Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

From the outside, everyone in your company should be different in the same way.
Unlike people on the East Coast, who all wear the same skinny jeans or pinstripe suits
depending on their industry, young people in Mountain View and Palo Alto go to work
wearing T-shirts. It’s a cliché that tech workers don’t care about what they wear, but if
you look closely at those T-shirts, you’ll see the logos of the wearers’ companies—and
tech workers care about those very much. What makes a startup employee instantly
distinguishable to outsiders is the branded T-shirt or hoodie that makes him look the
same as his co-workers. The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential
principle: everyone at your company should be different in the same way—a tribe of
like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission.
Max Levchin, my co-founder at PayPal, says that startups should make their early
staff as personally similar as possible. Startups have limited resources and small teams.
They must work quickly and efficiently in order to survive, and that’s easier to do when
everyone shares an understanding of the world. The early PayPal team worked well
together because we were all the same kind of nerd. We all loved science fiction:
Cryptonomicon
was required reading, and we preferred the capitalist 
Star Wars
to the
communist 
Star Trek.
Most important, we were all obsessed with creating a digital
currency that would be controlled by individuals instead of governments. For the
company to work, it didn’t matter what people looked like or which country they came
from, but we needed every new hire to be equally obsessed.

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DO ONE THING
On the inside, every individual should be sharply distinguished by her work.
When assigning responsibilities to employees in a startup, you could start by treating
it as a simple optimization problem to efficiently match talents with tasks. But even if
you could somehow get this perfectly right, any given solution would quickly break
down. Partly that’s because startups have to move fast, so individual roles can’t remain
static for long. But it’s also because job assignments aren’t just about the relationships
between workers and tasks; they’re also about relationships between employees.
The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company
responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and
everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just
to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining
roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete
for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles
are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to
build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. More
than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails,
we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But
every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to
outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of
death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.

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OF CULTS AND CONSULTANTS
In the most intense kind of organization, members hang out only with other members.
They ignore their families and abandon the outside world. In exchange, they experience
strong feelings of belonging, and maybe get access to esoteric “truths” denied to
ordinary people. We have a word for such organizations: cults. Cultures of total
dedication look crazy from the outside, partly because the most notorious cults were
homicidal: Jim Jones and Charles Manson did not make good exits.
But entrepreneurs should take cultures of extreme dedication seriously. Is a lukewarm
attitude to one’s work a sign of mental health? Is a merely professional attitude the only
sane approach? The extreme opposite of a cult is a consulting firm like Accenture: not
only does it lack a distinctive mission of its own, but individual consultants are regularly
dropping in and out of companies to which they have no long-term connection
whatsoever.
Every company culture can be plotted on a linear spectrum:
The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest
difference is that cults tend to be fanatically