The Mean Startup 1 – Fear & Tradition

The term “startup” is one of these concepts that one fine day crossed the line of popularity and started to become a cool way to name things. By now, you have probably heard of a bunch of similarly popular terms such as IoT, microservices, machine learning, growth hacking, unicorns, and so on.
However, one drawback of cool terms is that everyone wants to become part of what they encompass, and so we end up building impossible bridges between significance and reality.

I am also a car light. Problem?

In addition to that, most of the times, we humans tend to be irresponsibly superficial about things and especially sensitive to social pressure, and hence, tradition. We resist change, find it hard to say “no” and follow trends, even when we perceive that aspects of them are utterly flawed. Sure, you can blame evolution for that. After all, most of our brains developed to do great at socialising and surviving within a community — and doing anything necessary to succeed on that quest. But it is this very own feature of ours that kept us alive throughout history, the same that creates an inherent bias on how we perceive the world today.

Looking back

One striking way to recognise this bias is by looking back in time, enough to detach our view from the social constraints and circumstances that create noise and contaminate our view. Consider, for example, the following topics:

1. Tolerance for diversity
2. Deterioration of fanaticism in religion
3. Reduction of political frontiers
4. Political decline in discrimination of races
5. Physical war
6. Political gender discrimination
7. Prosperity of science
8. Slavery

Note how what seemed complex or puzzling back in time, is widely adopted and accepted by most of us today — at least from a moral, commonsensical point of view.

RAEF

But it cannot be only tradition and social bias what today, keep us from objectively evaluating matters like the ones listed before.
Thinking myself, I certainly reject topics such as bullfighting, extreme religious events or holy siesta even though these are very precious traditions in the country where I come from. Hmm… there seems to be more to it.

Let us go back to the previous list of historical examples, and try to come up with other motivations that may have neglected change from happening on the aforementioned.

(Try to do the same exercise yourself before continuing with the read).

• 1 & 3 & 7. Insecurity and uncertainty of the unknown.
• 2. Personal dissatisfaction, lack of control.
• 4 & 6. Jeopardy of privileged status of elite societies.
• 5 & 8. Thirst for control, narcissism.

Now, if you do the math, these motivations seem to converge towards a very specific set of common denominators, among which fear visibly stands out from the rest.

Fear + Social Bias

Fear, mistrust and social lethargy still show prominently today, continuing to do a fantastic job on preventing us from adopting new knowledge and developments and, as a result, allowing us to profit from them. Personally, I cannot even help but feel certain discomfort towards matters that although I have adopted myself, most of our society has not yet. Here are a few of them:

• Migration
• Economic inequality
• Climate change
• Regular exposure to toxic elements (alcohol, processed foods, radiation)

How do you feel about these topics?

In many cases, the response to that question is plain oblivion. Even though we recognise these as critical topics, it is still hard for us to argue precisely about why they are such undesirable elements of our society that we do not conceive the idea of not taking action in order to alleviate them.

This takes us back to the idea that our internal wiring favours the collective voice of groups over the objective exactness of globally accepted conventions.

There are probably some obvious examples of that surrounding you at this very moment. Sometimes, it is as easy as to look around for a few seconds and see how other individuals do things like:

• Follow people in a detour even if there is written indication pointing on a different direction.
• Start to clap after a single individual plants the clapping seed, even if you do not believe there is a strong reason for it (e.g.: when planes land — even though most planes do land).
• Drive past a red traffic light if other cars ahead of you do it too.
• Expose different personalities of your own self depending on who you are hanging out with.
• …and we keep opening bananas from the part where it connects to the plant, that is, the area where it is the hardest to break.

Banana plant

What are you talking about?

But, didn’t you say something about startups? you may argue. Heck, you are right! Yet, all this has a purpose of context.

In the next part, we will see how these patterns and constraints play a rather relevant role on how we organise our companies, particularly startups.