Forgiveness and Silicon Valley: The Surprising Utility of Forgiveness

Moral Code Vol. 1

Introducing a new series: Moral Code 

The power of technology, and the science it is built upon, is increasingly boundless. AI is creating new efficiencies in most industries as well as creating art, autonomous systems are revolutionizing the way we defend our country, and symbiosis between our brains and computers seems more possible than ever. As each element of our lives is increasingly shaped by the technology we rely on, perhaps the only thing it won’t be able to change is the moral systems that our society is built upon. 

In the West, our moral systems are founded primarily on Judeo-Christian values, but modern Christianity has alienated many potential believers by portraying sin as violation of divine law passed down by a no-fun god, like God’s version of parenting’s famous “because I said so” tactic.  I know this instantiation of the faith has hurt a lot of people—perhaps even some of you reading this–and has led to a belief that science and liberal humanism alone can define a moral system. However, science is insufficient to provide a framework for living an ethical life, and the values held dear by humanists were developed within and shaped by the Judeo-Christian construct. 

Regardless of what your beliefs are, our society is a Judeo-Christian society and we have a moral compass. Not everybody does, and there are those that are willing to go for the ends regardless of what means have to be employed, and we'll have to be ready for that. - Lt. Gen. Richard Moore

What if God’s law could be viewed simply as wisdom passed down from a loving creator who desperately wants us to live our lives to our fullest?  In that framing, “sin” is self-destruction, rather than failure deserving of divine judgment. We are given the agency to follow that wisdom/law or reject it, but there are real consequences when we choose to reject it.  Some of these–don’t steal, don’t kill–have obvious consequences.  Some, less so.  Remember the Sabbath–without rest, we can’t be at our best.  Don’t make idols–you don’t control your idols, they control you.  Don’t lie–even if it gets you ahead at first, it will almost assuredly consume and destroy you with time.  “Be sure, your sin will find you out.”

This applies as much to society & community as it does to us as individuals.  Judaic law around the handling of food was originally meant to prevent disease (don’t eat bats, mmmkay).  Numerous laws around charity and justice were established to protect the vulnerable and prevent societal decay.  We are instructed to avoid covetousness because when our desires are formed by our neighbors’ desires, we are walking the path of violence and destruction (read Girard).  

I’m interested in exploring the ways this Judeo-Christian wisdom shapes our moral system with a particular focus on how it emerges in the culture of Silicon Valley. Even in a community where it’s rare to outwardly embrace one’s faith, Silicon Valley’s culture has, perhaps unwittingly, adopted a number of Christian teachings (but far from all of them). In a new series called Moral Code, I’m going to dig into how Christian moral teachings and the world of tech are more intertwined than they may seem.

What follows is my first entry…

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One overcast morning earlier this year, in Boca Chica, Texas, the largest rocket ever built slowly lifted off the launch pad as thousands cheered, including locals from town, SpaceX employees, and traveling onlookers, while millions more streamed the launch from all around the world.  The cheers grew louder as the rocket called Starship built speed and passed through max q (the point of maximum aerodynamic pressure on the vehicle).  And the cheers continued as… the rocket exploded. Or, as SpaceX put it, the rocket experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” Elon, along with most tech leaders following the launch from Twitter, considered this a victory, and the media lost its mind.  

 A tweet following the launch shows the difference in response from mainstream media and tech experts

Despite all the misanthropes and Monday morning quarterbacks obsessed with following the “failure,” Elon and the crew at SpaceX held firm in their excitement. This was a clear and important step forward on their mission to Mars. In fact, SpaceX expected failure. In the lead-up to the launch, Elon said that his “top hope” was that they clear the launch pad before anything went wrong. 

A tweet from Elon in the lead-up to the launch

Despite all media criticism, no industry has come anywhere close to tech in terms of growth and contributions to the nation’s GDP over the past 20 years, but the disconnect between the culture of tech and our culture more broadly has never been more obvious. SpaceX, in keeping with the longstanding philosophy of tech, accepts risk and failure — to occasionally gratuitous measure — as part of the agile learning experience. Mistakes are made, we learn from them, and we move on. 

