The successful founder is an extraordinarily driven person.
Everyone knows the type: the founder works as though his life depends on it, and in his few spare moments, he talks about the company like a father whose son leads the little league conference in home runs. The founder is obsessed. And for good reason: he has the most to gain from success and the most to lose from failure. But no founder, even the most dedicated, can succeed without the right team. But how to find it?
Not every employee can be given the promise of equity and seven-figure compensation. But they all need to be equally obsessed for the success of the mission. The roots of this motivation must be deeper than money, pizza Fridays, or extra vacation days. A great team isn’t motivated by the prospect of spending less time at work, but rather by the appeal of the work itself.
This team, the group of people who are highly motivated both by the mission of the company and by the quality of the team itself, is what Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal, describes as a “mafia”. This isn’t the typical cloak and dagger understanding of the word. Rather, this is a mafia doing good, but with a sense of camaraderie that the Godfather himself would be impressed by. These people are proud to be associated with one another and with their organization. Members of the mafia are fiercely loyal, and are competitive amongst themselves not to step on each other on the way to the top of the corporate ladder, but to improve one another. Thiel points out that in this mafia-type organization, the enemy isn’t within the team, but without. The mafia seeks to defeat whatever opposes its mission, not its own people.
In its most elementary sense, the best team is the one that voluntarily gathers for drinks on Fridays after work, the group that celebrates the successes of its individuals as a victory for the collective, the people who deliver their finest work not simply for their own benefit, but out of care for one another.
Peter Thiel’s advice certainly scares a lot of people. LinkedIn gurus left and right stress the idea of “work-life balance” and advise job seekers to run if they hear the phrase “we're just like family here”. And this makes a lot of sense… if you’re not in the right mafia. If the mission of the company doesn’t inspire sublime visions of grandeur in a potential employee, if the team isn’t full of people who that person would voluntarily spend time with, the job would simply be a stressful and overly demanding experience. It would be better to clock in and out of a dead-end, boring job than to poorly fit into an organization with this type of tribal workplace culture.
But for the truly bold, those who are willing to pursue greatness, to find fulfillment in their whole lives, rather than having a relaxing, meaningless, and slightly miserable career, there is a mafia out there. But not just any mafia will do. Somewhere, there is one that you specifically belong in, one that desperately needs a person with your exact skills and personality. And Verso Jobs will help you find it. Our unique hiring platform uses a gamified system of questions to build profiles for both potential employees and companies, and seeks to find the ideal match for every position. The perfect mafia is right around the corner.
