Silicon Valley's Cargo Culting Problem

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:00)
The idea that superficially copying Uber and copying the things that they said in interviews, pretending that you're Travis, whatever, doesn't work. It's just like wearing a black turtleneck does not make you Stoss.

**Michael Seibel** (0:13)
Yeah.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:13)
That does not make you Apple. That is Cargo Culting.

**Michael Seibel** (0:15)
This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell, and today we're gonna talk about Cargo Culting.
We encounter this way too much in our life. So, there's classic variety, and then there's new age, modern Cargo Culting. Let's start with classic. What's classic Cargo Culting?

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:38)
Well, let's start with what is Cargo Culting? What are we even, one of these guys talking about? What are we talking about? All right. So, the history of the term, as I understand it, is when you superficially copy something without understanding why you're copying it.

**Michael Seibel** (0:52)
Yes.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:53)
That is Cargo Culting. I think the history, if someone looks this up in Wikipedia, is like folks would create a fake airfield so that the planes came back. And so, it's something that looks like a landing strip because they wanted the airplanes to come back.

**Michael Seibel** (1:03)
Yes.

**Dalton Caldwell** (1:04)
They didn't really understand why the planes were coming. So, they're like, oh, if we make a fake landing strip, then the airplanes will come back, okay?
And so, in this classic Cargo Culting mentality, it's just, I'm gonna copy something, I don't know why, I'm gonna copy it, and then I will be as successful as the thing I'm copying, right? Anything to add there?

**Michael Seibel** (1:22)
Well, I think in the classic variety, what's essential is the thing that you're copying is good. No one would debate whether it's good or not, right?
And so, we're just debating how you copy it.
I think what's funny about this modern, new age Cargo Culting that we'll get to later is that we could even just debate whether the thing you're copying is worth copying at all, fair? And so then it becomes this double-sided, you're screwing yourself. But let's just go with classic. In the classic variety, what goes wrong in Cargo Culting is because you don't understand, really deeply understand the product that you're copying, you miss some obvious things. And I like your airport example, right? Where it's kind of like, yeah, if you make a landing strip in the middle of the jungle, airplanes won't land there. You're missing the, it's part of me.

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:09)
There's something larger going on.

**Michael Seibel** (2:13)
And I think founders did this. I think we have the victims of this.
And so let's talk about the companies that were classically Cargo Culting in our era.

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:23)
Well, the first and most obvious one was Google.
Everyone in the 2000s was obsessed with Google. It was the best startup. And so everyone you talked to was like, well, Google did this, or are you the next Google? Or, well, this is how Google did it. And so all these ideas that may or may not have been good ideas, we were kind of trained.

**Michael Seibel** (2:44)
We're obviously the right people.

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:45)
We're things to copy. So the most obvious one is just like the office culture of having an open office and like bright colors and like free snacks and like all this like super Google-y stuff.
That was considered, like if you wanted to do a real startup, you had to be like Google, right, man?

**Michael Seibel** (3:01)
Not only that, that's what made Google great, was the lack of offices.

**Dalton Caldwell** (3:08)
Yeah, you're right. No cube farms. That's why it was considered their culture. Like this is actually, there was arguments that copying down to the T, every aspect of the Google office culture was key to building a successful startup.

**Michael Seibel** (3:20)
Exactly. I think the other thing was this kind of flat org.

**Dalton Caldwell** (3:23)
No managers.

**Michael Seibel** (3:24)
Don't need management and da-da-da-da. Another classic one that I love was just they like hire as many smart engineers as possible. If you ever come across a smart engineer, no matter what, give them a job offer, you'll find a way to use them.
I think it's funny because like this is what we came up. This was conventional wisdom.

**Dalton Caldwell** (3:43)
There was either examples more silly than that. It was like the name of your startup needed to be cute.
Or like drop vowels. Remember Flickr started this where there was no E in it? So it would be you need a Google logo that looks like primary colors and had like a shiny. What was the term? You would put like a lens flare on your logo. Do you remember this? Everyone did this. Go look at logos back in like 2006