We want to believe that we are data-driven, logical, and rational. We are less so than we like to think. In particular, the tech industry is tribal, and Silicon Valley is a mecca for many religious leaders. People need to believe, belong, and behave consistently with their belief system and the tribe to which they belong. Beneath every technology, framework, product, and architectural decision, we will find the building blocks of faith: dogma, rituals, prophets, schisms, sacred texts, and moral judgment.

Technology has many cult leaders. Bill Gates exemplifies the revenge of the nerds. Steve Jobs transformed Apple product launches into the equivalent of mega-church services. Satoshi Nakamoto is a mysterious leader who remains anonymous and has vanished, yet is revered because his white paper is considered sacred scripture by his followers.

This trend has been persistent in the technology industry for much longer than we care to admit. There were religions around the first email readers: Mail, VI, Emacs, Elm, and PINE. Traditionalists wanted the purity of mail. VI improved the user experience by adding a text editor. Emacs improved upon the editor, but it was too heavy for email. Elm was a simplification and more user-friendly. PINE improved upon Elm, but what better way to signal to your base religious beliefs than to name your product with an acronym: Pine Is Not Elm?

We had PC vs. Mac, but as of our last check, Microsoft and Apple were two of the largest companies in the world. We had the cloud wars between AWS, GCP, and Azure, but why pick one when you should invest in Amazon, Google, and Microsoft? There is a constant debate about open vs. closed. Open-source is great for distribution, but it can be harder to monetize. Closed is much better for monetization, but it’s harder to build distribution. Yet, the most closed and secretive company, Apple, opened iTunes for the PC to increase its user base of music lovers and sell more iPods, which was its entry into consumer electronics and, arguably, the harbinger of the smartphone.

Other examples include brick-and-mortar vs. e-commerce, Outlook vs. Gmail, Office vs. G Suite, on-prem vs. cloud, mobile native vs. mobile web, Nvidia vs. AMD GPUs, Snowflake vs. Databricks, centralized vs. decentralized, TradFi vs. DeFi, Web2 vs. Web3, and more. Today, we are debating general foundation models vs. specific models. For religious purposes, we need to pit one against the other, but history shows us that both have their merits. We should use both depending on needs and use cases. Both can be effective and win.

Fundamentally, founders and management teams are the religious leaders and their disciplines. Founders identify a problem that they believe the world has solved incorrectly, and they are on a mission to build a solution for the world that they believe is far better. That belief, mission, and values are inherently a religion, whether we want to admit it. Since the technology industry changes so much and so quickly, your company’s belief system, which includes your mission, values, culture, and operating principles, may be some of the few things that are stable over time and the foundations upon which we can use to build an enduring company.

While we work to align our companies around our belief system, we should also acknowledge that the best founders and management teams (1) are willing to iterate on their belief systems to improve upon them, (2) understand that the world embraces AND over OR, and (3) now and then, we need to be willing to break from our belief system, as Steve Jobs did when making iTunes compatible with Microsoft.