Ask HN: Where did you find your “cult”? (As described in Zero to One by Thiel) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where did you find your “cult”? (As described in Zero to One by Thiel)

39 pointsdrhectapus24 comments

Just finished reading Zero To One by Peter Thiel and there's an interesting chapter where he talks about how the best kind of startups almost resembles a cult.

The idea is that a culture of total dedication that looks almost crazy from the outside is required to make a startup succeed. In exchange, "members" experience strong feelings of belonging.

I find this idea fascinating because in my 30 years of life I still haven't found a place where I "belong".

So HN: where did you find your place of belonging? Was it in a new city/country? University? A hackathon? A meetup of some kind?

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When you call an organization a cult,you are essentially saying that the members accept leadership and belief without thinking for themselves and applying rationality.

Theiel's palantir is a good example. A ton of smart people and good products but as it appears not a single person doubts the organization's mission and the horrific impact it has on society. Why? It's a cult, don't doubt leadership,just be a good hacker and hack as you're told.

To each his own. For me, I can't imagine living like that. Even in the military you can doubt and question unlawful commands/orders.

I would rather be an outcast and a failure than succeed, be well connected and accepted by the group at the price of abandoning whatever conscious and principles I have. I guess you can say I am not much of a joiner?

And to that end, palantir is slowly failing, they lost a big NYPD contract due to their bad PR and inability to have their software be interopable with other vendors.

If you want to join an organization with a sense of mission & belonging, consider who benefits from its success.

If it's the world at large - the underserved, the unlucky, the overlooked - you've got a better chance of being able to look at yourself in the mirror each morning.

I'd grimace if I saw Thiel in the mirror.

I've worked for a few startups that have had a cult-like following, and it's never gone well. If you gave notice, you immediately got the cold shoulder from all of the execs - to the point that there weren't officially sanctioned goodbye parties. People got pushed out if they asked any questions that could be perceived as critical of the company or product. At one company I worked at, people would cheer absolutely everything in company meetings ("we missed our Q3 goals by 60%" loud applause "Don't worry, we'll get it next time!"). Company has layoffs, and nobody would believe that it could be due to poor performance, so they went with other implausible explanations.

The unfortunate thing about these cultures is that they self-select for the worst kind of employee. If you think there are areas of improvement in your company or product, and that's viewed as not being loyal, then you end up only with employees who already believe the company or product is perfect. Personally, I'd rather work with people who recognize the faults in their product and are actively working to fix them.

The only exception I've encountered is where there's a cult-like following AND verifiable performance of the product. Apple has a cult-like following among employees and enthusiasts, but they also make products people love and you can tell that objectively from their quarterly earnings calls [note: I'm aware that Apple certainly has it's own sets of issues with its product and work culture, my point is simply that a cult following of Apple is different from a cult following of your shitty benefits platform].

These experiences led me to a, perhaps, cynical conclusion: the more cult-like the culture, the easier it is for the executives and investors to fleece the employees. While everybody is cheering the quarterly losses, and unquestioningly supporting every product release, your executives are negotiating parachutes for when the company gets acquired for dimes on the dollar. It completely makes sense to me that Peter Thiel thinks this is a good thing: he's benefiting from those cults.

I think some low-level employees will greatly benefit from a class in philosophy.

It's not about the fault or that if the employee is right.

Founder makes a promise to customers. He comes with an initial vision. It might be a flawed vision but if the product has got any traction before you even joined. It means his flawed vision works in the market.

Don't mistake market for the world. Don't mistake your world-view for the complete truth of market or world.

Your worldview is just another way of seeing this world and unproven way since that's not what got him his first customers. Why do you want him to bet on your unproven worldview? I see newbie traders making this mistake over and over.

That's the only thing which matters.

That's his worldview and his company took off within his worldview, there is no reason to change that. Unless of course, you have an axe to the grind and you are clearly irreplaceable, try that and if he is any good and catches you halfway, next you are out of the company.

It doesn't matter who is right. It doesn't matter what is right. What matters how consistent you are in your worldview. That's what gives company success.

If you have a superior worldview, best a founder can do is - fire you, so you are set free and you start your own company, compete with them and then lose until you correct your worldview.

They do not want to bet on your worldview, you are not above the founder, no employee really is.

That's what you need to understand.

I think 'Cult' = 'Tribe' as described by Seth Godin.

https://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/files/CurrentTribes...

A better summary describing tribes. https://blog.12min.com/tribes-summary-seth-godin/

To answer OP, you can't 'Join' a tribe. (see link above that expains why)

Explain?

In a tribe you don't neccesarily have to blindly follow leadership. Cult means you accept their values as-is,no questions allowed.

I think this is widely misunderstood. Don't look for a "cult" with "members" where you "belong". Instead look for a "tribe" of like-minded people that you feel good being around.

The core difference is that cults defines themselves through a belief system that each member has to submit to, whereas the tribe is founded on a wider set of core values but allows or welcomes variety in its members.

Of course not all "tribes" will be for you. In fact most of them won't. You know it's a good fit when meetings and conversations feel effortless and you feel your opinions and ideas are understood and valued. Finding your tribe is like a startup finding product-market-fit. It requires active search.

That said it's also entirely possible you won't find your tribe in your workplace. In that case try to find it outside of work by joining associations, clubs etc.

