Cargo Cult Startups

It’s always badly defined. There is a vague desire to be a certain kind of person. Yet entrepreneurship begins when someone attempts to solve a specific problem in the world—and when starting a business just happens to be the best way to do it.

When Peter Thiel says that he sees a Cargo Cult-like phenomenon play out in startups, he is referring to this kind of metaphysical desire.

“It’s sort of like: ‘What do you want to be in life?’”, Thiel tells me. “And the answer, more often than not, is ‘I want to be an entrepreneur.’”

“People are good at learning by imitation,” Housel notes. “But the hidden nature of wealth makes it hard to imitate others and learn from their ways.” We can’t imitate many of the actions that lead to wealth because the most important action that leads to wealth—not spending every dollar we make—is an anti-action. Wealth comes, in part, from the th... See more

In Girardian terms, there is no such thing as a “Founder.” It is essentially a mythological category.

So what do most entrepreneurs do? They imitate the externals. They perpetuate the rituals.

But what does that mean?

Girard taught that all desire is fundamentally a desire for being. In other words, all desire is metaphysical—it seeks a kind of inner transformation, a transfiguration of identity, which we desperately seek but even more desperately deny.