that supposed to be any good?”

For those of you not in the Toronto/Ontario sphere… Research in Motion (Blackberry) was maybe the biggest business story of the past 20 years in the region. It dominated the Toronto stock exchange in the tech sector, and maybe thousands, if not 10s of thousands of articles, speeches, and industry meetings were given on how the success of Blackberry could enable Waterloo region (just outside the Greater Toronto Area) to become “The Silicon Valley of Canada”, and how it could enable an entire region to make the jump from a post-industrial farming and rustbelt area (the region being very similar to Michigan, Ohio, or Pennsylvania just across the border… right down to the plentiful Amish) and instead become one of the tech centers of the world… Tech could be for Ontario what Oil was for Alberta.

Of course, Research in Motion imploded spectacularly… Blackberry went from controlling over 50% to now controlling 0% of the cellphone market, Alberta’s oil industry has been destroyed by a decade-plus of willful misgovernance, and Canada’s long national suicide continues even as it’s doctors encourage it’s citizens to opt for physician-assisted suicide rather than burden the system with their depression, homelessness, or wounds sustained in their country’s wars…

But anyway for there to be a movie out about the rise and fall of Blackberry… and to not have heard of it? It would be as if a major movie was coming out about the rise of Ikea and no one in Sweden had heard of it… If there is one market in the world that should be abuzz with talk of this movie it should be the market I’m in… and yet they screwed up the marketing that badly, dumping it with a terrible trailer at the peak of an oversaturated corporate biopic market… not to mention the kiss of death Canadian Content subsidies inevitably wind up being for any actual business or broader cultural ambition…

Which is doubly tragic because they did everything else perfectly! This movie should probably be a Best Picture nominee. It’s one of the best films about business I’ve ever seen.

The story of Blackberry (the film and the Product) is the story of Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie… two more different businessmen you could not imagine.

Mike was a nerd’s nerd… an electrical engineering dropout who left the University of Waterloo 2 months before graduation to work on a contract he’d already successfully won from GM. Jim on the other hand, was a jock, hockey fan, member of a fraternity, a graduate from the University of Toronto’s Bachelor’s of Commerce program, then MBA at Harvard. He is the quintessential cutthroat businessman with legendary rages to match.

And it’s with Jim the film really shines. With Mike, Jay Baruchel plays… well, Jay Baruchel… if you seen him in anything you basically know what you’re getting… But Glenn Howerton’s Portrayal of Jim Balsillie’s explosive rage is one of the great performances. Ever. it’s one of those instant legendary meme performances.

THIS IS A MAN WHO THREATENED TO LAUNCH A HOSTILE TAKEOVER OF THE NHL TO THE FACES OF THE OWNERS.

This is a man who actually was all the things Kevin O’Leary from Shark Tank or Donald Trump tried to portray themselves as in their media careers….

And they got Howerton, DENNIS from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, to portray him.

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And the ridiculousness that these two would wind up paired up as Co-CEOs, and the initial personality… clash is to delicate a word… typhoon. takes up a good chunk of first third of the film. Indeed the fact that somehow they wound up paired up is rightly identified as the key to BlackBerry’s success… and downfall.

And this is where I think the film is really one of the best business films of all time.

Note: For the purposes of this review I’m only going to be referring to the portrayal of the film. allegedly there are a good number of inaccuracies (though fair filmic simplification or not I can’t say). I’ve yet to read Losing The Signal on which the film is based, but it’s certainly on my list now. Jim Balsillie, probably the person with the most right to be offended, called it good satire, saying "They're taking an element of truth, who I am, and they're playing with it, I'm aggressive. I'm competitive. I'm ambitious. I own that."

We’ve seen The Social Network, we’ve seen Steve Jobs, we’ve seen The Founder… we’ve seen the stories of these meteoric rises from obscure and bizarre places, the unstable yet optimal personalities filled with unexpected virtues, the unique insights, the daring… likewise, we’ve seen the downfalls, the criminal, institutional failures of virtue and judgement in something like The Big Short, or outright criminality and lack of ethics in something like Wolf of Wall Street or if you’re a documentary fan ENRON: The Smartest Guys in the Room… But we’ve really never seen a movie that tells the story of one becoming the other… just how closely the seeds of success take root next to those of ruin, how intertwined the threads of fate and destiny really are…