When I used the word "cult", it seems like many other commenters have taken it in its literal sense (despite being in quotes). But yes I mean tribe.

I worked at a Peter Thiel cult. In no uncertain terms: you don’t want to work at a Peter Thiel cult.

Boy, I wish some sort of throwaway account or pastebin would fill in details on that statement...

You can probably guess:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-...

At least under capitalism as we know it, no one workplace can supply the meaning of your life. You could have a personal mission for what you want to do with your professional life. But in any workplace, you and your employer are only committed to each other as long as it's economically advantageous.

Run away from any CEO who says something like "we're a family". Your family is committed to you no matter how economically valuable you are. That's not how it is at the workplace. And you probably don't want it to be any other way.

Thiel goes even further and says that he wants a cult? Maybe that works out if you happen to be CEO and also have a callous disregard for your employees' health.

In terms of deriving belonging from projects: I think there are things to learn here from Fred Turner, who has examined how Silicon Valley culture interacts with Burning Man culture. I'm not saying Burning Man is good or even better, but it offers a contrast between voluntary/amateur communities and professional workplaces.

https://logicmag.io/03-dont-be-evil/

Quote:

"At Burning Man, what you’re rehearsing is project-based collaborative labor. Engineers flowing in from the Valley are literally acting out the social structures on which Valley engineering depends. But they can do something at Burning Man that they can't do in the Valley: they can own the project. They can experience total “flow” with a team of their own choosing. In the desert, in weirdly perfect conditions, they can do what the firm promises them but can’t quite deliver."

This group identity philosophy is very destructive. Build your own identity first before you sacrifice autonomy to groupthink.

Sometimes, group exits before you. It has more experience under its belt.

I want to bring up a slightly different perspective, as an employee of a relatively large corporation -- not a startup.

I'll preface by stating that my manager is fantastic. Within our team, we have the capability of collaborating and making decisions amongst ourselves without fear of reprimand from the higher-ups (in effect, shielded by our manager). We don't hold standups. We don't have weekly team meetings. There is no mention of "scrum" or "agile" or "standup" or any management buzzwords. Yet, our domain is relatively complex.

Business-centric managers (project managers in particular) have no insight into our day-to-day work partly because of the involved complexity -- we rely on involved mathematics and algorithms to do our job. There is no need for PMs to dig deeper to break things out since we always go above and beyond the plain corporate expectations. This is while my manager (previously individual contributor in a similar space for 20+ years) has never given me a direct order on what to work on.

We make decisions based on the team's own best judgments and then act on them to deliver great products. Business guidance (context) is given to us as a team by this fantastic manager, based on his input, derived from the countless meetings he attends on the team's behalf. But we have the final say as to what is important to deliver after informal discussions explaining context -- never in the setting of a meeting: just conversations.

This sense of belonging that I feel with my team and the organization goes hand in hand with full autonomy over my work and believing in what we are doing: to deliver the best products we can for the customers.

I can't speak for the rest of my team, but I feel this dedication. For me, this is because of two things: a belief that we (within our space, greater than just the team I am a part of) are the best at what we do, and that I feel as though I have the autonomy to act in the way that I believe is best.

To address some of the other commenters: sure, it is likely that my contributions affect the company's profits by more than a full order of magnitude, compared to my salary. But I'm happy here in my autonomy, able to live comfortably, and I am able to make a difference based on my own judgment.

To me, this is the most important thing for me to keep living happily within my "cult".

What kind of place do you think you will belong to? what characteristics are you looking for? For me, it was the hacker and demo scene in my teen years. There was no money involved, it was all fun. Money changes the dynamic of things and people don't play nice since it's a zero sum game. The only environment that I see today like that is the open source scene, but unfortunately once a product gets popular it quickly get's commercialized.

I'm going to have to question the premise of your question.

I don't believe that the "best" startups resemble cults. I don't think you should feel like you're missing something because you haven't experienced that.

I'd more likely use the word "worst" to describe places with cult-like cultures, because Mr. Thiel and value very different things.

Peter Thiel is a venture capitalist interested in short-term profitability and has a very dog-eat-dog moral framework, whereas I care about long-term sustainability and the net effect of businesses on humankind. I suspect most of us are probably better off thinking more like me and less like Thiel.

That's not to say that I don't see a place for obsessiveness or singular-minded pursuits. Profit-motivated enterprises with that sort of culture are nearly always bad news though, and I even outside of that I'm pretty wary of the sort of tribal mentality that those cultures cultivate.

> The idea is that a culture of total dedication that looks almost crazy from the outside is required to make a startup succeed. In exchange, "members" experience strong feelings of belonging.

So few startups out there deserve that kind of dedication from its members. If the result of its success is (a) the owners make a lot of money, and (b) another chat app exists within the world, neither of those are good enough goals to deserve that level of dedication.

Perhaps the question is not where you belong but what dent do you want to make in the world? For instance, say you wanted to get humans on Mars, then you'd most likely want to work for SpaceX.

An Accelerator.

Hobby (sports) group.

Thiel is a Trumpist and neo-fascist. Would not be taking advice from him.

See for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoysIfCPn6w

An apologist and enabler. These people would enslave America while saying they don't support the things that their leader does or says.

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