Founding vs. Inheriting: A Review and My Own Saga of the Culture War Between East and West Coast

It is by mere coincidence that my own fate has fallen at the intersection between East Coast inherited institutions and West Coast Founder Disruptors that Balaji highlights in his post: Founding vs. Inheriting. As a naive youthful college graduate in 2012 I embarked on a non-traditional start to my career by spending a year in war-torn Afghanistan implementing what I thought of at the time as just another software system for the Department of Defense. Little did I know at the time that I was spearheading the implementation of a disruptive technology, Palantir Technologies, for an institution that was historically bound by bureaucracy, inheritance, and in many respects, failure. Ten years and dozens of legal fights, politically motivated campaigns, and billions of dollars later, disruptive technology from Palantir and other west coast emerging players in the defense sector are still fighting the inherited legacy institutions that marry the good, ol’ boy big defense primes with the Department of Defense and other east coast institutions.

It has been a blessing and a curse that I began my career working for Founders that declared war on status quo, legacy, failing, technology of inherited institutions of the East Coast. As I went on to pursue my dream career of working for an East Coast Institution (an Intelligence Agency) I missed the opportunity to come to the realization at an early age that East Coast Institutional Ideology is failing across the board. I learned the hard way by waiting 5 years to start my “dream job” due to a clerical error in which I called out a bureaucrat for ironically not heeding their own advice to “pay attention to the details” when reviewing my security clearance paperwork. Finally, after less than a year and struggling to stay in a “because that’s how we have always done it” culture, I departed. My career was born out of working for the disruptors of the west and doomed in attempt to adapt to the culture of the east.

Balaji’s reference to this culture war of Founding (West Coast) vs. Inheriting (East Coast) is really only addressing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the failings of the East Coast institutions. The East Coast institutions are incentivized to over-bureaucratize their systems through what Eric Weinstein refers to as an embedded growth obligation. Instead of decentralizing and optimizing with new technology and ideas, the East Coast continues to attempt to…