Founder Ideology
The Missionary, The Mercenary, and The Minstrel
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One of the threads of Silicon Valley lore is this idea of founder ideology. Supposedly, it originates with John Doerr: “we need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” A friend of mine asked me recently if I saw common archetypes in the founders I interact with. Given the aforementioned lore, my default thought was this idea of missionaries and mercenaries. But it felt worth unpacking the fringes of the types of ideologies I’ve seen founders espouse.
The Types
Missionary
Most people hold up the “missionary” founder as the ideal approach to building companies, and for good reason. Most large companies are built by missionaries. The amount of work and effort required in building a successful company is often best served by some kind of genuine preacher of a cause.
But even within that idolized status of missionary, there are two critical distinctions.
Believer
Examples: Patrick Collison, Brian Chesky, Stewart Butterfield
First, there are the typical “Believers.” People who see an opportunity and pursue it.
“I made money renting out an airbed in my apartment during a developer conference; maybe other people would want to do that too?”
“We use this messaging app to build our gaming company. Maybe that would be valuable for other people?”
These aren’t necessarily dogmatic missions. They’re effective founder-led opportunity canvassing for problems worth solving. It isn’t that they’re just looking for a quick buck. They genuinely believe in the thing they’re building and execute across the board in pursuit of that success.
Ideological Purists
Examples: Palmer Luckey, Alex Karp, Vitalik Buterin, Brian Armstrong)
A deeper manifestation of a believer missionary is an ideological purist. People who are committed whole-heartedly to what they’re doing, not because it makes sense but because its the only thing that makes sense. Their companies are more than representations of a business model. They’re a representation of world views.
Because of the world-view inherent in the way these companies operate, they often result in cult followings as well. People who buy into that world-view see the companies as borderline religions. Ways to cheer on that organization’s attempt to actualize that worldview. I wrote about this in Cultivating Cults.
One caveat. I went back and forth about whether Elon Musk should be in this bucket because he is most certainly an ideological purist when it comes to his beliefs about things like being an interplanetary species. But so much of what he does has what feels like a “professional” playbook that I actually think he’s a solid example of a successful rendition of our next bucket: a professional founder.
Mercenary
John Doerr’s aversion to “mercenary founders” came from a relatively simple mental model around incentives. You want founders who are motivated by the cause, not the capital. People who believe in what they’re building, not just people who will sell whatever needs to be sold.
But mercenaries don’t have to be an inherently bad ideology with which to build a company. The difference in my opinion is whether you’re motivated by the destination or the journey.
Missionaries, like any good religionists, are motivated by the destination; heaven! Achieving the dream. Building the world.
Mercenaries are motivated by the journey. The chase, the pursuit.
However, the means by which different types of mercenaries engage in their journeys can differentiate what type of mercenary they are.
Professional Founder
Examples: Eric Schmidt, Elon Musk, Sam Altman
In my deeply studied, and data-driven ramshackle guess at a framework, I see a professional founder as someone who, more often than not, buys a vision rather than builds it. From that buy-in, they are then typically relentless executors.
Eric Schmidt didn’t birth Google but was critical when he was bought in. Elon didn’t birth Tesla but it would be a distant memory if it wasn’t for his buy in. Sama wasn’t an AI researcher. He bought into an opportunity and then worked to make it happen.
Professional founders are also not always “later founders.” I would argue Jeff Bezos is also a professional founder. He heard a stat about the internet growing and knew he had to get in on it. It wasn’t an undeniable vision around the transportability of books that drove him.
And again, Elon Musk carries a LOT of the characteristics of an ideological purist. And I’ll get to how these ideological bents are not necessarily fixed. But when I think about Elon Musk, the opportunistic problem-solving strikes me more as a professional founder. He hates LA traffic? He builds The Boring Company and gives it to someone else to run. He’s mad at OpenAI for succeeding? He builds xAI with other people. He sees end-to-end encrypted messaging as an important part of building X, the Everything App? He picks a fight with Telegram and smears their product. He’s, obviously, very effective at it. But it strikes me as a love of the game even more so than a pure, radical belief in the end-state.
