What Burning Man Teaches Us About Corporate Culture

I'm serious.

Tomorrow this will be gone.

The man burns tonight, and I won’t be there.

I didn’t go to Burning Man this year, so I’m going to miss the large-scale bacchanalia that breaks out tonight around the burning of the Man. He is a monumental wooden effigy and the literal and figurative centerpiece of Black Rock City, the temporary ville radiale of about 80,000 souls built in the Nevada desert each year for the Burning Man celebration.¹

I’m not sad about missing tonight’s action. It’s a staggeringly large, loud, and long party — I believe that describing it is the only time one should be allowed to use the word “phantasmagoric” — but I’ve experienced it a few times and won’t be upset if I never do again. However, I kind of wish I were in BRC this week to experience the rest of Burning Man. I’ve been four times (2017-19, 2022), and can attest that it gets in your blood.

But don’t worry. This post is not about What Burning Man Means, or What Burning Man Has Meant to Me. There are plenty of both of those. What I want to do instead is address the question: why does Silicon Valley decamp to Burning Man every year? Why, in other words, is there such a strong and enduring link between the high-tech ecosystem in Northern California and this particular festival “city wherein almost everything…” Why do so many techies attend year after year? Why did the fact that Eric Schmidt is a Burner matter to Sergey Brin and Larry Page as they were thinking about who to hire as Google’s CEO?² Why did Elon Musk write on his platform “Burning Man is unique in the world. Hard to describe how incredible it is for those who have never been.”

The geeks of NoCal find the Playa³ a centrally important place. Is it because of all the sex, drugs, and rock & roll EDM on offer? That’s part of the allure (as discussed below), but it’s hard to believe it’s the whole reason. I’m not a libertine tour guide, but believe me when I tell you that there are much cheaper, easier, and faster ways to find sex, drugs, and sets from top DJs. And that all of those other ways involve less traffic and extreme heat, fewer duststorms, more showers, and cleaner bathrooms than Burning Man. In short, there are easier ways to have a good time, a fact that starts us on the road to answering our why? question.

There are easier ways to have a good time

Hard Fun

Stanford communications professor Fred Turner, who has attended and studied Burning Man, has a sharp analogy:

Burning Man is to Silicon Valley what a Protestant chapel might have been to a steel milling town a hundred years ago — a place to practice the ideals and forms of social organization on which the industries of the region depend

In an interview, Turner elaborated:

In the industrial era, you might work in a factory six days a week. On the seventh, you would go to church. The bosses would sit up front, the middle management right behind them, and the workers would fill out the pews. The church itself was a model of the factory,

Burning Man is a VERY different model. It’s intensely non-hierarchical, and behaving like an Industrial Era boss is about as big a faux pas as waving cash around. The vibe in Black Rock City is the right vibe for letting your freak flag fly, but does it work for getting important work done?

And there’s a lot of important work. I don’t mean the work of practicing radical inclusion, decommodification, radical self-expression, and the other principles of Burning Man. I mean the huge amount of cognitive and physical labor necessary to have a good Burn. There’s a ton of logistics and planning in the months leading up to it, followed by about the same amount of packing-up-the-UHaul, driving, and unpacking as you’d do if you moved to a different state. The first year I attended I flew out to California a few days early to help get ready. I was on what felt like my hundredth trip up the loading ramp of the UHaul, carrying a case of tequila or half a ratty sofa or something, when I said to a veteran Burner “I can’t wait until we get there so we can start taking it easy.” He replied “I work much harder once we’re there than I do getting ready.”

He was right. As a group we had to unpack; make camp; cook for everyone; fix stuff; get through adverse events like windstorms, torrential rain, and plagues of insects; strike camp;⁴ and pack back up and schlep home through nightmarish traffic.

A camp can’t get through Burning Man without doing all that stuff.⁵ The camp is the Burn’s basic unit of social organization. It’s a group of anywhere from a handful to hundreds of people who band together to share the fun and the work. Doing the latter requires division of labor and at least a bit of hierarchy. I was in charge of shade in my camp for a couple years, which meant that as soon as we got to the trackless, sun-baked desert that was to be our home for the next week I was responsible for bringing together a group of people to turn a pile of metal poles, tarps, connectors, ratchet straps, lag bolts, and ball bungees into ample luxuriant shade.

Our shade featured high ceilings with 100% opaque tarp roofs and mesh walls that could be individually raised and lowered. One of my proudest moments on the Playa came when a veteran Burner walked into our camp and said “Great shade!”

What We Do In The Shade

Who were those people? This is where it gets interesting. They were my campmates, not my employees or contractors. And they were my Burning Man campmates, which means that

1. They had plenty of other things they’d rather be doing. Like all the wild new fun stuff that was arrayed all around them, apparently without end. The stuff they’d come all this way to see, do, and take experience.

