Justin Zhu, former Iterable CEO ousted for taking LSD before a meeting, on his disputes with key investors and the challenges of being Chinese in Silicon Valley
Justin Zhu, chief executive officer of digital marketing startup Iterable Inc., was walking down Broadway in San Francisco … Tweets: @ellenhuet , @chris_skinner , @jfberke , @markmilian , @kateclarktweets , @garrytan , @coolgrey , @stevegraham , @hkanji , @keegan_hamilton , and @curtisschin Tweets: Ellen Huet / @ellenhuet : a fascinating follow-up from @mcbridesg — yes, the microdosing LSD incident played a role, but there's much more: a growing distrust between an unorthodox CEO and his investors, who he felt didn't understand his cultural values https://www.bloomberg.com/... Chrs Sknnr / @chris_skinner : So true ... “In the early days, they're looking for weird.” He'd taken Iterable from an idea to a company valued at about $2 billion. But when a company reaches that stage, the new mantra becomes: Reduce the risk. https://twitter.com/... Jeremy Berke / @jfberke : Fun tidbit in this story: “At another investor meeting, Zhu noted that the abbreviation AI, for artificial intelligence, sounded like the Mandarin word for love. Afterward, a colleague asked him if he was “becoming Adam Neumann.” https://www.bloomberg.com/... Mark Milian / @markmilian : The story of the tech CEO fired for taking LSD is a lot more complicated than it seems https://www.bloomberg.com/... Kate Clark / @kateclarktweets : “Toward the end of April, Zhu's investors again asked him not to speak with the press. Shortly afterward, he got the call telling him he was fired. “That's the price of justice these days,” he says. “I'd rather tell the story and even be fired.” https://www.bloomberg.com/... Garry Tan / @garrytan : This is a real cultural problem for East Asian children of immigrants: consensus is viewed as weakness by Western business culture. I've assimilated and learned to fight tooth and nail, to never self abandon, but not all of us do. And it required years of coaching to get there. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... @coolgrey : Big takeaway from this is what arrogant idiots CEOs and founders can be. Who on earth would think the right time to take LSD - even a microdose - for the first time was before a big meeting? I wouldn't even use a new shaver for the 1st time in that context https://www.bloomberg.com/... Stevie Graham / @stevegraham : Unbelievably cucked. If ever have a board seat at another company I would never vote against the founders and would resign if the board did. https://twitter.com/... Hussein Kanji / @hkanji : Zhu's firing has blossomed into a bizarre saga that hits on many of the classic Silicon Valley cultural touchpoints https://www.bloomberg.com/... Keegan Hamilton / @keegan_hamilton : When the LSD micro-dose kicks in a little too strong during your investor pitch meeting... https://www.bloomberg.com/... via @mcbridesg https://twitter.com/... @curtisschin : A $2 billion 🇺🇸 startup—Iterable Inc.—recently fired CEO Justin Zhu, ostensibly because he took LSD before a meeting. The full story is more complicated. “I run the company w/ Eastern values,” he says. “That doesn't mean I'm not equipped to be CEO.” https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Justin Zhu's interview recasts his ouster from Iterable: the pre-meeting LSD incident that made headlines is, in his telling, only the visible trigger for a deeper collapse of trust with key investors, who distrusted him enough to ask him not to speak to the press. He also claims part of the friction came from cultural misunderstandings as a Chinese founder navigating Silicon Valley norms.
The story lands in an established arc of founder-conduct reporting: the profile of Adam Neumann's chaotic lifestyle at WeWork set the template for lifestyle details standing in for governance worries, and growing tensions between tech investors and company managers have been building for years. Zhu adds a new layer — what happens when the ousted side breaks the silence investors demand.
First-order effects
- Zhu converts a private board dispute into a public referendum on his investors' judgment, directly contradicting their request for silence and forcing Iterable's backers to defend a firing whose stated cause looks trivial next to the distrust they actually cite.
- Iterable runs forward without the CEO who built it, with the board now owning both the company's trajectory and the narrative about why he left.
Second-order effects
- Lead investors across portfolios get a fresh argument for treating founder conduct and trust signals as firing-grade issues independent of business performance — the same logic that led prominent investors to decline funding HQ Trivia after troubling conduct by its founders.
- Founders weighing investor demands for discretion now have a worked example of breaking them, which raises the cost for boards of relying on quiet settlements in future CEO removals.
Third-order effects
- If Zhu's cultural-misunderstanding claim reflects a recurring pattern, venture firms face pressure to examine how they evaluate unorthodox or non-Western communication styles — 'distrust' verdicts becoming harder to separate from bias in founder disputes.
- The steady drumbeat of conduct-driven CEO exits — WeWork, HQ Trivia, DataRobot's Dan Wright resignation after employee uproar — points toward founder-investor relationships formalizing around documented behavior standards rather than informal trust.
The trend: Investor boards increasingly act on founder conduct and interpersonal trust rather than metrics alone, while ousted founders respond with public counter-narratives instead of silence.