Killing the Abraham


In Matthew 1:1 in the Bible, we find the begats.



I call the founder, founders or founding team of a company “The Abraham”. The Abraham influences all that follows, sets the vision and direction for the company, and the Abraham’s mores, habits, preferences, flaws and prejudices are often built, consciously or unconsciously, into the fabric of the company. This influences the products and services, first and foremost. But the Abraham also influences everything from company HR policies, the kinds of employees that work there, its investors, its customer service and even its logo and office decor. You can often tell what the founder cared about, and didn’t care about. You go to Google and it’s like a playground for adults– curious, smart adults — massive dinosaur in the courtyard, lego tables, beanbag chairs, primary colors — and then you read interviews with Larry and Sergey where they credit their success to having attended Montessori schools, and you see where it came from.

Often the Abraham is CEO, but doesn’t stay CEO. Google’s Abrahams are Larry and Sergey, and they had a strong influence on the company even during the 10 years that Eric Schmidt was CEO. Oracle is very Larry Ellison. Martha Stewart is very Martha Stewart. Zynga is very Mark Pincus. Groupon is very Andrew Mason. And isn’t Apple so very much Steve Jobs, so much so that when he left, and his successors tried to kill the Abraham, the company nearly died? It’s hard to kill the Abraham. Not only that, if you succeed, it may not be possible for the new leader to assume the mantle. Best for the Abraham to stick around, and work closely with the new leaders to make sure the spirit of the company survives. This has been, in my experience and observation, the best method for retaining the magical juju. This is why the role of incoming, non-native CEO at a startup is a notoriously difficult job. They don’t fit in with the company culture. Most of them don’t last a year.

Companies without a strong Abraham lose their way. If you can’t identify who is at the helm, it better be a commodity business that anybody can run (Warren Buffett: “Invest in a company any fool can run, since some day a fool will.”) Did Pierre Omidyar leave too early, or cede too much control to be able to set the course for eBay? In the book The Perfect Store the author talked about Meg Whitman asking if Pierre was going to stay, but did he strongly influence its direction? Yahoo wasn’t led for very long — from what I can gather, less than a year? — by David Filo and Jerry Yang, its Abrahams. The Abraham can also lose control when the extent of the empire becomes too great, and the Abraham can no longer see what’s happening in the farflung regions. The farther you get from the people you are making decisions for, the worse those decisions are likely to be.

The Abraham is especially powerful in social software, in anything that shows the people, the members, what to do, how to communicate, and how to behave. The founders dictate what the software does, how people use it, what the practices and mores are of the community. This is built into the software, and its assumptions of human behavior. As Larry Lessig noted, code is law. In social software how you interact with others is influenced by what values are built into the software. On Facebook we are very much living in Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of society. MySpace was like Chris and Tom, Friendster was like Jonathan Abram, LinkedIn is like Reid Hoffman. Foursquare is like Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. And dare I say Flickr was like something that would have happened if you put some English majors, a philosopher, some artists and hackers in a blender.

There’s a lot of glory in being the Abraham — you’re the father or three religions after all. People follow your lead. But most founders aren’t thinking about this when they start out, they just like making things, have a vision of something new. In dreams begin responsibilities, as Delmore Schwartz wrote. Abrahams are often called upon to do difficult work, thankless tasks, and sometimes, terrible things, as when god asked Abraham to kill his own, firstborn son, Isaac. Steve Jobs was rightly praised for his ability to “Kill his babies” — that is, disrupt himself. We may be taking the metaphor too far here, but hey. Let’s.

That’s the fate of the Abraham. Kill your babies, or be killed by your babies. Beget something great and the begats will follow! Salmon, Booz, Jesse, Ozias, Zorobabel and all the rest.

12 thoughts on “Killing the Abraham

  1. Isaac was a child. The reason he was able to beget Jacob is that at the last minute god let Abraham off the hook.

  2. This seems to be a similar line of thinking to Rushkoff’s Programme or be Programmed – understand the origins and intentions of a tool to understand what that tool is really for. Very useful perspective – thanks for writing it.

  3. Oh, and the best part is that Primer’s Abraham carries a loaded last name — Terger. There’s one thing that is common amongst tech founders: lack of ability to deal with ethical issues, leading to a lot of regret.

  4. Pingback: Caterina Fake on the influence of founders | ASH-10

  5. I’ve always wondered why the “begets” even care about the line that led to Joseph, who has no relation to Jesus whatsoever. Why not trace the line that led to Mary? Seems like either blatant sexism or an admission that, yeah, Joseph was the real father. Though i guess a lot of them were kings and whatnot.

  6. I think I found another typo.

    “youâ€™re the father or three religions after all.”

    I suspect you meant of, not or.

  7. I remember this passage from the small bit of the Bible I’ve read. I then tried to use “begat” in a high school Literature essay to describe how one event led to another. My teacher didn’t quite understand.

    I like your view of founders as “The Abraham.” I think it’s important for founders to keep this perspective as they look to make a profound impact on the world.

    Thanks for sharing.

  8. Abra-ham seems wrong somehow since Ham was cursed, the story seems corrupted or something. Who would accept having Ham in their name knowing that the perv had done something to his drunk nekked dad ? I mean really ? I ain’t gonna claim no Ham-ite ancestors yuk ?

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