“The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.”
Closer to the Cult End
In the “Of Cults and Consultants” section of Zero to One, Thiel sorts company cultures along a “linear spectrum.” At one end is the consulting firm, his example is Accenture, which lacks “a distinctive mission of its own” and whose people are “regularly dropping in and out” of clients they have no lasting tie to; he marks that pole “nihilism.” At the other end is the cult, all-out devotion and the “dogmatism” that comes with it. His advice to founders is to lean toward the cult end. People who quote this line usually keep only that half, forgetting that he is rejecting the opposite pole just as much: the rootless professional who believes in nothing.
In the next sentence Thiel says what a startup is actually right about: one of “those kinds of secrets” the outside world has missed and no consultant can sell you, a true and contrarian read on how something works. That is the part doing the work. Total conviction in a false belief is just a cult; the same conviction built around a real secret is a company worth starting.