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Speaker 1

00:00

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 Steve Jobs. Yeah. That does not make you Apple.

Speaker 2

00:15

That is cargo culting. Yes. Yes.

Speaker 2

00:16

Yes.

Speaker 3

00:19

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.

Speaker 3

00:28

So, There's classic variety, and then there's new age, modern cargo culting. Let's start with classic. What's classic cargo culting?

Speaker 1

00:38

Well, let's start with what is cargo culting? What are we even, what are these guys 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.

Speaker 1

00:52

Yes. That is cargo colting. 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 was something that looks like a landing strip because they wanted the airplanes to come back.

Speaker 1

01:03

So 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. And so in this classic cargo colting 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?

Speaker 1

01:21

Yes. Anything to add there?

Speaker 3

01:22

Well, I think in the classic variety, what's essential is the thing that you're copying is good. Yeah. No 1 would debate whether it's good or not, right?

Speaker 3

01:31

And so we're just debating how you copy it. Yeah. I think what's funny about this modern new age card-calling 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.

Speaker 3

01:44

And so then it becomes this kind of double-sided you're screwing yourself. But let's just go with classic. In the classic variety, what goes wrong in card culting is because you don't understand, really deeply understand the product that you're copying, you miss some like obvious things. And I like your like, you know, airport example, right?

Speaker 3

02:01

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 the

Speaker 1

02:09

kind of. There's something larger going on. Yeah, this whole system.

Speaker 3

02:13

And I think founders did this. I think we have the victims of this. And so let's talk about

Speaker 1

02:19

kind of the companies that were classically Krakow Kult in our era. Well, the first and most obvious 1 was Google. Yes.

Speaker 1

02:26

Everyone in the 2000s was obsessed with Google. Yes. It was the best startup. Yes.

Speaker 1

02:31

And so, you know, everyone you talk to was like, well, Google did this, or are you the next Google? Or, well, this is how Google

Speaker 3

02:37

did it.

Speaker 1

02:38

And so all these ideas that may or may not have been good ideas, we were kind of trained.

Speaker 3

02:44

We're obviously the right guys.

Speaker 1

02:45

We're things to copy. So the most obvious 1 is just the office culture of having an open office and bright colors and free snacks and all this super Google-y stuff. That was considered, if you wanted to do a real startup, you had to be like Google, right man?

Speaker 3

03:01

Not only that, that's what made Google great, was the lack of offices.

Speaker 1

03:08

Yeah, you're right, no cube farms, that's why. It was used for a key other 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.

Speaker 1

03:19

Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 3

03:20

I think the other thing was this kind of flat org.

Speaker 1

03:23

Yeah, no managers.

Speaker 3

03:24

Don't need management, and da, da, da, da. Another classic 1 that I love was just to 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.

Speaker 3

03:38

I think it's funny, because this is what we came up, like this was conventional wisdom.

Speaker 1

03:43

There was other examples more silly than that. It was like the name of your startup needed to be cute. Yes.

Speaker 1

03:48

Or like Drop Vowels, remember Flickr

Speaker 2

03:50

started this,

Speaker 3

03:51

where there

Speaker 1

03:51

was no E in it? And so it would be, you need a Google logo that looked like primary colors and had a shiny. Remember, what was the term?

Speaker 1

04:00

You would put a lens flare on your logo. Do you remember this? Everyone did this. Go look at logos back in like 2006.

Speaker 1

04:06

And that was because Google and these other startups had lens flare on their logos and they had cute names. So you had to do it.

Speaker 3

04:14

When I love it because it's like obvious in the pursuit of building the world's best search engine, the logo styling was essential. I mean, really it was a vital step. So number 2, of course, Facebook, even closer to kind of our generation.

Speaker 3

04:30

They're the ones that brought you the going viral. Oh, yeah. How is your thing gonna go viral thought? How's it gonna go viral?

Speaker 3

04:38

They're the ones who brought you the what where's the share button? Yeah, you have to have a share button on everything What else did what else was the uber? I'm not the the Facebook classics.

