startups as social movements
A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action.
It is usually an advantage to a movement, and perhaps a prerequisite for its endurance, that these roles should be played by different men succeeding each other as conditions require. When the same person or persons (or the same type of person) leads a movement from its inception to maturity, it usually ends in disaster. The Fascist and Nazi movements were without a successive change in leadership, and both ended in disaster. It was Hitler's fanaticism, his inability to settle down and play the role of a practical man of action, which brought ruin to his movement. Had Hitler died in the middle 1930's, there is little doubt that a man of action of the type of Goering would have succeeded to the leadership and the movement would have survived.*
The True Believer - Eric Hoffer (Pages 147-148)
Successful disruptive startups go through the same three stages that all successful social movements do. (This is not surprising since both involve a desire to change the status quo by advocating the possibility of a different future.) Sicknesses like the founder's syndrome arise when the leadership refuses to change as a startup passes through its natural phase transitions.
* Hoffer is not endorsing Fascist or Nazi movements here.
Another apt sociological metaphor is "startup as a tribe". The small can defeat the big by its sheer solidarity and dynamism.
Here is a delineation of some thoughts of Ibn Khaldun:
Concerning the discipline of sociology, he conceived a theory of social conflict. He developed the dichotomy of "town" versus "desert," as well as the concept of a "generation," and the inevitable loss of power that occurs when desert warriors conquer a city... Muqaddimah may be read as a sociological work: six books of general sociology... The work is based around Ibn Khaldun's central concept of 'asabiyyah, which has been translated as "social cohesion", "group solidarity", or "tribalism." This social cohesion arises spontaneously in tribes and other small kinship groups; it can be intensified and enlarged by a religious ideology. Ibn Khaldun's analysis looks at how this cohesion carries groups to power but contains within itself the seeds - psychological, sociological, economic, political - of the group's downfall, to be replaced by a new group, dynasty or empire bound by a stronger (or at least younger and more vigorous) cohesion... Perhaps the most frequently cited observation drawn from Ibn Khaldun's work is the notion that when a society becomes a great civilization (and, presumably, the dominant culture in its region), its high point is followed by a period of decay. This means that the next cohesive group that conquers the diminished civilization is, by comparison, a group of barbarians. Once the barbarians solidify their control over the conquered society, however, they become attracted to its more refined aspects, such as literacy and arts, and either assimilate into or appropriate such cultural practices. Then, eventually, the former barbarians will be conquered by a new set of barbarians, who will repeat the process. Some contemporary readers of Khaldun have read this as an early business cycle theory, though set in the historical circumstances of the mature Islamic empire.