Huckster
Examples: Adam Neumann, Trevor Milton, Chamath Palihapitiya
While not all mercenary founders are bad, it’s when we get into huckster territory that it is almost universally bad.
Hucksters are the people who don’t just care about the journey; they ONLY care about the journey. The destination is for suckers who aren’t “in the arena.”
Oh it’s a fraud? You should have known better. It was a pump and dump? You should have done your own research.
The most dangerous hucksters are those who believe they are ideological purists. I would put Adam Neumann in this bucket. There is a fine line between cults of personality and cults of belief. And my sense is Adam Neumann is smoking his own supply.
Trevor Milton is a classic huckster. Doesn’t believe a word coming out of his own mouth. But Neumann? The world simply isn’t big enough for his vision... in his mind.
Minstrels
For a run-of-the-mill founder rundown, that might be enough. But over the course of my career I’ve noticed the increasing prevalence of “performativeness” in people’s psychological makeup. Part of it is human nature, but part of it is the increasing hyperlegibility of startups that I want to write about more at some point.
Just like mercenary founders, they’re not all bad. But depending on your motivations, it can result in very different outcomes.
Rebels
Examples: Travis Kalanick, Parker Conrad, Reid Hoffman
Rebels are performers that have a “fake it ‘til you make it” energy, which can be powerful in startups. Whether its Travis Kalnick skirting the lines of what’s legal in the early days of ride share adoption, or Parker Conrad toeing the line between insurance broker and platform. I also thought of Reid Hoffman’s entire mentality around blitzscaling. It’s a more formalized version of “move fast and break things” that feels like trying to run across tiles as they fall in Mario. You can be successful if you just run fast enough.
In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with this approach. Granted, there is a fine line between outright fraud and faking it in pursuit of making (covered below). The “fake it” energy always has a more earnest and sincere energy behind it. The rebellion is about doing things not because it breaks actual rules, but because it skirts norms.
But its when you start to cross the line that you enter more negative territory.
Performance Artist
Examples: Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, [REDACTED]
Granted, in our world of “looking the other way” on fraud (see Trevor Milton’s pardon), there are plenty of people lining up to justify Holmes’ or SBF’s behavior. But one tweet I saw recently, I think, summed it up well. Even if SBF’s investment portfolio could have made them whole, they did something wrong. If you steal $10, make $20 investing it, and then give the $10 back, you still stole it.
What is different about Performance Artists and Hucksters is that I genuinely think Performance Artists really do feel inclined to believe the performance. Like method actors. Hucksters like Trevor Milton or Chamath, I don’t think they ever buy into their own pitch. They might think their behavior was justified but they never believed their own lies. Elizabeth Holmes, I think, genuinely believed she could fake it ‘til she made it with Theranos. And reality just caught up to her. Same thing with SBF.
This, again, is where I think Adam Neumann sits in a grey area. There is some sense that he bought into his own ministry. But his behavior taking massive secondary, starting another (similar) company, and running the same grift? That feels a little too calculated for a “method huckster.”
But that reinforces the idea that (1) none of these are mutually exclusive, and (2) none of these are fixed.
Evolving Ideologies
There are tons of examples you can look at of instances where people’s ideology as founders seems to have shifted dramatically.
Zuck’s Journey
Mark Zuckerberg is someone who has seemingly gone through several different ideologies in his life. At the very beginning? He was making a “who’s hotter” app at Harvard. He was maybe a believer in “social connections” but he was borderline a huckster, just hacking stuff together.
But then over time, I genuinely think he became an ideological purist. The story that comes to mind most often is when he turned down Yahoo’s $1B acquisition offer. The TLDR is he walked into his board meeting and said “obviously we’re not gonna do this.” Peter Thiel took him aside and explained how much money that would mean for him, inviting him to think of what he could do with it!
“I would just build another social network.”
That feels pretty ideologically pure where you can turn down $1B because you’re convinced of the thing you’re building.
