There's a concept from Freud (via Sapiens, via a slightly overambitious internal strategy document I wrote in 2020) called the founding murder. The idea is that every lasting community begins with a moment of collective crisis. The event that fuses people together. The thing everyone survived and nobody forgets.
In the summer of 2020 I was COO of a travel company watching the entire travel industry collapse. TravelPerk had raised well over $100M. We had hundreds of employees. And our core product, corporate travel, had gone to zero overnight. Not declining. Zero.
I wrote a document that August arguing that COVID was our founding murder. Not a disaster to recover from, but an event to build on. The logic went like this: any company is a group of individuals who share the same imagined reality (I borrowed this from Harari). The mission, the values, the belief that this particular group of people building this particular thing will win. When you're in the office every day, shoulder to shoulder, that imagined reality reinforces itself. In a hybrid world, entropy kicks in. Entropy is a fundamental force of nature that makes “everything go to shit”.
The argument was that religion had solved this centuries ago. Religion is essentially a hybrid operating model where people are mostly remote but gather for regular ceremonies to reinforce shared beliefs. Weekly sermons. Baptisms. Morning prayers. All of them tools to stop entropy seeping in. So we hired a Head of Community (Uri Riera - amazing person and phenomenally talented). Not an office manager with a new title. Someone whose job was to wake up every day and ensure the imagined reality held. Culture as infrastructure, not vibes.
It worked. TravelPerk came through COVID stronger than it went in. The founding murder bound the team in ways that two years of hypergrowth hadn't.
Then I co-founded Oliva Health. And COVID gave us a founding murder too, just a different one. The pandemic created massive demand for workplace mental health support. We found product-market fit, scaled past $3M ARR, built something real. But when the ZIRP era ended, benefits budgets evaporated. The mental health space commoditised. Dozens of competitors raced to the bottom. The same crisis that created the demand destroyed the margin.
We diversified into leadership coaching, which worked. But we eventually had to face a harder truth... coaching isn't a tech business. You can build something good. You can't build something that changes the world. Not at the scale we wanted.
Here's what I didn't understand at TravelPerk: a founding murder isn't always a single event. Sometimes it's a slow realisation. Watching a market shift beneath you. Admitting that the thing you built, the thing that works, isn't the thing that gets you where you need to go. And choosing to pivot anyway.
That was Oliva's founding murder. Not COVID. The pivot itself.
The team that's now building readywhen.ai isn't a new team. They're the people who went through all of it. The growth, the commoditisation, the hard conversations about what scales and what doesn't. We didn't recruit a fresh squad and start over. We took a team that had already been forged by the hardest version of the question (is this the right thing to build?) and pointed them at something new.
I used to think you needed to manufacture belonging. Ceremonies, rituals, community infrastructure. And you do, eventually. But the deepest belonging doesn't come from Friday drinks or offsite speeches. It comes from having survived a genuine question together and chosen to stay.
I'll leave you with Harari: "Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths."
We're not strangers anymore. The myth just got better.