Conversation

One of the things that outsiders tend not to immediately grok about Silicon Valley, because it's so friendly, open, and accessible, is that personal loyalty is unquestionably the one value that rules all the rest by a mile. It's as strong as in mafia or Trump inner circles.
19
218
Above a minimum competence bar for technical and financial savvy, the social graph solves for loyalty above all. In particular, though the average level of integrity is the same as genpop, the pressure to sacrifice it for personal loyalty is vastly higher.
Replying to
"If your boss demands loyalty, give him integrity, if your boss demands integrity, give him loyalty" -- John Boyd. This rule of thumb does not really work in SV. The rule is "loyalty first always," and if you ever violate it, for integrity or whatever, you'll be shadowbanned :D
2
89
And I do mean *personal* loyalty, not tribal. 1:1. It's not a YC/Stanford old-boys club. It just looks that way to people used to east coast old-boys-networks. The "tribal" level emerges out of really tight and frequently-tested personal loyalty equations.
1
50
No, it really is open, friendly, and accessible to anybody willing to just show up, show off their talents, and be open. Unlike the east coast and other parts of the world, you don't have to jump through hoops to connect to people or get access.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @vgr
Do you feel that SV is "friendly, open, and accessible" because you are part of the personal loyalty circle? Is it that way to people who are not part of the personal loyalty circle?
5
44
There is tribal loyalty too, but that part is not as special. It shows up as hustle porn rhetoric mostly, as well as wagon-circling etc. on social media. There is a general closing of ranks against perceived hostile discourses, but the hard core of it is 1:1 personal loyalty.
1
28
One of the things I'm amazed by is that I've mostly kept my friends and network in SV for a decade even though I basically never offer or accept this kind of "personal loyalty" calculus and am, by SV standards, an unreliable "friend" who cannot be trusted to toe the party line.
2
35
In 10 years, I've only had 2-3 incidents of people demanding personal loyalty (very explicitly and directly... this stuff is not subtle) and being pissed at me for going rogue.
1
31
I think I've largely managed to stay on SV's good side because for my own reasons, I tend to agree with startup-crowd philosophy/economics/politics about 80% of the time, and am reliably tech-positive. So the statistics have worked in my favor.
2
39
But when I do break ranks, as I've been doing in the last week with the party line that Musk-buying-twitter-is-great, I do burn up non-trivial amounts of political capital. If you're in tech, it's probably healthy and good to periodically burn some of your political capital.
5
78
Tech is only interesting long term, like over decades, if you're loyal to the tech itself. As in, the slowly uncovered laws and principles of how technology works. If you get trapped by the people-level loyalty circus, ultimately you'll lose whatever tech instincts you have.
1
98
A clear "tell" is people who supposedly talk "tech and startups" but rarely say much about the tech itself, whether dumb or smart. Their attention is exclusively on the people. Psyche management etc. A kind of SV-kremlinology mindset.
2
78
To all those saying this is human baseline/default business etc. No... I've spent enough time in other environments that I can tell the combo of personal loyalty/high openness is unique. It's not like east-coast old economy business or DC politics. It's frontier sociology.
2
34