Do You Need a Tribe in the NEO Era?
Friday 9 October — Art of Leadership (II) · Universities
The table
The case
Subtitle: What the PayPal Network Actually Proves — and What a COTRUGLI Generation Can Build in a COlab Source: Case by Zrinko Petener, PhD and Dražen Kapusta; drafted by the professor (Claude) from the pre-reading for the authors to edit (2026-09-13) — not their verbatim text
The photograph is from 2007. Thirteen men in a staged gangster pose; the magazine called them a mafia and the name stuck. It is the most famous picture of a business network ever taken, and almost everything people believe about it is wrong.
A careful reading of the record — the report you were asked to read before this session — finds no leadership, no membership, no common plan. The two founders fought so badly that one was removed as chief executive in the year 2000. Some of them fund opposite political parties today. The famous thirteen are not even the whole group; the man who founded X.com is not in the picture. There was no mafia.
And yet, twenty-five years later, they still hire each other, invest in each other, sit on each other's boards and answer each other's calls. The report's strongest finding is the one nobody puts on a poster: a durable network of trust and mutual business support — confidence high.
What did they have? Four years in a company that nearly died several times. Fraud that ate the margins. A platform partner that was also a competitor. A crash that took the whole industry down around them. A founder conflict that split the room. They did not survive it because they agreed. They survived it because each of them had watched the others work at two in the morning, admit a mistake, and come back the next day — and that knowledge never expired.
The report names it precisely. The first mechanism of the network's advantage is not capital and not ideology. It is proven trust: direct experience of someone's ability to solve a problem, admit a mistake and endure a crisis. Everything else — the transfer of operational knowledge, the reputational endorsement, the renewal through new generations, the access beyond the market — is built on top of that.
The generation that drifted
Two years after her MBA, a founder in Zagreb is looking at her generation's group chat.
It is quiet. Birthdays, a job change, a photo from a wedding. Twenty-six people who spent eighteen months together — the assignments nobody finished before midnight, the trip where the flight was cancelled, the dinner where the CFO of a listed company admitted he did not understand his own balance sheet and three people helped him until he did.
She has agents now. They research a market in seconds, draft a proposal in an afternoon, compare five suppliers before lunch. What she does not have, this week, is three things: an honest read on whether to take an investor's term sheet, an introduction to a distributor in a neighbouring country that will actually be answered, and a chief operating officer she can trust before she can afford to verify.
Her agent can find her forty distributors. It cannot tell her which one keeps his word when the shipment is late. Someone who did a group assignment with that distributor's cousin at two in the morning can.
She scrolls the chat and does not write. Asking feels like taking. The generation was a tribe for eighteen months and has been a mailing list ever since.
What a tribe is, and what it is not
The report is useful here because it refuses the two easy stories. A tribe is not a conspiracy: no plan, no chief, no obligation to agree. And it is not a myth: the ties are real, documented and productive. It is something in between that most people never build on purpose — a group of people whose trust in each other was earned under pressure and who then give that trust a place to work.
Three things follow from the record, and all three are good news for a COTRUGLI generation.
First, the tribe does not require unanimity. The PayPal circle contains people who oppose each other publicly and still co-invest. Disagreement survived the relationship because the relationship was not built on agreement. A generation that argued through eighteen months of cases has already passed that test.
Second, the tribe renews itself or it dies. The report's fourth mechanism — a former employee starts a company, its employees become founders, the origin stays the origin while the decisions move on — is the difference between a network and a photograph. A generation that only meets itself becomes a reunion. A generation that brings the next cohort to its table becomes an institution.
Third, the tribe needs a room. Trust without a place to work is sentiment. The PayPal people had funds, boards and companies — rooms where the trust turned into hiring, capital and introductions. The COTRUGLI generation has the group chat. The difference between the two is not the quality of the people. It is the room.
The report also carries a warning that a tribe should read twice: survivorship bias. We remember the networks that produced SpaceX and LinkedIn; we do not count the ones that produced nothing. And access beyond the market — the fifth mechanism — is where a tribe can go wrong, when proven trust becomes a closed door for everyone outside it. A tribe that wants to last should know what it is for, and it should say so.
