you are counter-cultural. embrace it.
post 1 of 3 in a series
Making something meaningful happen with a diverse group of people is weird. Our culture, our politics, our moment aren’t built for it. We’re gorged with new targets for grievance and new language to express those grievances. Sometimes the fruit of the many algorithms seems to boil down to suggestions for outrage and self-care.
Outrage and self-care have their place but no serious founder would run at a hard problem with those as the sole core values of her company. Those two dispositions, amplified across a team and repeated over and over, do not give you a Diverse Group of People Doing Something Together That Matters. Those two give you the average comment thread on a Facebook post: self-indulgent, aggrieved, inconsiderate, assuming the worst.
Starting something new, something meaningful, something that is based on better premises and better beliefs about who we can be for each other and what we can do together, is so worthy and so challenging. This kind of leadership is abundant in gifts that can be given and given again - rare gifts that can be revised and reopened. The corrosive culture around us is a reason it’s hard and a reason it’s worth it.
In Zero to One, Peter Thiel says, “A startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.” In practice, I have found it helpful to add “and a different present” - not just a different idea of what will be so, but a different way things are now, that others can experience. A way of getting people together to do stuff that is different than what the surrounding culture recommends or suggests. Possibly a way to do this that that culture even conceals or criticizes.
By definition, if you’re trying to do something that matters, you’re trying to change the status quo. This means confronting some element of the surrounding culture. Perhaps gently straying from it, perhaps denying or exposing it. Either way - if you are founder, you are counter-cultural. Embrace that.
This essential confrontation between your team and the macro-culture your team emerges from has several implications, which I’ll explore in the next two posts: one on things you might do; one on a tempting fallacy you should avoid as you start doing them.
For now, if you’re a founder, even of a small project among friends, and it feels to you like the world wants you to fail and you’ve somehow fallen into a minor civil war, with your would-be collaborators as combatants - don’t take that as the sign that you shouldn’t found or that you should founder. It may very well be a sign that you have a counter-cultural vision. The world needs more of those visions and leaders with the guts and skill to realize them.
-Eric
