Björn Jeffery

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on February 16th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Elon Musk is turning Washington DC upside down with DOGE. Behind the idea of running the US like a tech company lies a Silicon Valley philosophy — shaped by a handful of people.

In the spring of 2012, a particular document was circulated among entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley. The document — “CS183: Startup” — spread like wildfire, and its strange abbreviation quickly became something everyone in the tech world was talking about.

The name sounded cryptic but had a simple explanation. “CS183: Startup” was a course at Stanford, the university outside Palo Alto at the heart of Silicon Valley. CS stood for “Computer Science.” Student Blake Masters took the course and had summarised the lectures. The teacher in question was already well known in the tech sphere: Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and the first investor in Facebook.

Thiel was already known as a free thinker and a “contrarian” — someone who enjoys challenging conventional systems of thought and ways of working and living. But in the Stanford course, he articulated his philosophy a little more concretely: how can these ideas be applied when starting a new company?

Blake Masters’ notes subsequently became a bestselling book, “Zero to One,” which he co-wrote with Peter Thiel. Published in 2014, it has become something of a manual for new tech companies around the world, joining a relatively small and loosely connected body of ideas that Silicon Valley and the tech world around it draw upon.

Now these ideas have reached all the way into the White House, and are redrawing the political landscape of the United States at breathtaking speed.

The concept of “zero to one” — taken from Thiel’s book title — is an example of something that today is understood by entrepreneurs worldwide. It refers to creating something entirely new rather than improving something that already exists.

Likewise with ideas such as “product-market fit” (when a company has an offering the market genuinely wants), “MVP” (“minimum viable product” — creating the smallest possible product to test whether something works), or “blitzscaling” (scaling a company at extreme speed, often by spending enormous amounts of money).

The ideas come from Silicon Valley, but their spread is global. Startup companies at incubators from Stockholm to Sydney know exactly what is meant when these concepts are mentioned. The ideas now spread more like internet memes than as courses and studies — a vocabulary whose underlying thesis is at best available in a book, but may be something as small as a blog post or a social media update.

For somewhere so economically influential, Silicon Valley is not a place that particularly values political philosophy or grand ideas. Peter Thiel would probably agree with that — he moved away himself in 2018.

Entrepreneurial culture has instead built an informal base of ideas and methods that companies work from — a startup canon, if you will. And despite it not being formalised, rarely do new names emerge within it. In a culture that likes to present itself as different from the rest of the world, it is often nearly identical to its competitors — and former colleagues.

If the concepts are relatively few, the originators are even fewer. It is a handful of people who have coined virtually all of them, and whose writings are regularly pored over by tech entrepreneurs. When venture capitalist Paul Graham wrote about the concept of “founder mode” last autumn — being an extremely hands-on and detail-oriented leader — it was as if Silicon Valley itself changed.

The blog post was seen as endorsing a different type of leadership style in business. It was now acceptable not to include everyone in decisions, or to take into account the views of particular individuals or groups. Instead, the situation was urgent — and as a founder, you needed to take command.

Graham had captured the zeitgeist on a larger scale than he perhaps first realised. Two months later, Donald Trump won the US presidency, and the dismantling of DEI and diversity initiatives began in American corporate life. In the front of the pack were the very same tech companies that had previously established committees and working groups to promote it — Google, Meta, Amazon. Over recent months, those initiatives have been shut down rapidly. And now Trump has appointed Elon Musk and DOGE to clear all of this — and much else besides — from the American federal agencies.

Who, then, are these originators, whose views and opinions carry such influence?

At the top of the pyramid we find Peter Thiel himself — the high priest, one might say. He has credibility both as an entrepreneur and as an investor, and beyond that the courage to be clear in his opinions. In 2016 he was one of the speakers at the RNC, the Republican National Convention — the year Donald Trump first became president — and in his speech he noted the similarities:

“I build companies and I support people who build new things, from social networks to rockets. I’m not a politician. But neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder — and it is time to rebuild America.”

When Donald Trump was sworn in as president in 2025, the stage was full of tech executives. That was not how it looked in 2016. Thiel led the way.

The next figure is venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Together with Ben Horowitz he started the fund known as A16Z — an abbreviation of their combined surname, with 16 letters between. The aforementioned “product-market fit” comes from Andreessen, but he is perhaps most famous for a 2011 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he articulated what became a widely-quoted phrase: “software is eating the world.” Software would come to affect every sector and industry, and would thus become the most important force in the economy.

Today, 14 years later, it is hard to argue against Andreessen’s thesis. Of the world’s ten largest listed companies, seven are related to software — even if some, like Apple and Tesla, are also hardware-oriented. A further two of the ten make the chips that software subsequently runs on.

Two other names that appear frequently are venture capitalist Paul Graham and Sam Altman. Today, Altman has become a minor celebrity following the global success of the company he helped found — OpenAI — with ChatGPT. In Silicon Valley, Altman — or “Sama” as he is known online — was well known long before that. Both Graham and Altman came from the startup incubator Y Combinator, a powerful force in the tech world. Being accepted into Y Combinator is like winning the lottery in the startup ecosystem, with the companies there being virtually guaranteed continued investment from surrounding venture capitalists.

And finally — in descending order of philosophical significance to Silicon Valley — there is Elon Musk himself: founder of the quasi-agency DOGE, which is currently cleaning out — or closing down — American political institutions.

Musk is more of a respected entrepreneur than a thinker. He has prioritised decisive action over intricate plans, and made himself known for sleeping in his factories to avoid wasting any time. It is the methods, rather than the ideas, that have made him influential. Musk takes on the hardest problems with a radical optimism.

Tesla built its own global network of EV charging stations before all its competitors. SpaceX catches its own rockets and makes them reusable. Neuralink gives people the ability to control computers with their minds alone. Musk chooses incredibly hard problems and throws as many working hours as possible at solving them.

Now Elon Musk faces perhaps his hardest challenge yet — at least if you take him at his word.

In an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Musk said that “bureaucracy is the second-to-last boss fight” in the world — to use gaming terminology. The very last, he conceded, was overcoming entropy — something he acknowledged that the laws of physics do not allow. Bureaucracy was therefore, in practical terms, the greatest challenge.

Self-confidence is certainly not lacking. The Silicon Valley toolbox is packed with concepts and ideas.

But a state is, as is well known, not a company. Can the same methods used to clean up among bureaucrats really be the same ones used to build the world’s most highly valued companies?

The answer to that we are witnessing right now in Washington DC. Silicon Valley has temporarily changed coasts. The great boss fight is underway.