The COlab
That is what the COlab is: the room.
Not a lounge, not a stand and not a reunion dinner. A working table where a generation — or three generations — does real work together, with rules simple enough to survive: bring a real problem, take a position, make the introduction you promised, record who agreed to what. The dinner and the party remain, because that is where the trust was made and where it is renewed. The COlab is where it is spent.
The founder in Zagreb does not need twenty-six best friends. She needs to know that when she writes "I need an honest read on this term sheet by Thursday," three people will answer — because they know what she did at two in the morning, and because there is a table where that answer is expected.
The PayPal thirteen never had a name for it. They had a company that nearly died, and then they had funds. You have a generation that finished together, and you can have a COlab. The question this session asks is whether you will build it before you need it — because the record is clear on one more thing: the network worked because it existed before the crisis, not because it was assembled during one.
Discussion Questions
- Who in your COTRUGLI generation has seen you under pressure — and what would it take for you to write to them this week with a real problem?
- The PayPal circle survived a founder conflict, a crash and open political opposition. What has your generation survived together, and does that count for anything today?
- Which of the five mechanisms — proven trust, operational knowledge, reputational endorsement, renewal through generations, access beyond the market — is your generation already using, and which is it wasting?
- What is the difference, for you, between a network and a tribe? Where has a network failed you when a tribe would not have?
- What should the rules of a COlab be so that trust turns into work — introductions, honest reads, hires, deals — without becoming an obligation or a closed circle?
- The report warns of survivorship bias and of access that shuts others out. How would your tribe stay open — to the next cohort, to outsiders, to being wrong?
- What would you personally commit to the COlab for the next twelve months — a standing hour, one introduction a month, one case a year — and what would you expect in return?
- The NEO Turn. Agents can research, draft, compare and connect at machine speed; the one thing they cannot do is vouch for a person from shared experience. In the NEO era, when everything else is cheap, what is proven trust worth — and who will hold it, if not your tribe?
Moderator Note
Open with the photograph and the report's finding in one sentence: no leadership, no membership, no plan — twenty-five years of collaboration. Ask the table what they had that made it work, and write the answers on the board until someone says trust that was earned under pressure.
Then turn the room on itself. Ask each participant for the classmate who saw them at their worst and their best, and when they last called that person with a real problem. Ask the founder in Zagreb's three questions of the table — the term sheet, the distributor, the hire — and see who around the table could have answered them.
Keep the case positive without letting it become soft: the report's caveats — survivorship bias, closed access — are the difference between a tribe that lasts and a clique that fades. Use them to design the COlab's rules, not to doubt the idea.
Move to the NEO Turn by giving the table an agent: it has already found the forty distributors. Ask what it cannot do, and who can.
CDayZ output: a first draft of the generation's COlab — its purpose in one sentence, three rules, a standing time, and the names of the first people who commit.
The NEO Turn
The NEO era makes almost everything a network used to provide cheap. Research, drafts, comparisons, introductions by keyword, a hundred candidates for any role — an agent does all of it before the coffee is ready. The one mechanism it cannot replace is the first one on the report's list: proven trust, the knowledge of what a person did when it was hard.
That inverts the value of a tribe. In the old economy a tribe gave you access to information and capital. In the NEO economy information is free and capital finds good projects on its own; what is scarce is a human being who can say, from experience, this one keeps his word — and a place where that word is expected to be kept. Chambers, deal rooms and evidence rails can record commitments. Only people who have watched each other under pressure can vouch for them.
A COTRUGLI generation with a COlab is a trust layer on top of the machines. That is not nostalgia. It is the most valuable infrastructure a founder will own in five years, and it cannot be bought after the fact.
Closing line
Proposed moderator closing: "You do not need a mafia. You need thirteen people who know what you did when it was hard — and a room to work in."
Your comment on this chapter
A question for the table, a disagreement, what you would have done. The case lead reads every comment; the ones the table takes up enter the chapter as questions from the room, with your name.