Some companies don't feel like companies. They feel like cults.

Not in the corporate-babble sense of "strong culture," but something more visceral — the hum you notice before you understand it, the way a team moves together with an intensity that feels slightly unhinged in the best way. You can't fake it, you can't hire a coach to produce it, and you know immediately when you've stepped into it. There's a texture to the room, a metabolic rate to the work, a collective delusion that becomes self-fulfilling. From the outside, people try to reverse-engineer it. On the inside, you just feel it.

Ramp was the first place where I felt that energy sustained at scale. The thing people get wrong about Ramp is they think its culture was built through structure — the rituals, the monthly gatherings, the "ownership mentality." In reality, the energy predated all of that. It came from the density of the people in the building: operators who were hardwired for pace, taste, and impact. There were no passengers. You walked in and immediately understood the standard — not because someone told you, but because everyone around you operated like they had something to prove. The bar wasn't imposed; it radiated horizontally. The person sitting next to you was running a parallel race you didn't want to lose.

That's the first principle of cult-like energy: it's not top-down, it's contagious. One person with an unusually high slope can lift an entire team's center of gravity. Ten people like that can tilt the physics of a company. Ramp had dozens. Many came from networks that had already internalized high-velocity work — Stripe, Square, Figma, Meta, research labs, hedge funds. They weren't just talented; they arrived pre-calibrated to an operating model where intensity was the norm. When you stack enough people like that together, something shifts. The work becomes a kind of shared performance. The company develops a current you either keep up with or get swept out of.

Cursor has the same energy today, but expressed differently. It's younger, more kinetic, more raw — a team that behaves like a band on tour, moving city to city with the same singular focus: build the best AI development environment in the world. Cursor's cult energy doesn't come from maturity; it comes from conviction and compression. The founders aren't optimizing for "balance." They're optimizing for slope. The early employees aren't employees — they're zealots. Cursor is one of the few places where the average engineer would, without hesitation, work an 80-hour week because they're trying to outpace an entire category. It's the same gravitational pull that Ramp had, but with the intensity of a company still in the stage where every decision feels existential.

What links Ramp and Cursor — and the growing constellation of companies that want to emulate them — is a shared architecture of energy. High-trust, high-output environments tend to attract people who don't need permission to do great work. They operate with internal pressure, not external management. They write late-night documents not because anyone asked, but because the idea is burning a hole in their head. They recruit their friends because they want to win with people who think like them. They create off-the-record rituals, language, and lore. They blur the line between professional and personal ambition. They treat the office like a studio, not a workplace.

From Ramp's internal lore — like the "three-day product sprint" stories that inspired teams to match the output — to Cursor's now-mythologized velocity of releasing entire product surfaces in weeks, these narratives aren't marketing. They're artifacts of a company metabolizing work differently. It becomes part of the attractor. Someone hears a Ramp story and thinks: I want to be around people who work like that. Someone sees Cursor ship a generational product in record time and thinks: I want to be part of that wave. The story recruits the next member of the cult.

This is why dozens of early-stage startups in San Francisco today are openly aspiring to emulate Ramp and Cursor. Mercor is one — a young team operating with the same sense of compressed time and conviction that they're building something that should exist. Unify is another — early, hungry, stacking high-slope people in a way that makes the whole system feel overclocked. Across the city, you see small AI teams running 2 am standups, founder houses filled with whiteboards, hyper-ambitious 22-year-olds choosing intensity over comp because they want to be part of the next legendary group. The cultural gravity field is expanding outward.

But in reality, you cannot manufacture cult-like energy. Not authentically. Not sustainably. You can copy the aesthetics — the no-meeting Wednesdays, the late-night office photos, the public shipping logs — but those are symptoms, not causes. The cause is the people. Their backgrounds, their networks, their weird obsessions, their chip-on-shoulder psychology, the way they push each other without needing to be pushed. A company at this level isn't built by "culture," it's built by chemistry. And chemistry isn't designed — it's discovered.

Every cult-like company feels different because every founding team has a different underlying identity. Ramp's energy was sharp, analytical, and relentlessly operational. Cursor is fast, creative, and almost athletic. Mercor's is hungry, execution-heavy, oriented around slope and speed. Unify's forming its own variant — a team building with conviction and internal momentum. You can map these energies back to the founders the same way you can trace a band's sound back to its early influences. The company becomes an extension of the psychological profile of the people who built it.

What makes these companies special isn't that they are intense. Plenty of companies are intense. What makes them special is that the intensity is shared, and that it scales in the right direction. It doesn't fragment into burnout. It compounds into performance. It creates a feedback loop where people get sharper simply by proximity. The environment self-selects for slope. Only the people who genuinely love the work — not the image of the work — survive.

This is why cult-like energy has become the dominant archetype for the most ambitious startups in the 2020s. As AI compresses timelines and raises the ceiling on what small teams can build, the real differentiator becomes the quality of the humans, and the intensity of the environment that shapes them. Talent alone is insufficient. Taste alone is insufficient. Even capital is insufficient. You need a group of people who believe they're building something inevitable, and behave accordingly.

Looking back on Ramp, and watching Cursor, Mercor, and Unify in real time, I've come to believe that the best companies don't start with culture. They start with energy. Culture is the documentation of energy after it's been crystallized. But energy — that immediate, visceral sense that you're in the presence of a breakout team — is the thing that actually moves the needle. It attracts the right people, repels the wrong ones, accelerates the work, and strengthens the belief.

And belief matters. The most dangerous teams in tech are the ones who believe in the reality they are building ahead of the world believing it with them. Those teams move with a pace the market can't match because they're not reacting, they're creating. They think in loops, not lines. They trust each other implicitly. They run toward the hard problems because that's where their identity lives. They treat the work like a mission, not a job.

You can't fake that.

You can only build it by gathering a group of people who are dedicated enough, talented enough, and ambitious enough to build something worth believing in, and then letting the energy do the rest.