2. They were not used to being told what to do. My campmates were successful NoCal tech professionals, not Army inductees in basic training.

In those circumstances, it becomes very interesting to observe two things. The first is who shows up and how they show up to get the work done. We had to do an unfamiliar cooperative task that involved non-trivial physical work (carry stuff, climb ladders, use power tools⁶) in adverse (hot and sometimes windy) conditions. Under those circumstances the temptation to shirk would be strong. It would be easy to take a long break, to go another camp to borrow a drill and hang out there for a bit, or just walk away from the job.

So who did that, and who didn’t? Who stuck around until the job was done? Who was resourceful, solving problems and coming up with ideas to make the work faster and the shade shadier? And who did it all without complaining? In fact, who made the work fun? In 2022 we assembled shade in pummeling heat. As the day went on a grim mood started to descend, and no one goes to Burning Man for grim. At one point my friend Brooke stopped, stood up, and said “Shouldn’t we have some music on?” Yes, we should and we did. Things were much less grim afterward.

One other important distinction: who does the work, as opposed to talking about it? Putting up shade on the Playa is not the same as offering helpful hints from ground level about how to best put up shade on the Playa. Most of the people in my camps managed teams of people in the default world. When they got to Black Rock City, did they act more like (hands-off) managers or (hands-on) makers?

Economists have spent a lot of time thinking about how to incentivize people when their effort can’t be observed. And effort is particularly hard to observe with the kinds of knowledge work common in tech. How thoroughly did you review the pitch deck? How well did you prepare for the meeting? How hard did you work the phones? Yes, you gave me comments on my draft, but how carefully did you read it? How hard did you negotiate with that supplier, or try to fix that bug?

Silicon Valley’s geeks have found a fascinating hack here: they watch the effort people put in on the Playa. This is a far-from-perfect proxy for how they’ll behave as a colleague, cofounder, investor, boss, or employee, but it’s also a far-from-worthless one. There’s real signal here. In the camps I’ve known, many if not most of the people running the show, working hardest, and holding the whole enterprise together are quite senior and successful techies.

It’s Time to Build

Another reason for the tight link between Silicon Valley and Burning Man is straightforward: both ecosystems value group efforts to build something new and cool, often with the assistance of digital technology. And in large part just for the hell of it. Yes there is a mind-blowing amount of money slushing around NoCal these days, and yes that has changed things. But it is also the case that many geeks there still like to tinker and build stuff independent of how rich they think it’s going to make them.

The first folk I camped with built the quickly-famous Burner Boards: surfboards that incorporated thousands of LEDs, a thumpin’ sound system, and an electric powertrain capable of shooting them across the Playa at insane speeds (and excessive ones, as law enforcement personnel occasionally reminded us). My campmates. who were senior engineers, PMs, and execs at various big tech companies, built them entirely from scratch. It was a difficult, time-consuming, borderline-insane project, and they went after it with gusto year after year.

Burner Boards in action. As the lower right photo shows, a great way to make a law enforcement officer forget that you were speeding on them is to let him ride one.

My 2022 camp brought a dance party to the Playa. So what, you say, there were plenty of those. OK, but how many of them took place inside a working cold storage container, the interior of which was done up to resemble Shakleton’s ship (except I don’t think the Endurance had a DJ booth)? It was the chillest experience at Burning Man that year.

These are two out of the countless examples of geeks coming together to build cool stuff for the Playa. Money, greed, and opportunism have not driven this spirit out of Silicon Valley.

OK, let’s talk about the sex, drugs, and music.

I actually have the least to say about the sex (sorry if that disappoints). The Playa is a deliberately sex-forward place (sometimes stridently so), and a lot of people and camps go to some length to stress their sex-positivity, rejection of conventional mores, etc. All this despite the fact that a hot, dry, dusty, highly alkaline environment is not the ideal place for many kinds of physical intimacy. I think part of what’s going on here is an expression of NoCal’s counterculture, of which Burning Man is a proud descendant and torch-bearer. All human societies police sex, so a surefire signal that Black Rock City is NOT the default world is to NOT police sex there (with the clear and crucial exception that consent is always required).

Before we get to the drugs and the music, I want to bring up an important element of how Silicon Valley goes to Burning Man: people don’t generally camp by company. There’s not one major Google camp or Salesforce camp or Facebook camp, despite the fact that lots of people from each attend. What happens instead is that NoCal-heavy camps are a blend of techies. You don’t join them to hang out with your colleagues in Black Rock City; you instead go to hang with friends, many of whom you met during previous Burns.

