PEOPLE LIKE US DO THINGS LIKE THIS

On community as the oldest mastermind in the world.

There is a line I keep returning to from Seth Godin's book This Is Marketing.

People like us do things like this.

He meant it as a marketing principle. The most compressed possible statement of how culture shapes consumer behaviour. We do what our tribe does. We buy what our tribe buys. We vote how our tribe votes. We build what our tribe builds. The brand that figures this out wins.

But the longer I have sat with the line, the more I think Godin pointed at something larger than marketing. The sentence works in reverse, as an instruction rather than an observation.

If people like us do things like this, then the fastest way to become a person who does a thing is to spend time among people who already do it.

Which is, when you say it plainly, just a long-winded definition of community.

And here is the part I want to spend this essay on. Godin did not invent this. The idea that you become what you sit next to is one of the oldest ideas in business literature. It has had several names across the years. The one I want to write about today is mastermind groups.

Where this started, and how far back

In 1925, a former journalist called Napoleon Hill published a book called The Law of Success. He had spent the previous two decades interviewing the most successful Americans of his era. Andrew Carnegie. Henry Ford. Thomas Edison. Alexander Graham Bell. John D. Rockefeller. Theodore Roosevelt. Charles Schwab. The book ran to a thousand pages and introduced a concept that Hill would refine and expand twelve years later, in 1937, in a book most readers know better. Think and Grow Rich.

Hill called the concept the master mind. He defined it as the coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose. The idea was that when two minds came together properly, a third invisible force was created in the room. A force that did not exist in either person alone.

No two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible, intangible force which may be likened to a third mind. — Napoleon Hill, 1937

Andrew Carnegie, who was Hill's first interview and one of the central inspirations for the entire concept, had built his fortune around a master mind alliance of roughly fifty men. Engineers, financiers, marketers, operators. He attributed the entire arc of his career, by his own admission, not to his own brilliance but to the room he had assembled around himself.

Hill did not claim to have invented this. Two centuries earlier, in 1727, a young printer in Philadelphia called Benjamin Franklin had assembled a weekly group of tradesmen, shopkeepers, and clerks for a meeting he called the Junto. Twelve members. Every Friday evening. The agenda was reading, debate, and quiet mutual upliftment. The Junto eventually produced the first public library in America, the first volunteer fire department, the first hospital, the University of Pennsylvania, and much of the practical infrastructure of the United States as a country.

Twelve men, meeting on Friday evenings.

A note before we go on

Hill's biographer, the historian David Nasaw, has pointed out that there is no documented evidence Hill and Carnegie ever actually met. Hill claimed they did, in a famous 1908 interview that supposedly launched his life's work. The biographical record does not support the claim. Hill embellished, often grandly, when it suited his story.

I want to acknowledge that, because we are about to spend the essay treating Hill as a reliable witness to early twentieth-century business culture, and he was not entirely one. The idea of the master mind is real and useful. Some of the specifics of how Hill described its origins were probably not. The concept survives the embellishment. Most powerful ideas do.

The modern version, in one room

Almost a century after Hill, in 1998, a small team of twenty-something engineers and economists started a payments company in Palo Alto. The original name was Confinity. The product was a way to send money between Palm Pilots. They merged with Elon Musk's online banking startup, X.com, in 2000. The combined company became PayPal.

In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for one and a half billion dollars. Within four years, only twelve of the original two hundred and twenty employees were still at eBay. The rest scattered.

What that scattered group went on to build is, by some distance, the most consequential alumni network in the history of business.

Peter Thiel founded Palantir and the venture capital firm Founders Fund, and made the first outside investment in Facebook. Elon Musk founded Tesla and SpaceX. Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn. Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons founded Yelp. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim founded YouTube. Max Levchin founded Affirm. David Sacks founded Yammer, which sold to Microsoft for one point two billion dollars. Roelof Botha became a partner at Sequoia Capital. Keith Rabois went on to senior roles at LinkedIn, Square, and now Khosla Ventures. Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman went off and built Yelp from scratch.

Take the combined value of the companies the PayPal alumni went on to found or fund in the twenty years after the eBay acquisition, and you arrive at a number well into the trillions of dollars. The journalist who first covered them, in a 2007 Fortune piece, called them the PayPal Mafia, with the photo of them posed in tracksuits and gold chains in a Las Vegas hotel room. The name stuck.

Of the first two hundred and twenty PayPal employees, only twelve were still at eBay four years after acquisition. The rest went on to found or fund roughly half of modern Silicon Valley.

What the PayPal story illustrates, and what every serious profile of the group eventually concludes, is that there was nothing magical about the original twenty-somethings. Most of them had not done much before PayPal. Most of them have not done as much, individually, since. What was magical was the room. They worked side by side for four years, on hard problems, under pressure, with each other. They learned how each other thought. They built habits of trust. They became, in Napoleon Hill's exact words, a master mind.

When the room dispersed, every member of it carried the room with them. Every subsequent company any of them founded was built on the friendships of that one open-plan office in Palo Alto.

Africa has been doing this for years

The PayPal Mafia is the best-known modern example. It is far from the only one. And it is certainly not the only one on this continent.

In 2014, four founders, three of them African, started a company called Andela. The premise was that the world had an enormous shortage of software engineers, and Africa had an enormous abundance of brilliant young people who had not been given access to the training pipeline. Andela would build the pipeline. Recruits would go through a six-month bootcamp in Lagos or Nairobi, then be placed with global companies, paid global salaries, working from African campuses.

By 2021, Andela had reached a valuation of one and a half billion dollars. It had trained over a hundred thousand African engineers across forty-nine countries. But the more interesting number, for the purposes of this essay, is fifty.