Speaker 1

04:48

I think just trying to not make any money directly from users and build up as big of a user base you can. And then build an ads business. Obviously everyone was trying to do this, But Facebook really, we were constantly told by everyone we knew, and again, we believed it, that following the Facebook playbook was what was right for every business, no matter what type of business it was.

Speaker 3

05:09

No matter what. Charging users was against the rules.

Speaker 1

05:12

Yeah, because you wanted to get the most user data possible, you wanted to get the biggest database of users. All that

Speaker 3

05:17

good stuff. And then the nobody cares about privacy. What was the, there was a quote where it was like privacy.

Speaker 1

05:23

Doesn't matter. I forget. They were like, anyway, everyone that was blindly following what they did was trained to ignore all of those matters.

Speaker 3

05:32

Then maybe the last 1, even more modern, Uber. This was the fun 1. I think it started with, spend as much money as possible, which I love because Uber was a successful company.

Speaker 1

05:47

And the idea that we could boil down a key strategy, spend as much money as possible, but that was the takeaway. They wrote a book about it. It was called Blitzscaling.

Speaker 1

05:55

Spend all the

Speaker 3

05:56

money as fast as it comes in. What's funny about maybe these Uber ones that are slightly different from the Facebook and Google ones. It's like, I don't think Uber even did these things.

Speaker 3

06:06

Like, cargo culting kind of took on its mind of its own.

Speaker 1

06:09

Exactly. And again, to be really clear on the point, Uber did a great job of what they did. They nailed it. Rock

Speaker 3

06:14

and roll.

Speaker 1

06:14

It's the folks that were like, well, Uber did X, so we should do this, without really understanding why Uber did the things they did, they would superficially scale the way they scaled, burn the way they burned, ignore laws the way they ignore laws, ignore unit economics.

Speaker 3

06:30

Go to as many cities as possible as possible. Yeah,

Speaker 1

06:32

it was it was the superficial Wannabe ubers. Yes that did the silliest stuff versus uber itself where it was pretty well, right

Speaker 3

06:41

now Let's be clear all these businesses worked. Yeah, so let's talk about

Speaker 1

06:46

it right

Speaker 3

06:47

like like for Google This was great advice. Yeah, right for Google hiring as many really smart people was essential because they were trying to do something really hard.

Speaker 1

06:58

Yeah, I think that the conventional wisdom pre-Google was that search was a commodity, and that Yahoo was good enough, and that incremental engineering breakthroughs in search wouldn't matter, and Google disproved that, where it was actually a hard technical problem, and they were able to put those engineers to work. Also, historically, This was right after the dot-com bubble crashed. So they were able to hire some great talent that was available because the dot-com bubble just crashed.

Speaker 1

07:22

And so if you really look at the decisions they made in context of history, it made a ton of sense.

Speaker 3

07:28

Made a perfect sense.

Speaker 1

07:28

But how many people did we know that blindly copied the Google Playbook, and it did not. They did not replicate Google's success, did they?

Speaker 3

07:35

No. No. They weren't even trying to do anything near as hard. I think in Facebook's case, another perfect example of not charging users was really smart.

Speaker 3

07:46

They understood they could build an amazing ad business. They understood that scale was the only path to it. And Facebook is an amazing ads business, right? That was really smart for them.

Speaker 3

07:57

Not clear that every business should be an ads business.

Speaker 1

08:00

Yeah. And when you think about it, how many Facebooks are there? And how many people that were blindly copying the Facebook cargo, you know, how many people that were cargo-culting Facebook succeeded? Yes.

Speaker 1

08:11

Not many, again, maybe it's more than 0, but wow. That was more of like a one-shot epic company than something that people could just blindly copy and be just as successful as Facebook. The second Facebook-style profile you had was delivering infinitely less value

Speaker 3

08:27

than the first 1 you had. I would also argue that people, Facebook and this whole going viral, it's a lot easier to try to make your product go viral if users spend 2 hours a day using it, right? That,

Speaker 1

08:40

day 1 Facebook, people were spending 2 hours a day using it. If people use your product 5 minutes a month, it's a lot harder to go viral. Yes, you need some different tactics.

