As If You Had Collaborated

The “it” in this quote describes both an effective terrorist organization and, for Sellis, an effective team. Sellis led product at Discord after seven years at Snap. On Lenny’s Podcast in September 2026, he explained why he likes to design teams like a terrorist organization, a comparison he admits he “should probably workshop”; Discord’s Chief People Officer was “simultaneously horrified and intrigued” by the idea. Before giving the definition, he asked listeners to “set aside violence for a moment.” Right after, he described his own teams the same way, with the strategy “almost like a religion to the entire team.”

No executive, Sellis says, ever tells a team to stop collaborating, and he takes that as a warning sign: every extra person in the loop is a place where work can wait, so a team moves “as slow as the slowest node in the system.” He wants product managers at fast-growing companies making calls the founders would have made a year or two earlier. With both parts in place, he says, they get the results “as if you had collaborated.”

At Snap, his team boiled the strategy down to “the fastest way to share a moment with the people you care about,” then broke it into parts: fast meant how long the app took to load, and the people you care about meant best friends. A feature with only a tenuous link to that sentence probably wasn’t a priority. He gave an onboarding talk on it to every new hire, every week or two, for seven years.

Peter Thiel makes a similar comparison in his startup book Zero to One (2014): “The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults.” His opposite of a cult is a consulting firm, which lacks “a distinctive mission of its own.” Sellis agreed when the host, Lenny Rachitsky, brought up cults: “You can’t spell culture without cult.” What cults and good teams share is the first of his two parts, a mission everyone on the team believes in.