Complicit by Design: How Startup Culture’s “Wartime” Positioning Corrodes Professional Ethics
by Chris, 2025 Design & Technology Fellow
Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win. - Ben Horowitz1
The first time I was told I was at war was not in a televised address from my country’s leader, nor was it a news broadcast covering a military invasion. It was in a memo written by my boss. I was an intern at a tech startup, a software company that was staffed not with privates, sergeants, and generals but with designers, product managers, and developers like me. The founder and CEO of the company had just authored a directive to all employees: we are at war, and our enemy is our biggest competitor. We must do whatever is necessary to win. When asked about this at an all-company meeting later, our leader made it clear that he did not think that this language was hyperbolic. We needed to treat our industry as a conflict zone and our company’s success as a life-and-death battle.
I had heard this language in the corporate realm before—from Ben Horowitz, the venture capitalist at a16z. In his blog, Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO, Horowitz describes how when a company is in “wartime,” its leadership needs to play by different rules, that in wartime, decision-making must be consolidated and dissent must be crushed. Concepts like “employee satisfaction” and “tolerance” are liabilities. The “mission” is all that matters. In wartime, a CEO must act like “the competition is sneaking into her house and trying to kidnap her children.”
There is a legitimate case to be made that early-stage companies, especially those burdened by exponential growth targets demanded by venture capitalists, are at a high risk of failing and that risk needs to be communicated to employees. But wartime framing goes beyond that by adopting language that evokes a threat to
physical and psychological safety. If the recent trend of AI firms adopting “996” schedules along with wartime framing is any indication, it may be that founders are hoping this threat brings productive gains.
At the time, I wasn’t sure why our CEO was suddenly adopting this language. Our industry was competitive, sure, but it had been for years. Our financial success was not guaranteed, but that was true for most startups. Employees were already focused on increasing productivity. Honestly, I figured the adoption of Horowitz’s vision would result in nothing more than some overdramatic office posters. My colleagues and I brushed off his memo as another oddity from our quirky but passionate leader.
In the next few months, however, we started to see how our “wartime” CEO would demand work be done quickly and without question, even when it had questionable business value or didn’t align with established practices. We saw how entire teams that couldn’t complete work without first getting clarification or justification were laid off for being “inefficient.” We saw employees who raised ethical questions about our products fired for bringing forward concerns deemed irrelevant to the mission. It was clear that in war, there was no time to question commands.
We were also told that if we didn’t like this new work culture, we should leave. At the time, this was not an impossible option: the job market was healthy, and many of us chose to resign. But as I moved between roles at different companies, the workplace- as-a-warzone mentality followed. I faced this rhetoric several more times, each because of a seemingly existential threat to the mission. (In rough order: the development of mobile apps, cryptocurrencies, COVID-19, the metaverse, high interest rates, and A.I. were all used as excuses to enter a “wartime” approach).
But wartime framing is also an effective tool to undermine an employee’s sense of professional ethics. When our bosses bombard us with messaging that we are fighting for our literal survival, they condition us to implement plans without question. The unintended consequences or negative externalities of our decisions are not appropriate to discuss because they are not in service to the mission. Wartime framing absolves workers of responsibility for problems that are unrelated to profit. It creates a culture where decisions from authority cannot be, and never are, challenged.
The last decade has seen wartime framing applied to social media, transportation, and various consumer segments. Uber and Airbnb regarded themselves as “at war” with local regulators, so employees developed techniques to deceive and bribe them.
Facebook was “at war” with anything that took attention away from its users, so its product managers allowed harmful but engaging content to flourish on its platform. Amazon engineers developed technology to enable competitive delivery times that compromised the safety of its human labor force.
In all of these cases, we find examples of employees who set aside their own ethical concerns in pursuit of achieving their company’s mission, in part because they operated in an environment where “mission success” supposedly had do-or-die stakes. Even employees who did not fully subscribe to this framing became complicit in a culture that made it clear that failure to fulfill leadership’s goals would not be tolerated.
My FASPE fellowship has opened my eyes to the extent that an “at-all-costs” environment that relies on hierarchy and inflammatory rhetoric can result in moral calamity. I fear that the wartime culture in startups, whether through its desensitizing use of language, its insistence on the absolute authority of company leadership, or its maniacal focus on mission success, has created a class of workers that do not value their own sense of right and wrong, because that sense presents itself as a liability to their careers.
Such a class of workers is primed for complicity.
Chris was a 2025 FASPE Design & Technology Fellow. He is currently a software engineer at an AI technology startup.
Notes