The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

This CEO posted a crying selfie on LinkedIn. It didn’t go over well.

Braden Wallake wanted to be honest about the tough parts of being a CEO. Many online called the post ‘tone deaf.’

August 11, 2022 at 2:53 p.m. EDT
HyperSocial CEO Braden Wallake (Braden Wallake)
4 min

If he had thought about it longer, Braden Wallake might not have posted a picture of himself crying on LinkedIn.

But Wallake, the 32-year-old chief executive of HyperSocial, a marketing start-up, had just laid off employees for the first time, he said in an interview with The Washington Post. He had tried to avoid making his small team smaller. He had cut his paycheck and made other business adjustments. In the end, though, he had decided to let two of his 17 employees go.