How to avoid cargo culting other startups

Executive overview

Founders copy successful companies without understanding why those companies made specific choices. The copies fail because the original decisions were highly context-dependent — tied to the company's specific market, timing, and product.

Start with what the user wants, then trace which decisions actually served those users. That filter separates essential from superficial.

Copying the surface of a successful company without understanding its context is cargo culting — and it almost always fails.

Classic cargo culting: Google, Facebook, Uber

• Google's open offices and "hire every smart engineer" policy made sense for a hard technical problem in a talent-rich post-bubble market — not universally
• Facebook's "never charge users, build an ads business" worked because Facebook's scale was unique and users spent hours daily on the product
• Facebook's "go viral" strategy required the product to already have daily engagement — it doesn't transfer to products used five minutes a month
• Uber's "burn money, expand to many cities" was misread: early investors funded cities where unit economics already worked, not ones where the product wasn't landing
• Uber was immediately, obviously valuable in San Francisco — the "just burn and scale" narrative was a myth

Modern cargo culting: copying companies that haven't succeeded yet

• Founders now copy unicorns based on fundraising announcements, not revenue or product-market fit
• When asked how much revenue the company they're copying makes, the most common answer is: "I have no idea"
• High valuations signal investor enthusiasm, not that a business model works
• WeWork and robotic pizza startups both attracted copycats before their models were proven — those copycats failed with them
• Copying a failing company is strictly worse than copying a successful one

Superficial startup mimicry

• Founders optimise for looking like a startup: advisors, patents, pitch decks, press, conference appearances
• These signals impress other founders — they have nothing to do with users or product
• The goal becomes "looks fundable" rather than "solves a real problem"

How to copy well

• Start with the user: what do they want, who are they paying today, what can you learn from those companies
• Ask whether users care about the specific thing you're copying (logo style, city expansion) or the underlying value (fast search, their friends are on it, the car shows up)
• Being influenced by many sources and synthesising something original is legitimate — plagiarising without thought is not
• The music industry works entirely through influence: everyone absorbs sounds and integrates them into new work; ripping off a song gets you sued
• There is no startup checklist; you have to think carefully about each decision in context