Lulu Cheng Meservey, founder of Rosta, discusses how founders can build cult-like followings and cultures around their companies, drawing on historical examples and modern startup stories to illustrate the principles of leadership, loyalty, and narrative.
The Founder as Cult Leader
Starting a cult means signing up to be the cult leader—the person who sets the vision, recruits the first members, and takes all the risk and criticism.
The hardest part is recruiting the first few believers when you have nothing to offer but a vision that sounds crazy.
You must be so committed that you can look someone in the eye and convince them to leave their comfortable life, risk relationships, and work for uncertain equity.
After roughly 10 employees, the culture starts recruiting itself, but the first several hires require the founder to personally sell the mission with absolute conviction.
What Makes a Great Cult Leader
Traditional charisma (like Palmer Luckey or Donald Trump) is one type, but not the only kind.
Reiner Pope of Maddx has a quiet, substantive charisma that convinces people through depth rather than flash.
Scott Woo of Cognition built belief through extreme integrity—overdelivering on every promise, no matter how small, which made people trust him with their livelihoods.
The common thread is making people feel their future is safe in your hands, whether through force of personality or consistent reliability.
Being Yourself, But More
Founders cannot sustainably pretend to be someone else; the only viable strategy is to be yourself more fully.
Palmer Luckey was the same person at 15 as he is now; his audience simply needed time to curate itself around him.
Early on, his following included random skeptics, but over time the people who genuinely aligned with him found him.
Every day spent pretending to be someone else delays the compounding effect of finding your true people.
The Power of Unpredictability
Elon Musk exemplifies the value of constantly resetting people’s expectations so he is always undervalued.
When people think they understand one of his businesses, he introduces a new, larger ambition that redefines the frame.
What looks like chaos to outsiders is often a necessary intermediate phase between the current state and a much better destination.
The key is to constantly remind people of the “finished pizza”—the end goal—so they don’t panic during the chaotic middle phase.
This is like the Domino’s pizza tracker: people tolerate disruption when they know where things are headed and can see progress.
Forcing Cultural Clarity Through Opt-In
When Elon took over X (formerly Twitter), he initially planned to ask employees to opt out of the new hardcore culture, then changed it to require an explicit opt-in.
This immediately surfaced who was committed and who would quietly sabotage from within.
Moving this filtering up front prevents a “deep state” of disengaged employees who leak, kill morale, and slow everything down.
The same principle applies to Anduril: the founders chose explicitly to stand on the side of people in uniform, which repelled some people but attracted the right ones.
Avoiding picking a side means being beloved by nobody; picking a side creates a home for the people who matter.
The Net Value of Going Direct
Critics point out that Elon makes mistakes by being public and confrontational, but the net result is what matters.
He built the largest audience on the most significant social media platform and now owns that platform, giving him the ability to contest hostile media narratives directly.
Nothing—no audience, movement, or company—gets built without some errors along the way; they must be baked into the calculation.
The Power of Language and Naming
Language shapes how people perceive reality; giving something the right name can make the impossible feel desirable.
Napoleon needed volunteers to guard a cannon with a 100% casualty rate. Instead of describing the job, he named the group “Les Enfants sans Peur” (The Men Without Fear), and people volunteered.
This principle applies to startups: working at a startup objectively sucks, but if the mission is “making humanity multiplanetary” or “bringing nuclear energy back to America,” people sign up willingly.
Language literally shapes perception: cultures that lacked a word for “blue” literally could not distinguish blue from green as well.
The concept of “teenager” didn’t exist until the 20th century; before that, 15-year-olds were treated as either children or adults, leading to child labor and abuse.
Founders creating new categories should consider naming them, because existing language can obscure the gap the new thing fills.
Deterrence and Incentives
Everything is about shaping incentives. As you gain exposure, more people take potshots at you because the stakes are low for them and the upside (engagement) is high.
Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk both exemplify deterrence: if you come after them, they retaliate with overwhelming force, which over time discourages attacks.
The key mindset is to avoid temporary pain avoidance and instead focus on the long-term goal.
Google is a cautionary example: activists “salami-sliced” their way into controlling company culture through many small actions that individually didn’t seem worth confronting, until the company was forced to make major business decisions based on ideological monoculture.
Elon’s approach of reacting with what looks like overwhelming force to a single small provocation is actually deterrence against the hundred future incidents that now won’t happen.
Preventing a Leaky Culture
Once a culture becomes leaky, it is extremely hard to fix—investigations and monitoring are like trying to weed out insurgents from a civilian population.
Prevention is far better, and it comes down to personal loyalty to the founder, not NDAs or policies.
NDAs are nearly meaningless in practice; the most sensitive situations often involve no NDA at all.
What works is people internalizing the founder’s intent and following the spirit, not the letter—because they genuinely want to, not because a piece of paper constrains them.
Building Loyalty
The right approach is to offer acts of goodwill and see who reciprocates—a “Nigerian prince scheme for goodwill.”
