The Forlorn Hope
It’s fairly easy to join a company when things have grown beyond the point where certainty has settled to comfortable levels financially, technically and organizationally. Anyone can do that: office space is nice, chairs are comfy, salaries and perks are generous. At this point, the org quickly becomes increasingly populated by risk-repellent people and some sort of bourgeoisie sets foot who come from similar or comfier environments, bringing their bourgeois mindsets, processes and requests. So, we will just call them that, The Bourgeoisie.
A totally different story is to join a startup at an early stage, where uncertainty reigns, where the runway is short, salaries are modest and no product can be seen in the horizon. Not for the faint of heart. At this stage, the organization is made of relatively younger, risk-friendlier people who are in it for the glory and not so much for the quid. These people are the org’s Forlorn Hope. A forlorn hope1 is a band of soldiers chosen to take the vanguard in a military operation, such as an assault through the kill zone of a heavily defended position, where the risk of casualties is extremely high. Such a band is also known as the enfants perdus (French for 'lost children'). Chances are things might not go well for them, but they are still willing to charge full steam ahead, bayonet in hand, for an amorphous ideal.
Because The Bourgeoisie and The Forlorn Hope belong to different historical moments of the organization, they tackle different historical problems. The Bourgeoisie deals with simpler, more palatable challenges, which ends up painting them as tidier, brainier, smoother, since they don’t need to cut so many corners. Because the Forlorn Hope has been basically trying to get their way through Omaha beach2 under heavy artillery, mud and sinking sands, they tend to be seen, in today’s eyes, as dirty, hacky and undisciplined; many of them still may wear the face paint in meetings. History can be ungrateful: because time only flows forward, we can get to see how the Forlorn Hope performs in today’s context but we can’t get to see how The Bourgeoisie would have performed in the messier past. As some of them can’t adapt or are not trained in time for the new context, The Old Guard eventually disbands and its legacy fades away, somehow reenacting the ending of the movie “Casino” while The House of the Rising Sun plays as each member of the mafia falls down. Some of them eventually join new lost causes elsewhere.
There is a lot of filler written about the evolution of the overly abstract concept of startup culture as things grow, but not so much written about the clash of The Bourgeoisie and The Lost Children; the inevitable encounter of The Beauty and The Beast.
History tends to blur the past. It happens. But the past must be honored and reconciled with the present: the only reason The Bourgeoisie can get to sip their tea today is because of those who established a beachhead where there was only mud.
As the song from Phoenix3 goes:
Bourgeois, why would you care for more?
They give you almost everything,
You believe almost anything.