Justin Zhu – Bad Trip

Justin Zhu was fired for taking LSD before an important meeting. The whole situation was even weirder

- By Sarah McBride

Justin Zhu, chief executive officer of digital marketing startup Iterable Inc., was walking down Broadway in San Francisco on April 26 when he was summoned to a surprise conference call and abruptly fired. His co-founder, Andrew Boni, and the company’s entire board told him he was losing his job, primarily because he had taken LSD before a meeting in 2019.

The incident had indeed happened—Zhu says he was trying to take a small dose to improve his focus and accidentally took too much—but he also was being fired for other reasons. For the previous 10 months, Zhu had been talking with a reporter from Bloomberg Businessweek about his experience as CEO, the challenges of being Chinese in Silicon Valley, and his disputes with two of Iterable’s key investors. He hadn’t cut off the conversations when investors asked him to, the final straw in a long-running feud.

Zhu’s firing has blossomed into a bizarre saga that hits on many of the classic Silicon Valley cultural touchpoints: founders who don’t act like conventional businessmen, the search for additional productivity through drug use, and the risks of talking openly about the pressures of the job. It’s also a story steeped in the tense ethnic politics that are roiling the tech community and American society at large.

“In the early days, they’re looking for weird,” Zhu, 31, says now about venture capital investors. He’d taken Iterable from an idea to a company valued at about $2 billion, a stunning success by most measures. But when a company reaches that stage, he says, the new mantra becomes: Reduce the risk.