At Founders Fund, we’ve seen many founders fail. We often fund them again. This “second chances” ethos has attracted significant public attention for all of its apparent strangeness, and has no shortage of critics in the media. When Parker Conrad founded Rippling after being ousted from Zenefits, the media cast doubt on his ability to succeed in his second effort building an HR software product. When we compare the two companies' trajectories, it’s clear that Parker’s second effort paid off. Zenefits was acquired for $209 million last year, whereas Rippling’s valuation currently stands at over $11 billion (more than 50 times as much as Zenefits was sold for). 

Graphic by Mike Petriano

Second chances in Silicon Valley are often credited to our success. When you have so much, it’s easy to be “gracious.” But that’s not it at all. Our philosophy of what essentially amounts to “forgiveness” is the reason we’ve succeeded. And we didn’t unearth the value while microdosing LSD at Burning Man. Forgiveness is, somewhat famously, a core Christian virtue. No one associates the tech industry with Christian values, but the tech industry’s embrace of the failure + forgiveness cycle is a critical part of our success. 

When it comes to forgiveness, God advised that we should forgive not once, but seventy times seven times, implying an infinite font of forgiveness.  But in a society like ours, riddled with broken relationships built on resentment, fear, vengefulness, neglect, and callousness, forgiving can often feel horribly unnatural. Why would we invest again in a founder whose company failed? How could it possibly be rational to “turn the other cheek” in an unjust and cruel world? If we’ve been bitterly wronged by those most important to us in our lives, why should we open ourselves up to being hurt again? And if we see the same people continue to hurt us or others time and time again, surely some form of retribution is required, right?

But these are all enslaving behaviors, even if we each have a tendency to attempt to justify our own version (myself included).  Maybe you had a bad family life and became estranged from your parents or siblings.  Or were bullied in school and sought revenge against your bully.  Or participated in “canceling” someone.  It might feel good in the moment to rage and meter out justice to the perceived offenders, but this generally doesn’t “fix” anything.  We are simply grasping at disunity, resentment, and fear.  And to quote Master Yoda, “Fear is the path to the dark side.  Fear leads to anger.  Anger leads to hate.  Hate leads to suffering.” 

Forgiveness, as an alternative to the above, is an abundance unlock.  Forgiveness allows for inevitable human error and growth.  That’s not to say that we’ll just snap our fingers and move on every time we are wronged (Sorry SBF, Elizabeth Holmes, Carlos Watson, et al).  Forgiveness is about your response.  Reconciliation is about their response.  Trust must be earned.  But taking that first step of forgiveness, which we are each uniquely empowered to do as individuals, provides a path to reconciliation and trust.  And this is how we build hope for the future.  

Much of global business outside of Silicon Valley gets this wrong by optimizing for failure avoidance in the face of an unforgiving business culture. And even within Silicon Valley, startups are able to disrupt more established tech players because of their nimbleness, quick decision-making, and willingness to fail and iterate.  Large bureaucracies have a tendency towards incrementalism that is rooted in fear and risk-aversion (the old adage “no one gets fired for buying IBM”). Hierarchical structures and procedure-overload guarantee that no one person is responsible for a decision, so as long as you follow all of the well-trodden rules, no one is really accountable.  On the other hand, if you don’t play by the rules, the consequence of failure is often career and reputation immolation.  

We are lucky that this is generally the worst of it in a Western Christian cultural context.  If you think this is tough, you should see how this sort of thing plays out in atheist cultures like China, where it is not uncommon to see business people crawling on their hands and knees reciting their failures at company conferences.

Despite the tech community’s frequent association with anti-religious views, we may be the closest to the imitation of Christ in this core virtue of forgiveness.  We encourage risk-taking, hold individuals accountable for outcomes, and offer second chances when things go wrong. If we are going to work with broken people towards a common goal, we can’t dwell on our inevitable brokenness. 

Silicon Valley understands forgiveness, and the rest of the country would do well to learn it too.  Not because it’s a Christian virtue, but because it works.