Then there is a phase where Zuck needs to learn to be a grown up. He clearly becomes a Professional Founder because he feels like he needs to be. Maybe there are hints of ideological purity, like buying Oculus or spending $10B on the Metaverse because he genuinely believes in the vision. But so much of what he does becomes opportunistic and calculated.
Today, as he’s been battered through a series of what feel like both personal and strategic chameleon phases, I have a hard time not seeing him as a huckster. He may not have crossed the line from Professional Founder to Huckster yet, but boy does it feel like he’s close.
Sam Altman’s Journey
I think Sam Altman has gone through a similar evolution. I would say that he started out as a Professional Founder. In my mind, that’s why he made sense as a choice to run YC. Generally, Believers, and especially Ideological Purists, make pretty bad VCs because they’re far too concerned with the actualization of their own worldview that they struggle to split their attention. But Sam ran YC like a Professional Founder. Helping build up the pieces of the ecosystem that felt opportunistically primed.
Starting OpenAI was similar. I think he became bought into the pitches of smarter people when it came to AI and he saw the opportunity. Real Professional Founder vibes. But my sense is that the unbounded success of ChatGPT has quickly started to put him into Huckster territory.
His recent response to Brad Gerstner when asked, what felt like, a real softball question about how a company with $13B in revenue could handle $1.4T in spend?
He didn’t lead with his fundamental worldview, like an Ideological Purist would.
He didn’t lead with an articulation of the opportunity, like a Believer would.
He didn’t outline the strategic execution required, like a Professional Founder would.
He responded with wild accusations and claims of victimhood. Textbook Huckster vibes.
There may be an argument that he was a Huckster all along, just a really lucky one. When you look at Ilya’s deposition about Sam’s behavior, you see what feels like additional evidence of Hucksterhood:
“[Ilya had] seen Altman pit high-ranking executives against each other and offer conflicting information about his plans for the company, telling people what they wanted to hear.” He said, “Altman ‘exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another.’ That’s a quote from the very first page of the memo he sent about Altman.”
This wasn’t just a new development at OpenAI. The reports go on to say:
“Murati had surfaced claims that Altman left his leadership role at Y Combinator for, according to the memo, “similar behaviors. He was creating chaos, starting lots of new projects, pitting people against each other, and thus was not managing YC well.”
Maybe a Huckster all along. But in any event; he was no Ideological Purist. That’s for sure.
Defining Your Ideology
Reflecting on all of this, I’m reminded of a common idea: “You choose every day who you are.”
As a founder, an investor, a builder, a husband or father or mother or wife. As a person. The ideological motivations that you have are not defaults. They are choices.
Each of these founders (and any other person for that matter) can demonstrate a variety of characteristics that would probably fit into each of these six buckets. It’s not about applying a firm label to any one person. The point of the mental model is to be instructive. Both for investors to evaluate founders, but more importantly for founders to evaluate themselves.
If you’re a missionary, driven by a mission, you have to ask whether you’re a Believer or an Ideological Purist. Though, if you’re asking the question, you’re probably not an Ideological Purist. Those kinds of people never have to question the mission because the mission is inherent in who they are as a person.
If you’re a mercenary founder, you have to evaluate whether you do it for the love of the game, or whether you’re willing to break the rules of the game for the love of money / fame / power. That will define the difference between being a Professional Founder and a Huckster.
And finally, if you feel inclined to the performative nature of the art of building, you have to wonder whether you’re a Rebel, fighting the good fight even when it leads you into some moral grey areas, or a Performance Artist, hoping you can craft reality out of a narrative lie.
The other thing to keep in mind as you work to define your own ideology is that ideology is not always indicative of success. Adam Neumann has a $2.2B net worth. Chamath is doing fine as well I hear. You can be successful in all sorts of ways, at least financially. By the same token, there are thousands of Believers and Ideological Purists that history has forgotten for one reason or another.
So the question isn’t “how do I win?” Because you can win (and lose) lots of different ways.
The question is “who do I want to be IF I win?” Ideology, like beliefs, should be a leading indicator of action. Who you want to be should dictate the type of ideological bent you have as you go throughout your life.
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Wow, Believers part, so insightful! More types you'll uncover?
Love this!