CEO Tried to Navigate Hate Incident By Telling Staff His Mentor Was a KKK Member
Recordings show that while he was the CEO of Digital Ocean, Yancey Spruill told staff that they should bend their values because "we love the company."
More than 150 employees at the cloud services giant Digital Ocean protested last year after its CEO explained in an all-hands meeting that his former mentor was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, which he said shows how employees can work together despite holding different beliefs. The CEO’s comments led to widespread outrage among employees on Slack, in a formal open letter, and in an employee walkout that has not been previously reported.
The all-hands meeting was intended to address the fallout of an employee posting an anti-LGBT meme on LinkedIn after the company changed its logo to be rainbow colored during Pride Month.
404 Media has obtained video of a July 2023 meeting in which the then-CEO of Digital Ocean, Yancey Spruill, tells employees that a company's "values," are not the same as an individual employee’s personally held beliefs. Digital Ocean is a huge, publicly traded cloud services and data center provider that has become particularly important with the rise of AI. Spruill has since left the company.
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An excerpt of Spruill's remarks
"Every time we leave our home we have to bend our belief system because we engage with human beings who are different than us in any number of dimensions. And this is really critical that beliefs are not our values, our behaviors. However, we all have to sign up for the [company's] values," Spruill said. "All the companies I’ve ever been in, I don’t remember the numbers, the EBITDA, the projects I worked on. What I do remember is—did that company live and honor its values? Did the employees?"
Spruill, who is Black, then tells an anecdote from his time working at a chemical company called Corning in the 1980s in which he came to be close with a colleague who was in the KKK.
"I worked in the electrical engineering, controls engineering group at this manufacturing plant in Wilmington, North Carolina, and not everyone liked that they were integrating Corning. And there was a particular person who I got off to a rough start with who had been at the company for 40 years in North Carolina. And our manager saw this and talked to him and he actually turned a corner and became a mentor of mine," Spruill said. "I had a great relationship with him. He never invited me to lunch, never invited me to have a drink, never invited me to play golf. We both loved golf. I came to find out this person was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and it was a very powerful message in learning for me that we sign up for values [of a company] because we believe in the opportunity. We love the company. We can bend as long as we don’t break our personal beliefs, it can work incredibly well. And I want us all to think about this because we all bring different belief systems to this place. And it can still work, it will work, as long as we understand that we’re not asking people to compromise their beliefs to the point that they break. We are asking you to compromise to the point where you accept our values."
Spruill’s talk was spurred by an incident in which an employee at Cloudways, a Pakistani company that DigitalOcean had just acquired, wrote "#SayNoToLGBT #ProudToBeMuslim" on LinkedIn, and crossed out a version of the Digital Ocean logo that had been turned rainbow for Pride Month. In the comments of that post, the employee wrote "LGBT is a disease not a human being thing according to science." The employee was not fired but left the company several months later, according to their LinkedIn.
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Spruill's full remarks on the situation
Slack messages obtained by 404 Media from during and after the meeting included "Yancey I strongly recommend you stop talking right now," "are my ears broken? This can't be what I think it is," "holy shit," and the "This is Fine" burning room dog meme. Another employee said "perhaps I've misunderstood what I've heard, but management is using an example of the KKK as something that would be still acceptable for an employee to participate in, as long as they keep that disconnected from the company?" Three other employees then say that that is how they interpreted the comments, too. "We should accept A LITTLE dehumanization for the sake of the company," one worker said. Several employees, including some who are Muslim and queer, pointed out that the implication that Muslim employees would inherently not support LGBTQ is employees is itself bigoted.
Questions asked by employees at the all-hands included “To clarify your opening statement [about the KKK], are you saying that I should compromise on my own identity, to be able to work with coworkers who (for example) have said my existence is a disease?” And “Can you please clarify: Is it Digital Ocean’s official position that if we feel unsafe working with someone who would post ‘LGBT is a disease’ in a public forum next to DO’s Pride logo, then we need to seek employment with another company?”
Spruill left Digital Ocean in February and is now a director at Vista Equity Partners, one of the largest private equity firms in the world. Digital Ocean is a publicly traded company with more than a thousand employees. Digital Ocean and Vista Equity Partners did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Spruill told 404 Media that he later apologized for his remarks.
“There were several different follow up meetings with individual employees and an additional all hands where I apologized and clarified my remarks, including that I did not find out that the former colleague was affiliated with the KKK until several years after I left Corning, which was nearly 31years ago,” Spruill said. “I was trying to help the company navigate a challenging internal moment by sharing a deeply personal example from my own lived experience as a black man. My intention in sharing that story was to illustrate that employees from different backgrounds and beliefs can be successful in working together in a professional setting to achieve a common goal.”
“Even though this was a powerful personal experience for me, I recognize using this personal example to make a point in comparison in this context (or any context) was insensitive and inappropriate, and given the moment, I regret my clumsy delivery of this personal example,” he added. “I am sorry that my remarks were initially interpreted by some as suggesting we would tolerate or otherwise make space for any discriminatory or anti-LGBT+ conduct at the company. That was never my intention, and I worked hard to make that clear in subsequent conversations with employees.”
During a question-and-answer segment at the end of the meeting, Spruill brought up the KKK anecdote again after saying that changing the logo to rainbow colors during Pride Month "actually created risk, embarrassment, and ostracized a portion of our employee base." He says that changing the logo caused it to show up on the LinkedIn pages of employees in Pakistan—where being gay is technically illegal—"caused" the employee to denounce LGBT people on LinkedIn.
"The company violated our values, not unknowingly, when we changed the logo during Pride Month, which we’re proud to do. We didn’t realize that that would be attributed to individuals who are linked to our company’s private social media channels," he said. "So a big learning in this is we’re going to have to think about, as we’re global, how do we support our various employees and their communities in a way that does no unintentional harm. We did this here, which is what sparked this incident. We catalyzed this incident. An individual didn’t catalyze it, we did it by our actions."
He then said "we bend our beliefs, we don’t bend who we are as human beings. To the point that if people can’t bend their beliefs to the point where they can work with someone. As I mentioned earlier, me working with someone from the Ku Klux Klan, who ended up being a great mentor and coworker of mine who actually helped me enormously, even getting [me] into the stock market. He was into the stock market, we’d go into the lab, we’d be talking about stocks, he actually sparked my interests in a career that’s transformative to my entire existence and yet when we went home from work at night, we had very different beliefs about the way the world should work."
The incident and, specifically, Spruill's comments at the all hands, caused more than 150 employees to sign a letter of solidarity with queer workers at Digital Ocean and a company walkout several days later, according to sources at the company and a copy of the letter obtained by 404 Media. The letter notes that "during the all-hands today, leadership messaging was borderline hostile, and included "Yancey telling us a story about how he got along with a KKK member at a former job, and using the story as an example of the type of behavior he expects from us."
A month after the all-hands meeting, in August 2023, DigitalOcean announced that it was conducting a search for a new CEO, but did not say why. Spruill remained in the position until February of this year. Spruill said the remarks had nothing to do with why he left DigitalOcean.