CEO Attempted to Navigate Anti-LGBT Hate Incident By Telling Employees His Mentor Was a KKK Member

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.

"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?"