We haven’t seen many “Rise and Fall” stories in the modern tech world… the space is young. Modern startup culture and the unicorns it birthed weren’t exceptionally common before the DotCom boom and crash of the 90s… and even if you cast a broader net to just all industries it’s incredibly rare for a company to rise and then fall with it’s founders still at the helm… and once you have multiple generations of turnover it becomes too easy to say “The original founder wouldn’t have allowed this” or “They fell behind the times”… the real philosophical questions of what actually should or shouldn’t be done and why, or what “keeping up with the times” even means safely getting shunted to the side as hard questions that don’t need to be asked…

And yet, in the story of Blackberry, all these questions have to be asked… it was largely the same leaders and core employees who made the impossible happen for their meteoric rise that failed to even keep the bare minimum afloat to stay in the market.

And the film doesn’t give you easy outs… Just as you think “Oh this is the story they’re going with” they complicate it, someone will say something that throws what you thought was a responsible decision into question, or what seemed an embarrassing defeat actually gives what you thought was a man on the downfall the exact correct insight.

Director Matt Johnson and co-writer Matthew Miller are geniuses… most Hollywood types would struggle to comprehend 1 of these insights or complications… and they’ve managed to incorporate a dozen+ of them as core thematic questions incredibly subtly… these are the questions founders and venture capitalists muse about endlessly and they’ve managed to bring them together in a tight and thought provoking package.

You could teach a class on startup and organization theory with this film.

Success is downstream of Personality?

There’s something ethereal about the startups that become these multibillion-dollar unicorns. I follow a lot of tech personalities, billionaires, wannabe billionaires, techies, corporate types… people I’m always deeply shocked choose to follow me back instead of hitting block… and the one that you hear from all of them is just how unpredictable these successes are, and how reverentially praised the rare people like Sam Altman, Peter Theil, and Paul Graham are who are seemingly able to kinda sorta see something in the vague auguries that are early companies.

Yet there are some major insights that seem consistent. Per Peter Thiel in Zero to One the personalities that make good founders are largely the opposite of what you’d think of as well-adjusted or optimized for business in other respects… Given any trait, most people are going to fall somewhere on a bell curve.

Sure Ideally you’d be markedly above average in some traits, but for the vast majority of people in any function at any firm, they’re going to group around the average in almost anything… indeed the important thing for a lot of business applications is to trade off exceptionality in some areas for more averageness in others… most firms will gladly put up with a worse programmer in order to have one slightly less awkward with the female employees, or more normal to look at… Most companies would much rather hire a worse salesperson than one whose aggressive pursuit of results will cause personality clashes…

Successful founders according to Theil are the opposite.

Founders are bundles of extreme traits they’ll be in the top 1% or even 1% of 1% in some trait… and then in another, they’ll be near the bottom. Theil claims to be able to visually tell great founders… that even at the physical level founders will be incredibly physically distinctive: One will be a near bodybuilder level of fitness, another emaciated and thin like some gothic cartoon, or camp survivor… yet uncanny otherwise betraying no signs of malnutrition, another obese and disheveled as if the physical world does not even occur to them with regards to their own body, and yet another meticulous and eccentric in their appearance such as a fashion designer.

This is depicted in our main founders. Mike Lazaridis is depicted as details focused to distraction, nearly torpedoing a pitch to disassemble a buzzer that emits a white noise he can’t stand, and which embodies his disgust with the “good enough” shoddy manufacture embodied by “Made in China”. Likewise Jim Balsillie’s killer instincts, his need to win in the world of business, is nigh on self-destructive. He highjack's his own firm’s business pitch to prospective clients because he holds the man who was supposed to present in such contempt he would rather alienate his boss and team than let an inferior pitch be given… he’s FIRED for this! (Thus his peculiar jump to the young Research in Motion) both men KNOW exactly what needs to happen and exactly what true quality, either in product, or management, should look like… and neither is willing to accept “Good Enough” even though they struggle to recognize the similarity between their two drives.

And then there’s the third figure… Doug Fregin. Portrayed by director Matt Johnson. Not a lot is known about the real Fregin and this depiction is very fictional, he’s one of the least public people that we know is a billionaire… so this character is more an amalgam of Start-up archetypes and ideas. Doug is by far the lesser of the three, the one who doesn’t get the title “Co-CEO” a figure who acts as a foil to Jim especially but also Mike at a lot of points… he’s also the goof and the embodiment of nerd culture. I watched in a screening of two people and still there were mutters, “What’s with this guy?” and “They need to get rid of him”.

