Nuno Sebastiao
If you had less to be thankful for this past Thanksgiving, now is the time to make changes in your startup, revisit the mission of founders and reevaluate your values that started it all. During this time year, I like to reflect about lessons learned from the original entrepreneurs, the Pilgrims. They had true grit and forged a new world like none before. They were also European, lest we forget, and their experiment at Plymouth Rock founded the ultimate American startup.
I’ve started companies on both sides of the Atlantic, and for the last several years, have been thoroughly immersed in Silicon Valley culture. And so I want to share the lessons imported from across the ocean by the Pilgrims, which are still valuable today.
While this may all sound like a page out of your grade school history book, the Pilgrim experience can still teach us a few things about thriving in modern Silicon Valley. First, the original contract amongst the Pilgrims stipulated that everything produced was to go into a common store, and every member was to be allotted equal shares. Everyone was to work for the common good, and altruism was to be its own reward. Later, this socialist principle would give way to a better system of free enterprise.
However, Pilgrim society’s focus on the larger community remains a valuable lesson for startup teams today. With access to instant communication technology and today’s always-on culture, it’s easy for individuals to have an “always about me” attitude. But like the Pilgrims, when we think of moral or ethical issues on a community or societal level instead of an individual level, we can also create highly functioning teams that can repeatedly weather failure and rebound quickly.
Eventually, the Pilgrims adopted a free enterprise system where individuals could own their own homes, land, and keep the fruit of their own labor. The result? Production increased 700%. The Pilgrims discovered that people had no reason to put forth extra effort without the motivation of personal incentives to do so. Within a startup today, we can similarly empower people to responsibly adjust output so they can accomplish what needs to be done to keep their lives running smoothly. That means experiment and build a culture where work schedules are achievable on a professional level, and where people are proud to achieve their goals for the greater good of the company as well as themselves.
Most of the Pilgrims had been mainly agriculturists but had to learn entirely new skills such as printing and light manufacturing in order to be self-sufficient in the new frontier land. Today’s startup employees must also embody this same “maker culture” and possess more versatility than ever before. To build a successful team, find coders that can talk ROI, seek out sales people that know technology down the bare metal, or hire marketers that can crunch financial term sheets.
And let’s also remember that the Pilgrims were not the original settlers. There were indigenous people, the first Americans, already successfully thriving on the land. The Native Americans taught the Pilgrims about local agronomy, fishing and construction among other proven survival skills. Yet within modern startup culture inherently comes a heavy predisposition for disruption and disintermediation of the old ways. Too much of that leads to excessive hubris, and we can start to ignore history and repeat mistakes.
The American Pilgrims – our O.G. entrepreneurs – showed us much about forging something from nothing, and founded the ultimate unicorn startup. Today, we can achieve similar success if we do the hard work, learn new skills, heed the past, and look out for one another.
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