Business Monoculture

And yet, as the journalist Emily Chang documents in her 2018 book Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley technology companies have deliberately spent the last couple of decades progressively narrowing their culture. To a large extent, she blames the spreading influence of the Paypal Mafia. At Paypal’s founding, she writes, this group, which includes Palantir founder Peter Thiel, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and Tesla supremo Elon Musk, adopted the basic principle that to make a startup lean, fast-moving, and efficient you needed a team who thought alike. Paypal’s success and the diaspora of its early alumni disseminated a culture in which hiring people like you was a strategy. This is what #MeToo and fights for equality are up against.

—Wendy M. Grossman, The Fregoli delusion