Indeed you’re set up to think that this will be a major plot point, the cutting out of one of the early unserious figures…and probably subsequent lawsuit a la The Social Network. And yet this doesn’t happen.

Despite all the goofball stuff, the video games being played at the office, the speaking extremely out of turn, the seeming focus more on movie nights and social fixtures than the actual business… and the general seeming embodiment of what most Blue Collar and White Collar professionals struggle to take seriously about the Napping Pods and Ping Pong table side of tech work… he sticks around, and across a decade-plus manages to stay central to the team… huh.

Success is downstream of Culture?

It’s this team we see perform, an arc is given over to Jim’s stupendously aggressive push of sales, needing his team to double and triple total sales to avoid a hostile takeover, as well as the product side’s incredible struggle to make their network take that growth…

We also see the illegal lengths Jim is willing to go to hire the best people… back-dating stock options steal away top talent from Google and Microsoft with 10s of millions they didn’t actually have to compensate them.

This stretches over to the consumer culture… the rise of the CrackBerry moniker, and the often ravenous loyalty the biggest Blackberry fans had for their devices. With figures like Barrack Obama and Kim Kardashian only being the most prominent people who held onto their keyboard-based Blackberrys well into what we’d consider the touch-screen/smartphone era.

And it’s as this culture frays we begin to see the cracks in the success… we see Jim hire not just engineers but managers from these other firms, meant to corral and rein-in the engineer culture management felt they increasingly couldn’t control… but the film asks if this isn’t what started the downfall…company cultures are very delicate things… especially in these highly skilled environments where, by rights, anyone there could do anything, and had millions of dollars with which to fuck off and do it.

Mike and Jim were successes because they were barely controllable people who carved out enough free rein to do what they thought was necessary… when you’re paying some of these people tens of millions to produce as great if not better results, can you really start to tighten the leash? Would you want to?

You see this with a lot of the bizarre corporate culture stuff out of silicon valley, the catered lunches, the flex time, the percentages of their work-day they’re given for “Self-directed projects” it’s a recipe for abuse… but also there’s no bloody way to get anything close to the value out of these people without it. You aren’t paying people a million plus a year for box-checking consistent work… you’re paying them for grad-A highly creative output that most likely they’re the only people who can produce or even judge it… half this stuff takes a year-plus just to come up to speed and get integrated onto the team… half the time 50-90+% of the value from a hiring batch of 10 people is going to come out of one clever insight made by one or two people… when the culture is that finicky, when the industry is that lopsided towards talent…. can you really afford to crack the whip and try to regularize results, only to drive your most promising people to another offer or their own entrepreneurship 3-4 years earlier than they otherwise might have? Can you risk them merely working as opposed to performing the magic you hoped to get out of them? can you risk pissing them off enough or killing their joy such that they start to plan their early retirement with the millions you just gave them?

We’re informed at Blackberry, and a lot of tier-1 tech companies, a lot of these people are putting in 80 hrs a week at the office, barely seeing their family… can you really afford to start micromanaging them and risk making that 80hrs miserable?

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Did Blackberry lose it’s position to apple and google because it just became another workplace as opposed to the pirate ship of the geeks it was in it’s early days? It’s an interesting question.

Success is downstream of Ethos?

People fucking loved their Blackberries. Some of this gets played up to me since I’m a bit too young to have had one, and it was one of the before times when men were men, and kids walked to school uphill both ways… blah blah blah, and it was a Canadian invention, so, of course, you get all the myth-making like with the Avro Arrow that it was a revelation generations ahead of it’s time that we’d still be using if not for American malfeasance strangling our brightest stars in the cradle…

But people bloody loved them.

I’ll hear from friends about corporate executives who have their decades-old Blackberries on display in a little arrangement in their office… no one does this for their iPhones or Androids…

And there’s a very good reason for this.

Blackberry came into existence before data was king and before data-harvesting was the be-all and end-all of the software/tech world.

All the hostile design and interface bullshit meant to keep you scrolling and keep you distracted and feeding attention and data to the algorithm just wasn’t a part of design when Blackberry reigned and made it’s brand.