This arrangement is brilliant because it supports how important bonds form in human communities. Research in multiple hunter-gatherer societies shows that there are three kinds of close bonds: among family members (duh); with in-laws (also kinda duh); and among non-family members who share a few kinds of experience. Two of these are initiation rituals and combat or other terrifying trials. Neither of those are much in evidence at Burning Man (except maybe at Death Guild Thunderdome). But two others — synchrony and intoxication — are.

Synchrony is simultaneous movement, often facilitated by rhythm and music. In other words, a rave. When the late Tony Hsieh, a frequent Burner, attended his first rave in 1999 he found that "The entire room felt like one massive, united tribe of thousands of people, and the DJ was the tribal leader of the group… I made a note to myself to make sure I never lost sight of the value of a tribe where people truly felt connected” Like hunter-gatherers, techies know the bonding value of an all-night dance party with sick beats.

They also perceive value in altering their mental states. Here again, they’re following ancient and apparently universal human tradition. The archeological record shows that at all times people all over the world have found ways to get intoxicated together. Booze, weed, shrooms, and so on have been around for a long, long time, and they figure prominently in both secular and religious rituals. Like synchrony, these substances have a long track record of bonding people together. (I feel the need to include some kind of disclaimer here that I am not advocating the use of prohibited drugs, or underage drinking, or other illegal acts. I hope that helps). So the large number of high people at Burning Man isn’t that surprising. It’s to be expected at an event that serves as the focal bonding opportunity for Silion Valley geeks each year.

Experiencing Burning Man with your campmates facilitates bonding with them. And those bonds support the long-term, high-trust relationships central to Silicon Valley: cofounder-cofounder; investor-entrepreneur; investor-investor; mentor-protégé(e); etc.

Every year around Burning Man there’s an entirely predictable rash of articles about the event’s nudity! drugs! hedonism! and hypocritical billionaires! Yep, the Playa is a deeply silly place. But it’s also an important one for what is by far the world’s largest and most successful high-tech ecosystem. I think it’s worth spending some time investigaing why that is.

Of Human Bonding

Let’s close this post by taking on one more question: how does bonding do its job? How does it make people more likely to cooperate with and trust each other for a long time afterward? It’s not immediately obvious how getting hammered and/or dancing all night together encourages cooperation and trust down the line. And it’s far from obvious what synchrony and intoxication have in common with initiation rituals and terrifying experiences, two other powerful bonding experiences. What’s going on here?

An intriguing answer comes from economists Moshe Hoffman and Erez Yoeli, who wrote the fantastic applied game theory book Hidden Games. As Yoeli explained to me, the game-theoretic view of extended cooperation between two people is that it’s a repeated prisoner’s dilemma: both people are better off if they keep cooperating, but there’s a constant temptation to defect (i.e. to screw the other person over for short-term gain). One big thing that keeps them cooperating is the “shadow of the future” — the likelihood of future interactions with the same person. One big thing that reduces that likelihood is the presence of lots of other people who you could potentially cooperate with. I’m more tempted to screw you over if I know that there are lots of other people I could easily spin up a relationship / try my luck with.

So what’s a community that desires lots of cooperation and little screwing-over to do? One smart approach is to make it costly to spin up a new relationship. That cost changes the math. It lowers the attractiveness of defecting, and thus the temptation to screw over the person you’re currently cooperating with.

Bonding is just such a cost. It takes time and involves effort and risk (with many kinds of intoxication, for example, there’s a risk you’ll do something embarrassing or say something incriminating). In Hoffman and Yoeli’s perspective, the time, effort, and risk are the whole point of bonding. They’re what encourage us to keep cooperating, because they raise the cost of defecting to try a new relationship (since you’re gonna have to go through the cost of bonding with that new person before you can start cooperating with them).

It’s strange, isn’t it, to think that one purpose of an extended bacchanalia is to keep people on the straight and narrow? But that could well be one of the purposes of Burning Man for Silicon Valley’s geeks. By bonding them to each other, it keeps them on the straight and narrow of continued cooperative behavior.

1. Then immediately unbuilt afterward, so thoroughly that if you wandered around the Black Rock Desert after the Burn ended, you probably wouldn’t be able to figure out where it had taken place.

2. Eric has confirmed to me that this story is entirely true.

3. “Playa” is a term for a dry lake bed used in the West of the US. “The Playa” is a synonym for Burning Man, aka the Burn

4. Strike is the worst. You’re tired, likely feeling the effects of the previous night (and week), and literally disassembling the fun. There is a LOT of shirking during strike.

5. Some camps — by stereotype full of oligarchs, venture capitalists, NY hedge fund types, and their various hangers-on — outsource all the work to paid help and just come to party and gawk. This approach is widely disdained within the Burning Man community. I want to stress that not all VCs burn this way. Some oligarchs and NY financiers probably also don’t, but who cares.

6. We anchored our shade by power-drilling lag bolts into the living Playa, not by pounding in rebar with a sledgehammer.