A LAND WITHOUT GIANTS

From Reggie James Product Lost by @hipcityreg

Earlier this week, like many folks in tech / Tesla owners in general, I watched the Tesla “We Robot” event. And as a result I texted my boys — “Elon really is him.”

He also provides us with one of the few primarily symbolic (from a consumer lens) organizations with SpaceX. An object of discussion of whether space and occupying Mars is part of our future or not.

But like most people (I assume that aren’t absolute yearning sycophants), Elon’s constant broadcast and management of Twitter has created a real stain on his record.

The archetypes that set our future within technology are not hidden. They broadcast everyday. They earn, or force, our attention everyday. And that is converted, directly or passively, into quantifiable commerce. But we are starved for a new discussion…

In my conversation with Freddy last month, I asked him what’s next for founder archetypes (particularly design founders).  LINK

This question remains on my mind as I look at my peers, both those I have a relationship with as well as those I simply observe online. And the following is a reflection on some of those feelings.

Every young person (and plenty of non-young people), trying to strike gold and solve problems, is architecting themselves after a dominant personality of our field.

These archetypes equally modeled themselves off of someone else that inspired them. Steve was obsessed with Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. He would even take the “intersection of technology and the liberal arts” directly from him.

Now in the valley you see Brian Chesky talk about the hiring of Hiroki Asai, his global head of marketing who previously spent 16 years at Apple. The emulation runs as deep as hiring the cadre of individuals that made the reference what it was… and pushing for a similar effect.

But as I wrote in  Mimetic Hauntology …

We end up producing the same image. The same energies. We are breathing old life into new ideas.

If I had to describe my time away from Twitter, it would be simple → a search for the honest newness in myself.

Capital tends to search for low resistance paths of deployment. Pattern matching is the framework that gets expressed to many founders when starting their journey with venture capital.

“Give them a story they can easily map to.”

There’s a lot of frustration for folks that find themselves across the table from an investor that clearly can’t connect them to one of the previous folks they’ve backed in the past that turned out well for the fund’s performance.

What’s at risk when we require alignment to the dominant archetypes of before?

Diversity & Derivatives

I don’t mean diversity in a “fund underrepresented founders kind of way”. I mean an ecological richness for further growth. The image above from Megalopolis really stood out to me. A literal tech tree of sorts.

Imagine the arms of a tech tree as the great founders/researchers/etc that helped usher us along the branches of progress. Well if we stick to derivatives of these individuals… how much further can these branches really go?

That’s not to say that I view Sam Altman or Zuck as derivatives of the groupings I put them in. I believe they started in those pools but are clearly becoming something else.

What I am saying is that when I see emerging founders playing copy/paste on the behaviors of these archetypes, it concerns me that we actually aren’t going anywhere new. And that’s the whole point!

We are in a land without giants.

Sure there’s a lot of Percy Jackson’s running around. Sons and daughters of the previous gods. And I love them and look up to them. But there’s a clear and present need for new archetypes leading next-gen institutions.

We are in need of a great debate about the future!

Cesar Catilina, Megalopolis by Francis Ford Coppola

Origin points are a core part of folks’ identity. For example, I find it amusing that both Sam Altman and Jack Dorsey grew up in St. Louis, Missouri.

It’s critical to the mythology of the hero’s journey to establish the origin point, and like many in tech, our hero’s tend to venture West. Many American heroes have this in common.

Searching for folks with differentiating origin points, life journeys, developmental triumphs and failures → will lead us to new archetypes.

The new question becomes: will they be brave enough not to water themselves down for the benefits of pattern matching?

I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.

Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.

Much love.

Live in the light