Fifty is roughly the number of Andela alumni who, by the early 2020s, had gone on to found their own venture-backed startups. The venture capitalist Idris Ayodeji Bello, an early Andela investor, started compiling the list informally on Twitter and concluded that what he was looking at was a direct African parallel to the PayPal Mafia. He called it, naturally, the Andela Mafia.

Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, one of the Andela co-founders, left in 2016 and co-founded a payments company called Flutterwave, now one of Africa's most valuable fintech businesses. Other Andela alumni went on to lead Paystack (acquired by Stripe for two hundred million dollars), SafeBoda's Nigeria operation, Sparkle, and dozens of smaller ventures across the continent.

Where Andela alumni went, African tech followed. The pattern was the room before it was the resume.

Closer to home, the same dynamic has played out at Cellulant, the Kenyan payments giant founded in 2003 by Ken Njoroge and Bolaji Akinboro. By the early 2020s, the Kenyan tech press had started using the phrase the Cellulant Mafia to describe the founders who had emerged from its ranks. Tatenda Furusa and Sanmi Akinmusire founded ImaliPay. Several Cellulant alumni now run their own fintech operations across the continent.

And the room that arguably made all of this possible, the one I want to give particular credit to, is iHub Nairobi.

iHub was founded in March 2010 above the Bishop Magua Centre on Ngong Road, by the same Kenyan tech community that had two years earlier built Ushahidi, the crisis-mapping platform that emerged out of the 2007-2008 post-election violence. The co-founders were Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich, and David Kobia. Their idea was simple. Give Nairobi's hackers, designers, and would-be founders a space to share, eat, code, and find each other.

In its first decade, iHub incubated over a hundred startups. It hosted M-KOPA Solar's earliest team meetings. It produced BRCK, the rugged Kenyan-made internet device. It spun off Savannah Fund, a venture capital firm. It launched mLab East Africa, a mobile app accelerator. It hosted visits from President Obama and Mark Zuckerberg, though as one of its founders later observed, the high-profile visits did not pay the rent. What paid the rent, eventually, was the network of founders the room produced.

By the time CcHUB acquired iHub in 2019, the four thousand or so members who had passed through it had raised roughly forty million dollars in startup funding and created an estimated forty thousand jobs across East Africa. Whatever the present state of the building on Ngong Road, the room that briefly lived inside it permanently changed Kenyan technology.

Why these rooms work, in plain terms

If you look at the PayPal alumni, the Andela alumni, the iHub graduates, and the original twelve Friday-night Junto members in Philadelphia, the same pattern shows up in each.

First, the people in the room are roughly at the same stage as you. Not exactly the same, but close enough that what they are working on feels reachable. Hill called this harmony. Modern community researchers would call it peer mirroring. Whatever you call it, the effect is the same. When you see someone two steps ahead of you operating without the anxiety you currently carry, your anxiety drops a little.

Second, the room has someone who has already solved the problem holding you back today. Not in theory. In practice. They will tell you how, often within ten minutes of you asking, because that is how rooms like this operate. The five-year learning curve you assumed lay ahead of you collapses, in some cases, into a five-minute conversation.

Third, the people in the room provide the proof your nervous system requires before it will let you act. Most ambitious work is held back not by a lack of information but by a quiet inner suspicion that people like you do not get to do the thing. The room dissolves that suspicion. Not through a pep talk. Through the simple fact of its existence.

Community becomes proof. Proof that the thing intimidating you is being done, by people not so different from you, in a room you could walk into.

This is the Godin principle, read inward instead of outward. If people like us do things like this, then I become a person who does the thing by finding, joining, or building a room where the thing is already being done.

The three questions

If the argument so far is correct, then the central practical question for any ambitious person in Nairobi, or anywhere, becomes very short.

Where do I want to go?

Who is already going there, who is on the journey, or who has already arrived?

How can I get into the same room as those people, as often as I possibly can?

The answer to the third question, almost every single time, is a community of some kind. Sometimes the community is formal, like Attic Chapter or LinkedIn Local Nairobi. Sometimes it is institutional, like a company or an accelerator. Sometimes it is informal, like a chama or a WhatsApp group. The form does not matter. What matters is the room, the repetition, and the people.

As I keep reminding you. It is less about what you get from the community, and more about who you become inside it.

Becoming the kind of person who does the thing you want to do is much, much easier when you spend regular, structured time among people who already do it. That is the whole sentence. It is what Napoleon Hill was pointing at in 1925. It is what the PayPal Mafia accidentally proved in the 2000s. It is what Andela and Cellulant and iHub have been proving here in East Africa for the last fifteen years.

And it is what Seth Godin was, almost in passing, telling us in a book about marketing.

Find the room

There is no community in your life that someone, somewhere, did not first walk into without knowing anyone in it. There is no founder you admire who did not begin as a person on the wrong side of the door. The Andela Mafia were once a bunch of nervous twenty-three-year-olds in a Lagos bootcamp. The iHub graduates were once a handful of Kenyan kids who did not own laptops. The PayPal Mafia, before they were the PayPal Mafia, were the awkward early employees of a payments company that almost did not survive its first eighteen months.

Every room you might want to be in was, at some point, a room that did not exist. Then someone walked into it. Then someone else followed.

If there is a thing you want to do that currently scares you, the move is not to study it harder alone. The move is to find the room where it is already happening, and to walk in.

The room is the shortcut. The room is the proof. The room is the master mind. It has been the answer for at least three hundred years, and it is, almost certainly, the answer for you.

Go and find it.