YOU SHOULD RUN YOUR STARTUP LIKE A CULT. HERE'S HOW
No company has a culture; every company is a culture. A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside. The first team that I built has become known in Silicon Valley as the “PayPal Mafia” because so many of my former colleagues, including Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and David Sacks, have gone on to help each other start and invest in successful tech companies. ZERO TO ONE: NOTES ON STARTUPS, OR HOW TO BUILD THE FUTURE We didn’t assemble a mafia by sorting through résumés and simply hiring the most talented people. I had seen the mixed results of that approach when I worked at a New York law firm. The relationships between lawyers I worked with were oddly thin. They spent all day together, but few of them seemed to have much to say to each other outside the office. Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other? Taking a merely professional view of the workplace, in which free agents...