Speaker 1

08:52

You can't just copy Facebook blindly and hope

Speaker 2

08:54

it works.

Speaker 1

08:55

So it's like going viral was a great

Speaker 3

08:57

strategy for Facebook. Is it a great strategy for you? And the last with Uber, I think the hilarious thing about Uber is that most of the common beliefs about Uber just weren't true.

Speaker 3

09:07

People who were investing in Uber were looking at markets where Uber was doing very well in unit economics and purposely funding them to expand quickly. It wasn't people looking at Uber serving no markets well, burning money left and right, and saying, oh, let's just throw more of our money on the fire. And it was weird to watch founders just be like, well, you know, we should expand our business to 17 cities when it's not working in 1. Yep.

Speaker 3

09:35

When like, you remember the first time you took Uber? Like, I do. It was a huge moment. It literally was so valuable.

Speaker 3

09:43

It was immediately successful in San Francisco. And so this idea that like, oh, Uber just like, nobody liked it,

Speaker 1

09:50

and they just burned a

Speaker 3

09:51

bunch of money and somehow got successful,

Speaker 1

09:53

it doesn't make any sense. 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 Steve Jobs.

Speaker 1

10:07

Yeah. It does not make you Apple.

Speaker 2

10:09

That's cargo holding. Yes.

Speaker 1

10:11

Whereas like if you

Speaker 3

10:12

built a thing that people would use multiple times a week to get to the most important things in their life, like work, or their loved ones.

Speaker 1

10:18

That's pretty good. That's really valuable. So hard to replicate this stuff, right, man?

Speaker 1

10:23

It is. Copying is hard. You have to be really smart to copy well. So

Speaker 3

10:28

we talked about this classic hard recalling. And at least with the classic hard culting, you're copying successful companies. What concerns me more and more nowadays with the explosion of valuations is that we see a lot of founders copying companies that haven't succeeded yet.

Speaker 3

10:44

And this is what's really scary to me is that some founder will be like, well, we have to do it this way because so and so are coming to this. And I'm like, oh, why are they good? It's like, well, they're a billion dollar company.

Speaker 1

10:55

They just raised a series B. They just did this. They read some fundraising announcements.

Speaker 3

11:00

And then I asked them, well, how much revenue are they making? And the most common answer is, I have no idea. And it's like, so you're basing a huge chunk of your company's strategy.

Speaker 1

11:09

Yeah, your strategy. You're the CEO of the company. Let me get this straight.

Speaker 1

11:13

You're the CEO of the company. Yes. You're telling me the strategy you're betting the farm on is based on you read a fundraising announcement and you have no other context but like a podcast interview with a founder.

Speaker 3

11:25

And it has a lot of GitHub stars. It's 1 thing to try to copy something that's working.

Speaker 1

11:30

Like you might get lucky in 1 way, right? If you copy something that's not working, I don't even know what are we doing here.

Speaker 3

11:39

And I think that unfortunately these valuations have gotten people all messed up in the head. Like they think that if Investor thinks it's worth a billion dollars, it's working.

Speaker 1

11:49

Well, again, just to be super concrete, how many people do we see that were influenced by WeWork and building WeWork for X? And their entire strategy was based on WeWork. We saw the same thing, Zoom Pizza, robotic pizza making.

Speaker 1

12:02

And so you'd see these things where it eventually turns into like, you know, sadly a flame out for the founders. But there are a lot of people that were copying these companies blindly

Speaker 3

12:09

because they raised a bunch of money. Yeah. And I think this is part of this kind of certainly weirdly bigger trend of like people doing the modern cargo culting amongst startups.

Speaker 3

12:20

Where they're like, oh, if my startup looks, is going to be real, it has to look like other startups.

