The Relationship Between Faith and Startups
- Jonathan Rodriguez
- Apr 5
- 7 min read
[Originally posted: February 13, 2025.]
Belief After the Smiling Stops
As I've been pressed so hard to communicate with people over the years, I feel it wise to first assert the following American freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the freedom of press. Some people in business seem to be afraid that their products won't sell as well if they actually assert these freedoms, but if the failure to use these freedoms results in a failure to communicate clearly, I think it is hard to justify at a base level that these would be bad for business.
I've left behind the "believe as I do" business, as I saw that we had reached a condition of severely limited returns along those lines. That business had become bad enough that it was failing a kind of lawfulness test. If I don't want you to try to force me to give up on my core doctrine, then I should not try to force you to give up on your core doctrine.
The reconciliation of doctrines in conflict must therefore proceed along different lines, as a better belief-oriented sales pitch just isn't going to do it here.
***
Why do I begin this article with a disclaimer (which is not really a disclaimer but a layout of expected parameters of discourse)? It is so that I can proceed with the truth of the experiences I want to lay out here unencumbered by concerns about how these things will be received.
It's not that I don't think about how the truth of these things will be received, but because I do not want the fear of how I might be received to prevent the truth from getting out at all.
So I'm declassifying some experiences here.
strange things that really happened
(between my mind and the rest of the world)
There is a Software Architecture professor that I had who I made it a point to chat with about a few not-strictly-class-related things, and he asked me at one point if I was making progress on my thesis. I hemmed and hawed a bit, and said I wasn't sure if I was really making progress or not, and his reply was, "Just say 'Yes.'" I mentioned this to my dad, and he also thought it was strange, and he wondered as I did, "What does he know?" I surmised that this professor had some kind of faith that if you assert, "Yes, I am making progress," that you then are de facto are making progress -- even if the result is not immediately visible or obvious. Kind of like the invisible things that are needed to real progress are coming into place because you assert that they are.
A fellow graduate student that I was having a long and rather delightful conversation with (as I frequently enjoyed in those days as a respite from the stress of uncertain research pursuits and "real job" hunts) asked me at one point, "Are you God?" Obviously, he was clued into some facet of our communication that I was not making any particular effort to hide, and so I said the most truthful thing I could come up with in the moment, which was, "Not necessarily." I make no such claim, by the way. I still regard it as a dangerous thing to make an overt claim on the divine. I was running on pure intuition in those days.
Getting told by a coworker at one company that its stock price had suddenly gone up by $2 per share in one day. I actually felt flattered by this, as strange as it sounds. "They know I'm here!" And presumably, I surmised, the stock money was attached to an expectation that the company do something in particular for them, perhaps as compensation to cover potential damages that may occur as a result of said task.
A sense that I was being pulled into some kind of military operation. Plausible, as the company did not only have business connections, but also military, and I surmised, political as well. An increasing hyper-awareness of details in the surrounding environment. A sense of being a VIP of some sort, that we were rapidly ascending into the ranks of national leadership of some sort. Security services, helicopters. Extra paperwork. Reaching a peak in which I suspected was supposed to be a type of religious experience, a kind of "seeing the light", if you will, but I did not know if this was the real deal or not, as I have been aware of at least one warning about these types of matters. At any rate, there was an expectation that there was a type of internal protocol expected here, and so I took the risk and executed on it. I was not the least bit surprised when, the following morning, my technical manager took me up to the newly-refurbished veranda and after a brief chat, simply asked me, "So what do you want to do?" He also told me, shortly thereafter, that people who had a Top Secret security clearance were not actually issued badges that showed that clearance on them, because, well, even the understanding that they had that clearance is secret.
The interpretation of these matters was, seemingly, left up to me.
I did know I was in mental pain -- it felt like a war zone.
This was approaching 6 years ago now.
The sense of being "taken" psychologically. Not by in the popular conception of aliens, but by the feeling of being pulled psychologically somewhere that I didn't want to go, and there wasn't anything I could do about it. The sense of something being twisted and of something keeling over. The overwhelming sense of confusion and chaos, an inability to settle on a clear or easily explainable interpretation of what is really taking place here.
A making of many new possible connections between things that I had previously automatically assumed were unrelated. This thing, whatever it is, was clearly capable of, and was, reshaping my psyche in some way that was entirely unexpected, very painful, and very fearful, and perceptually disorienting. A descent into what I shall only describe here as the abyss.
How was I going to continue "performing" at work under these types of duress? My mind was actually damaged (or perhaps "traumatized") during this unseemly long process, and if I should fail to produce as an assembly-line machine at that juncture, then what would become of me?
One thing that they did do there is finish the renovation of their front entrance. I was happy to be present for that, as it was a little gross to be having to enter through the back doors all the time. They did one of those big silver-glitter drops, and had a speech, at the end of which the speaker called, "Jonathan?" -- pause -- "Jonathan? Maybe he's gone already." If he was actually referring to me as having participated in some actor-ish way to the "show" they seemed to be putting on for the employees, I wasn't terribly interested in making a spectacle of myself like that. If their point was that I was able to be manipulated in some ways (and this was not the manipulation itself; that was a whole set of other things) like an actor having his puppet strings pulled, or like a machine responding to various stimuli, this wasn't really news to me. I was terribly unimpressed. I did wonder if they were going to arrange to do anything to compensate me for the poor condition that all of this had left me in.
What I reported internally at that time was that there was an unresolving conflict, an infinite and endless war. If there is no thought process, no opportunity to work the conflict through to real agreement, then it just never ends. Even if the war appears to stop visibly, the animosity and unsolved conflict remains. The last thing I remember writing in that position is approximately, "It hurts when people won't join you in what you believe." Then, as if in response to this, COVID-19 arrived. I was one of the ones cut from the staff in anticipation of the financial difficulties. But my ties to this thing that had entered my psyche were never cut, and this thing seemed to be apparently associated with Putin, with Trump. And I've had to live with that, and deal with it, and do whatever it takes to do what needs to be done here, because this affects everyone.
I'm not sacrificing.
We're down to sixes (as in, "Watch your six."). The Heart Doctor. The Physicist. The Six Nations. The Six Flags in Chicago (?). Iroquois Magnet/Middle School of Science and Technology. Iroquois near Ottawa. The California that came to Texas, and to the Midwest.
The hole that's so black that it turns white.
I hope I have not misspoken anything.
I finally reached poetry status
After watching "The Greatest Rivalry: India vs Pakistan" (Cricket) on Netflix, I actually wrote the following (going for straightforwardness over highest linguistic compression, so careful about the mockery):
The love we see between the countries
The dove of peace lands lightly
The old man goes blind
The hatred I see abates not
So must I fight another day
[FLOWERS] go here.
the startup
What binds a startup together at the beginning but a shared belief that it can and will be something or do something in particular?
My startup is held in my chest. It is valuable. There is much more to say about it, but I will not write that here.
Holding together thoughtlessly divergent modes of belief produces pain, and that pain can, if it is not held by someone else, manifest in actual pain in your mind and body. It depends on how directly you find yourself involved in this.
There are two key words in the previous statement: "thoughtlessly" and "divergent". Real divergence produces pain, but if you handle it carefully and thoughtfully you can allow for surprising divergence without too much pain.
It's when you don't really think about it that you cause more pain, and I can assure you that the rest of us do not want to carry that for you.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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