# Dalton & Michael: Silicon Valley's cargo culting problem

**Author:** Dalton Caldwell, Michael Seibel
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/IR-dalton-michael-silicon-valley-s-cargo-culting-problem
**YouTube ID:** ECLJ95XNxA4

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When it comes to building a startup you’re never doing it entirely from scratch. Inspiration and ideas can come from a
variety of places, including other successful startups. But there’s a thin line between borrowing smart ideas and
copying them without much thought — otherwise known as “cargo culting.”  
  
In this episode Dalton and Michael break down the problem with cargo culting and offer advice on the right way to draw
inspiration from other successful companies.

## Transcript

the idea that superficially copying Uber and copying the things that they said in interviews pretending that you're Travis whatever yes doesn't work it's just like wearing a black turtleneck does not make you just yeah that does not make you Apple yeah this is Michael cyborg with Dalton Caldwell and today we're going to talk about cargo call tape we encountered this way too much in our life so

there's classic variety and then there's new age modern call girl quilting let's start with classic what's classic yeah well let's start with what is Cargo culture what do we even what are these guys what are we talking about all right so the history of the term is I understand it is when you superficially copy something without understanding why you're copying it yes that is Cargo quilting I think the history of someone looks this up and Wikipedia is like folks would create a fake Airfield so the planes came back

and so with something that looks like a landing strip yes because they wanted the airplanes to come back yes they didn't really understand why the planes were coming so like oh if we make a fake Landing Strip yes then the airplanes will come back okay um and so in this classic cargo quilting uh mentality it's just I'm going to copy something I don't know why yep I'm going to copy it and then I will be as successful as the thing I'm copying right yeah there well I think in the classic variety what's essential is the thing that you're copying is good yeah we're not no one would debate whether it's good or not right and and so we're

just debating how you copy it yeah I think what's funny about this modern New Age Chicago that we'll get to later is that like we could even just debate whether the thing you're copying is worth copying at all fair and so then it becomes this like kind of double-sided you're screwing yourself but let's just go with classic in the classic variety what goes wrong in car Carlton is because you don't understand really deeply understand the product that you're copying you missed some like obvious things yeah and I like your like you know 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 me there's a part of me I know there's something larger going yeah soul system and I think Founders did this I think we definitely wins of this and so let's talk about kind of the companies that were classically cover culted in our era well the first and most obvious one was Google yes everyone in the 2000s was obsessed with Google yes it was the best startup yes 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 did it yes and so all these ideas that may or may not have been good ideas we were kind of trained we're obviously the right where things to copy so the most obvious one is just like the office culture of having an open office and like yes bright colors and like free snacks and like all this like super googly stuff yep that was considered like you if you wanted to do real startup you had to be like Google right man not only that that's what made Google great was the lack of offices

yeah you're right no Cube Farms that's why it was beautiful 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 exactly exactly I think the other thing was this kind of flat org yeah no manager don't need management um another classic one that I loved was just the like hire as many smart Engineers as possible if you ever come across a smart engineer no matter what yep 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 like yeah like this was and it was emotional there was either examples more silly than that it was like the name of your startup you need to be cute yes or like Drop vowels remember flickers started this where there was no e in it so it would be you need a Google like logo yes that looked like primary colors and had like a shiny remember what was the turn like you would put like a lens flare on your lobe oh my god do you remember this yeah back in like 2006 yes and that was because Google and these other startups

had lens flare on their logos and they had cute names yes so you had to do it well and 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 two of course Facebook even closer to kind of power generation they're the ones that brought you the going viral oh yeah how is your thing gonna go viral Dalton how's it going to go viral they're the ones who brought you the

what where's the share button yeah you have to have a share button on everything uh what else did what else was the Uber I'm not the uh the Facebook Classics I think just trying to not make any money directly from users and build up as big of a user base you can yep 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 no matter what charging a users

was against the rules yeah because you wanted to get the most user data possible you wanted to get the biggest database of users and then the nobody cares about privacy what was that there was a quote where it was like privacy is doesn't matter I forget they were like anyway everyone that was blindly following what they did was trained to ignore all of those yes uh matters then maybe the last one even more modern Uber yeah this was the fun one um I think it started with spend as much money as possible which I

love because like uber was a successful company it's great and the idea that we could boil down a key strategy to spend as much money as possible but that was the takeaway they wrote a book about it scaling spend all the money as fast as it comes in what's funny about maybe these Uber ones that are slightly different from the Facebook and and Google ones like I don't think Uber even did these things yeah like cargo quilting kind of took on its mind of its own exactly to be really clear on the point Uber did a great job of what they did yes it's the folks that were like

well Uber did X so we should do this yes without really understanding why Uber did the things they did they would superficially scale the way they scaled burn the way they burned yes ignore laws the way they ignore laws yes ignore unit economics go to as many cities as possible as possible yeah and so it was the superficial want to be Ubers yes that did the silliest stuff versus Uber itself pretty well right now let's be clear all these businesses worked yeah so let's talk