Speaker 1

12:26

Yeah, it's like the superficial, they're really focused on how people will perceive the startup superficially. Like the logos thing we were talking about.

Speaker 3

12:34

Yes, yes.

Speaker 1

12:35

Like what are some examples of the superficial things that you want to do to pretend to be a startup?

Speaker 3

12:39

Well, I have to raise money, right? I have to have good advisors. Maybe someone, God forbid, told me I should have a patent, I have to have an amazing pitch deck.

Speaker 3

12:49

I got to be able to pitch my company anywhere. Maybe a couple of conferences I get invited to, some press. And these are things that founders do to impress themselves, to impress other founders. The user is

Speaker 1

13:04

not essential. It has nothing to do with the product or something positive for users. It's all the superficial facade of this looks like a startup that looks like other startups that raise money.

Speaker 3

13:15

So let's think about it, because we're talking about cargo hauling on 3 levels, right? We're like, okay, garden variety cargo hauling, that's still really bad as you cargo code Google. Then we're like, okay, the modern thing is to cargo haul the modern unicorn that has very little revenue.

Speaker 3

13:28

And now the super, super modern is just to cargo haul the other struggling startup.

Speaker 1

13:33

I love when someone references a startup that we know and we're like, no.

Speaker 3

13:41

And I think that like maybe the base conclusion here is that you have to do some copying. You cannot innovate everything. But I think that I like when founders start with what does the user want.

Speaker 3

13:55

Starts with who are the companies the user's paying for, paying today to provide this service, and what can we learn from those companies? And then, what can we learn from those companies running the service who are successful? Okay, now let's think through it. And I think once you think through it through users' eyes, you can tell which things are essential.

Speaker 3

14:15

Do people care about the Google logo or do they care that they get search results that

Speaker 1

14:19

are good? Hey, how about that? Fast, right?

Speaker 3

14:21

Do they care about the Facebook, I don't know, or do they care that their friends are on there and they get updates quickly? Like, do they care about, you know, what city Uber just expanded to or do they care that like Uber shows up in 5 minutes in their city? So I think when founders start with the user, they won't go into this carbon culting.

Speaker 3

14:41

I think when they start with the, like you said, fundraising announcement,

Speaker 1

14:46

It's almost impossible. Look, the metaphor I use for this is, think about the difference between plagiarizing a paper that you read. Imagine you're like, hey, I got to turn in a report.

Speaker 1

14:58

And what you do is you go and Google for things and copy and paste blindly all the stuff. You copy and paste 3 different things, just put it in your paper and submit it. Yes. That is not evidence of original thinking?

Speaker 1

15:09

No, no. Versus you go read a bunch of places.

Speaker 3

15:12

Yes.

Speaker 1

15:12

You digest the information, you synthesize it into your own original work. Yes. You maybe cite the sources of what you're learning from, but you actually took the time to digest and process these things.

Speaker 1

15:22

Same thing with the music industry, where if you plagiarize a song, that's a problem. Like if you just rip off someone's music, you will get sued, Right? But if you listen to a lot of music and you get influenced by some of the sounds you hear and you integrate these new sounds into the new music that you want to put out, totally cool. That's how, that's literally,

Speaker 3

15:40

That's the game.

Speaker 1

15:41

That's music. That's the music business is that everyone's being influenced by everyone else. And so again, the really important thing to tease apart is copying completely without thought or any original thinking or original work versus being influenced and borrowing good ideas to integrate into your own thing, right?

Speaker 1

16:00

Doesn't the thing that

Speaker 3

16:01

suck about startups is that you do have to think about a lot of things. There isn't just like... You can't just copy and paste.

Speaker 1

16:07

There isn't just a checklist.

Speaker 3

16:08

But you do have to think carefully. But I think that's why really smart people are attracted

Speaker 1

16:15

to it.

Speaker 3

16:15

Yeah. Because like, you have to think really carefully. Yeah, it's an amazing test of your skills. All right, great chat.

Speaker 3

16:22

Great. Thanks