It was a cellphone with a built-in Email and a QWERTY keyboard. The very thing your phone is now basically designed to stop you from doing: Opening it, checking your messages, responding to your emails, then shutting it down, putting it back in your pocket, and going back to life… is EXACTLY what Blackberry was designed to do as quickly as possible.

It was a Smartphone that actually made you smarter, more productive, more efficient… less distracted.

Hell just looking at one, half the surface is dominated by the keyboard, ie. an unchanging analog physical tool.

You could actually see an email whilst out walking and respond with a thoroughly composed professional email, or proposal, or counter-offer…

You can’t do that on a touch screen! Or at least you can’t if you’re responding to clients or managers or people you have to appease… as opposed to managers sending off some poorly thought out, inscrutable, on-the-fly directive to underlings.

Many people held onto their Blackberrys until 2015-16 and beyond, the last of them only went out of support and stopped working this year… well after it was clear they had lost the market, figures like Obama and Kim Kardashian were still using their Blackberries, out of loyalty to a product ethos that just doesn't exist on the market anymore… Hell Obama had a minor scandal over it.

He refused to give up his Blackberry despite the US security state insisting it’s encrypted messaging system stored on Canadian servers was compromising national security… with many experts commentating, that it wasn’t so much Blackberry’s lack of security the Pentagon took exception to… but rather that it’s end to end encryption prevented the NSA from spying on the president, whilst others insinuated that clearly Obama was doing something nefarious if he insisted on such an encrypted device.

There were several prominent protests organized on the Blackberry messenger network and gulf states and several western ones exerted major pressure or threatened bans over the feature.

Jim Balsillie’s own accused stock fraud could not proceed to charges because the relevant messages were secure and unavailable instead the charges ended in an out of court settlement and payment to regulators.

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Put otherwise Blackberry was exactly what the old Web 1.0 user sovereignty types, digital freedom advocates, and civil libertarians championed as how all services and platforms should be governed and designed.

This has led to a fair number of conspiracy theories and suppositions that the real reason Apple and Google were able to out-race Blackberry was because they had US deep-state backing, that the security state favored them and ensured they’d have regime-aligned corporate backing and sweetheart arrangements to give them an edge anywhere they interacted with the wider US public-private hydra.

But the film takes a different tact… Blackberry lost because it fundamentally stopped believing in itself.

Success is Downstream of Faith?

I once heard a wise man say “A startup is a faith-based enterprise” that the thing which sustains it from the start, when there’s nothing there, is fundamentally the belief that there could be something there. The faith in that vision sustains it, but he hastened to add that it was vital to get to a solid state so you could stop running off faith and start running off hard numbers…

Having seen the film, I wonder if that caveat wasn’t wrong.

Faith built Blackberry. It’s what allowed Mike Lazaridis to negotiate so hard with Jim when he was utterly outclassed as a businessman (and thus carve out the vital “Co-CEO” division) It’s what got Jim to invest his life savings in a venture that from initial inspection looked like it might already be a failure, it’s what kept the assembled engineering talent around and pouring insane effort into a company community they liked and what stopped Jim and Mike from quashing that magic in favour of some more conventional office culture.

Faith is what led Jim to risk everything on a securities fraud scheme to backdate stock options so he could steal the world’s best engineers to bloody Waterloo! A regional city of 113,000 in the middle of Canadian Amish country… and it’s what led him to keep pushing til that illegal investment paid off.

There are very good reasons you can’t fraudulently compensate star employees by diluting your shareholder’s equity… but given the results? Rocketing Blackberry to a 66 Billion market cap at peak? None of those shareholders were complaining.

That faith built the company… and Even when they controlled half the cellphone market in rock-solid sales, that wasn’t enough when that faith died.

When Jim and Mike started hiring outside managers to reign in the culture they had built…when Mike started panicking and rushing to try and copy/directly compete with the iPhone, a product he personally didn’t respect and saw as a step towards bad design and philosophy… when to meet that impossible rush they moved production to China for the first time and the details focused quality obsessed design was compromised.

All the numbers in the world can’t save a venture it’s core leaders have lost faith in…

Or rather that’s my interpretation…

What I loved about the film was how much thematic richness the creators were able to draw out of every line of dialogue… it’s an incredible Rorschach test of a script that can leave dozens of people all thinking different things and debating.

These are the debates that happen in articles linked on hacker news or talks given by the august VCs and accomplished Tech founders of yore.

I was crazy impressed. Check it out.

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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak

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