1/100 alright @threadapalooza lfg for those tuning in this is 100 tweets on a subject as an exercise in... something. feel free to mute, not sure why you follow me anyways

today's subject is remixing vgr's Gervais Principle henceforth referred to as ("the og")

2/100 **disclaimer** this exercise will be considered successful if it's 10% useful. it contains about 3 showers worth of thoughts, so take it with the same amount of salt as a 40-min long voicemail from a buddy who tried shrooms for the first time

3/100 **disclaimer pt 2** I will refuse to defend any claims made in this thread and QT this as a reply instead

4/100 suggest you read a summary of the og when you get a chance. if you're like me and skip to the comments, here's the orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296 

5/100 it made me kinda depressed when I first read it. but the light at the end of the tunnel is that it best describes behavior in zero-sum environments

6/100 the og frames players in an org as clueless, losers and sociopaths

7/100 I'll call my reframed groups owners, missionaries and mercenaries. these don't map fully to the og's groups. behavior isn't mutually exclusive tho

8/100 owners exercise economic control over the firm. there's two types: passive (e.g., index funds) and active (e.g., founders)

9/100 active owners attempt to align the org with their long-term objectives. that could be getting rich or connecting the world. passive owners mostly just care about optics and financial metrics

10/100 so the degree to which you hold shares in the firm you are an owner. and when ppl ask you to act like an owner, it generally means think long term rather than selfishly

11/100 missionary and mercenary qualities are usually blended

12/100 so, imagine you're playing an RPG and you get 10 points to put into MIS or MER and you reallocate every quarter or review cycle or whatever

13/100 so behavior can change both between jobs and within them. for example people who burn out tend to shift toward mercenary behavior

14/100 missionary behavior is closest to the og's Clueless. the org mission aligned with your own or you allow the org mission to subsume your own

15/100 this often means taking a bad economic deal - the org reaps upside and individual takes downside

16/100 company missions are written broadly enough that ppl can join as missionaries of different "religions" despite being in the same firm, so to speak - look at coinbase and "no politicking"

17/100 mercenary behavior means you want to get paid and also protect personal downside. i.e., real-life mercenaries know they don't get to enjoy their paycheck if they don't survive the mission

18/100 some ppl arrive as mercenaries, but also some give up on the mission but feel stuck inside the org so they reallocate points

19/100 there's different types of mercenary behavior - some folks clock in for 8 hours (waiting), some just want to get good at their thing (crafting), and the worst ones are the looters

20/100 Wait-ers are the minimum-effort vgr loser, not aligned with mission or colleagues, just want to put in min effort

21/100 looters are actively destructive - they not only want to get paid but will take from others internal and external to get it. these are closest to the og Sociopaths and should be avoided at all costs

22/100 as lee kuan yew said once there's 3 generations of corruption, an institution is fucked - same with companies and looters, though it's probably more like 2

23/100 craft-ers just want to do their thing well. score takes care of itself, etc.

24/100 execs can either be active owners (e.g., founders) or mercenaries, but there aren't really many missionary execs unless they were homegrown

25/100 owner and craft-er execs are great to work with, but craft-er execs get outcompeted by looter execs cuz they keep their heads down, so it's up to the owners

26/100 execs who present too loudly as missionaries can be looters in disguise

27/100 visionary types are usually owners, but owners don't have to be visionaries. e.g., a lot of b2b isn't about changing the world :sparkle:

28/100 one way to detect missionary/looters is seeing how often the mission changes. everyone gets feedback on the mission, but looters a/b test messaging

29/100 a/b tested messaging is like asking a computer; it fundamentally doesn't care about what it's saying, just about maximizing the reward function (e.g., ppl nodding in a specific meeting)

30/100 so a/b tested missions will be weirdly speific in some places and vague in others - basically some areas/functions get pandered to

31/100 so basically a looter exec will sell whatever message they think will stick on order to gain resources to extract

32/100 founder-led companies are more resilient against looters because the owners are still around and paying attention, and care

33/100 like a real animal, companies can withstand more parasites if they're well fed and healthy to start

34/100 anyways so your options as a lowly employee who's reading this are to decide how to allocate your points. I personally try to work places where I can believe in the mission without squinting, but also without needing to keg-stand the kool-aid

35/100 this is further helped by being somewhere that's growing. if the pie is growing then people don't need to fight over share

36/100 if you don't need to fight over share, then you don't need to do sociopathy stuff and you can sleep like a normal person. and still feel like you're not getting exploited

37/100 this will sound vaguely marxy but basically the way to avoid ppl feeling exploited is for them to actually own the means of production (e.g., hold shares in the company)

38/100 startups have of course figured this out with options / equity. you act like an owner because you actually are one

39/100 the corollary of this should be that to get people to act *more* like owners, you should *increase their ownership* (though probably backweight the vesting to prevent free riding) but that's for another time

40/100 I think the binary distinction between missionaries and mercenaries is a bit weird and not very employee-friendly because someone can both want the team to succeed and also want to get paid

41/100 if you look at sports this is evident - and you'll even (sometimes) see star players make salary sacrifices (if it's capped) to accommodate other teammates

42/100 I'm also not sure if the whole "we only recruit missionaries" thing is a posturing like "we don't negotiate with terrorists" when afaik everyone negotiates with terrorists but also can't say so.

43/100 not comparing startup employees demanding mroe equity to terrorists lol

44/100 so the way out of the trap as a regular person is to:
1. try to be somewhere that isn't zero sum (i.e., growing)
2. become more of an owner so you're aligned with the rest of the business

45/100 this is sort of an naive "rationalist quokka" view because there's degrees to everything and it's hard to execute and people will lie and cheat and steal, but it's allowed me to preserve my happiness despite the corporate world

46/100 fuck this is hard