about it right 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 yeah I think that the conventional wisdom pre-google was that search was a commodity yes and that Yahoo was good enough and the incremental engineering breakthroughs and search wouldn't matter and Google disproved that where it was actually a hard technical problem yes and they were able to put those Engineers to work also historically this was right after the.com bubble crashed

so they're able to hire some great talents for uh that was available because the.com bubble just crashed and so if you really look at the decisions they made in context of History made a ton of sense made it perfect 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 no no they weren't even trying to do anything near as hard I think in Facebook's case another perfect example of like not charging users was really smart right they understood they could build an amazing ad business they understood

that scale was the only path to it and like Facebook is an amazing ads business right like that was really smart for them um not clear that every business should be an odds business 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 quilting Facebook succeeded yes not many again maybe maybe it's more than zero 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 right the second Facebook style profile you had was delivering infinitely less value yeah than the first one you had I would also argue that people you know Facebook and this whole going viral it's a lot easy to try to make your product go viral if users spend two hours a day using it right yes that day one Facebook people were spending two hours a day using it if people use your product five minutes a month it's a lot harder to go viral like yes

you need some different tactics yeah you can't just copy Facebook blindly and hope it works so it's like going viral was a great strategy for Facebook is it a great strategy for you and the last with Uber I think like the hilarious thing about Uber is that most of the common beliefs about Uber just weren't true people who are 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 one yep when like you remember the first time you took Uber like I do it was a huge moment in my like it literally was so valuable like it was immediately successful in San Francisco and so this idea that like oh Uber just like nobody liked it and like they just burned a bunch of money and somehow got successful I was like

that doesn't make any sense the idea that superficially copying Uber yeah and copying the things that they said in interviews yes pretending that you're Travis whatever yes doesn't work it's just like wearing a black turtleneck does not make you Steve Jobs yeah that does not make you Apple yes whereas like if you built a thing that people would use multiple times a week to get to the most important things in their life like work are their loved ones that's pretty good that's valuable it's so hard to replicate this stuff right man like yes it is hard you have

to be really smart to copy well so we talked about this classic cargo quilting and at least with the classic cargo quilting you're copying successful companies what concerns me more and more nowadays with the explosion evaluations is that we see a lot of Founders copying companies that haven't succeeded yet and this is what's really scary to me is that like some founder will be like well we have to do it this way because so-and-so coming to this and I'm like oh why are they good it's like well they're a billion dollar company they just

raised a series B they just did this like they heard they read some fundraising announcement 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 like a huge chunk of your company's strategy yeah your strategy you're the CEO of a company let me get this straight you're the CEO of the company yes you're telling me the strategy you're betting the farm on yes is based on you read a fundraising announcement and you have no other context oh but like a podcast interview with a founder and it has a lot of GitHub Stars it's one thing to

try to copy something that's working like you might get lucky like if you copy something that's not working I don't even know what are we doing here 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 well again just 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 yeah we saw the same thing Zoom Pizza yeah robotic

pizza making 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 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 quilting among startups where they're like oh if my startup looks is gonna is gonna be real it has to look like other startups yeah it's like The Superficial they're really focused on how people will perceive the startup

superficially yes like the logos thing we were talking about yes yes like what are some examples of The Superficial things that you want to do to pretend to be a startup yeah well I have to raise money right I have to have good advisors maybe someone God forbid told me I should have a patent right I have to have an amazing pitch deck I got to be able to pitch my company anywhere maybe a couple conferences I get invited to some press and these are things that Founders do to impress themselves to impress other Founders yep the user is not essential

users no it's all the superficial yes facade yes of this looks like a startup that looks like other startups that raise money so let's think about because we're talking about Target holding on three levels right we're like okay Garden variety cargo colting that's still really bad as you cargo Google then we're like okay the modern thing is Chicago called the modern unicorn that has very little revenue and now the super super modern it's just a cargo called the other struggling startup I love when someone references a startup that we know and we're like no

yes and I think that like maybe the base conclusion here is that it you have to do some copying you cannot innovate everything but I think that like I like when founders start with what does the user want starts with who the companies the user is paying for paying today to provide this service and what can we learn from those companies and then like what can we learn from those companies writing the service who are successful okay now let's think through it and I think once

you think through it the user's eyes you can tell which things are essential do people care about the Google logo or the care that they get search results they're good hey how about that fast 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 five minutes in their city so I think when founders start with the user they won't go into this cargo call thing

I think when they start with the like you said fundraising announcement 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 and what you do is you go and Google for things and copy and paste blindly all the stuff you copy and paste three different things just put in your paper and submit it yes that is not evidence of original thinking no no versus you go read a bunch of places yes

you digest the information you synthesize it into your own original work yes you maybe cite the sources of what you're learning from yes but you actually took the time to digest and process these things same thing with the the music industry where if you plagiarize a song that's a problem yeah like if you just rip off someone's music 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 yes totally cool that's how that's literally that's the game that's music that's a music business is it 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 that's the thing that suck about startups is that you do have to think about a lot of things there isn't just you can't just copy and paste there's just a checklist but you do have to think carefully but I think that's why really smart

people are attracted to it yeah because like you have to think really carefully yeah it's an amazing test of your skills all right great chat great thanks [Music] thank you