Acts don’t need to be expensive, but they must be meaningful to the recipient.
The best leaders eat at the same time and place as their people, literally and figuratively.
Scott Woo eats lunch with his team in the lunchroom; Napoleon and Julius Caesar ate among their troops.
Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo made efforts to go out onto the factory floors and be among the workers.
If you ask people to do something difficult, you must do it yourself first.
Elon slept on the factory floor during the 2018 Model 3 production crunch, visible to everyone, which motivated the team far more than a comfortable hotel would have.
Ernest Shackleton refused easier rowing shifts despite everyone being frostbitten, which made his men follow the spirit of his leadership.
The Power of Visuals
Visuals communicate leadership and values more powerfully than words alone.
German Chancellor Willy Brandt silently knelt at the Warsaw Ghetto monument—the “Kniefall”—which reshaped German-Polish relations more than any speech could.
Steve Jobs pulling the MacBook Air out of a manila envelope in 2008 is remembered far more than any spec sheet.
Jensen Huang invented a custom metric—“time to train AlexNet”—comparing 150 hours on Intel equipment to 2 hours on his, and called the DGX1 “a data center in a box.”
These concrete, vivid analogies shortcut through technical complexity and become the thing people remember.
Why People Root for You
People root for you not because of who you are as a person, but because you represent things they want, like, or see in themselves.
You become a vector for a normative good—non-transactional relationships, long-term thinking, positive-sum behavior.
When you succeed, it validates something they also care about, which is why they support you.
Recruiting for Spirit, Not Letter
Early startup employees must be bought into the mission at the deepest level, because the job is objectively worse than almost any alternative in every measurable way.
The only way to get genuine enthusiasm (rather than quiet corner-cutting and micro-disloyalties) is for them to believe they are “helping get to the moon.”
This is the difference between Boeing engineers working on “some space capsule” and SpaceX engineers who say “we are making life multiplanetary.”
The Three Levels of a Company Story
Level 1 (basic): What are you literally doing? Half of founders can’t even articulate this.
Level 2 (upshot): What does success represent? What changes if this works?
Level 3 (dent in the universe): What is the shape of the impact on society and humanity if this actually works?
SpaceX Level 1: We’re building a rocket. Level 2: We’re restoring American private space flight. Level 3: We’re making humanity an interplanetary species because it’s our last best hope.
Each level corresponds to the quality of talent you can attract and how hard they’ll work. A++ talent dedicates their lives to Level 3.
Distribution Is Plating, Not the Dish
Everyone is obsessed with distribution, but distribution is just the plating—it cannot save a bad dish.
The ingredients are the story itself: what are you actually saying, and do the facts support it?
The preparation is how you craft and curate the message.
No amount of distribution—Joe Rogan, Super Bowl ad, Times Square billboard—can compensate for a bad message.
Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” framework applies: the best storytellers start with why they do what they do, then how, then what. Most people start with “what” and lose their audience.
Secret Truths and Jailbreaking People
Most people have a “secret truth” inside them—something they believe should be done and is possible—but they gaslight themselves out of it because no one around them seems to share it.
Founders must trust themselves over the crowd, even though humans are evolutionarily designed to conform.
People have an overwhelming bias to comply with what they feel they’re supposed to do, which means the right language can jailbreak them off the default path.
The founder’s job is to find the 500 to 1,000 words in the right order that reprogram people at scale.
This has been done throughout history: to convince nations to fight wars, to inspire civil rights, to go to the moon. It is always the same mechanism—language, curated and delivered to jailbreak people.
Reframing Facts to Change Incentives
Cicero’s political career should have been over before it started—he was a “new man” with no money, hated by the powerful, and assigned an impossible case: prosecuting a corrupt governor of Sicily before a jury of the governor’s friends and bribes.
Instead of arguing the facts (which everyone knew), Cicero turned it into a trial of the jury itself: “Everyone knows he’s guilty. What’s on trial is whether you can be bought.”
This completely flipped the incentives—now they were voting for their own reputations, not the defendant’s.
Offense vs. Defense in Narrative Combat
On offense: Concentrate force on the smallest possible point of attack (pressure = force / surface area).
Don’t attack the whole company; attack one specific, verifiable thing that, if believed, unravels everything else about the person.
Example: “He received a Bitcoin payment from the Saudis” makes people question everything else without you having to prove anything else.
On defense: Diffuse the pressure by expanding the surface area.
Don’t defend yourself; defend the larger principle you represent. “She’s attacking young entrepreneurs and free media” recruits others who see themselves in your cause.
This is subtly using a human shield: “If they get me, they’re going to get all of you.”
Aura vs. Auctoritas
Aura is fleeting and tied to current events; the more durable concept is the Roman idea of auctoritas—a combination of authority, influence, presence, and moral weight.
Auctoritas means becoming the enduring authority on something that matters, so people look to you for guidance over the long term.
The core is what you stand for; charisma and presence are the plating. Without an iron core of enduring values, aura fades.
