Is Your Startup a Cult or Just Using Futura Bold?

You can tell a lot about a person by the font they trust. And you can tell even more about a startup.

Futura Bold is the Helvetica of people who want to seem like they don’t care about Helvetica. It's clean, geometric, modern. An enduring favorite of Bauhaus purists and cereal bar disruptors alike. If you’re launching an app that wants to empower the future of decentralized pet-sitting, you’ve either considered Futura Bold or already screen-printed it on a tote bag for your Series A investors.

But font choice is just the gateway drug. If you suspect your startup might be a cult, or you’ve recently joined one, don’t panic. There are signs. And they’re usually kerned just so.

The Vocabulary Spiral

Normal companies sell things. Cult-startups reimagine ecosystems. They don’t make software. They scale human connection. Employees aren’t workers. They’re builders, evangelists, or worse, day-zero warriors. If you’ve ever received an onboarding packet titled The Manifesto, congratulations. You’ve joined a rebranded pyramid scheme with kombucha on tap.

If you're calling your users a “community” before you even have 100 of them, you're not building a brand. You're printing pamphlets.

The Founder Glaze

There’s charismatic, and then there’s won’t blink until you sign the NDA. Founders at cult-adjacent startups tend to give off the vibe of someone who just microdosed before a TED Talk.

They don’t talk to you. They speak into you. Their vision is disruptive, transcendent, and oddly reliant on you agreeing to unpaid overtime. If your founder ever compares themselves to Jobs, Musk, or Jesus, run.

Bonus red flag: they refer to your company as the movement.

The Aesthetic Purity Test

Your office, if you have one, is probably all white everything, plants you’re not allowed to water, and inspirational signage in—you guessed it—Futura Bold. The message is always something like:

BE HUMAN. STAY SCALABLE.

No one knows what it means, but it’s printed on the hoodie they gave you your first day, and now you can’t throw it out because it’s technically your uniform.

If you’re using a typeface famously favored by NASA, Wes Anderson, and IKEA, but your mission is to liberate laundry, you may be overcompensating with visual clarity to distract from operational chaos.

The Infinite Pivot

In a normal company, things fail and get reworked. In a culty startup, every pivot is reframed as the next phase of the vision. The problem wasn’t the product. It was that the world wasn’t ready yet. You’ll hear phrases like:

• We’re still in stealth, technically

• Our metrics are more qualitative right now

• Growth is a colonialist construct

You’ll nod. You’ll take notes. You’ll eventually realize your job title has changed four times this quarter and you’re now technically in charge of storytelling ops.

The Rituals

All companies have traditions. Culty ones have rituals: Monday all-hands with mandatory breathwork. Slack channels with names like #blessings or #hypergrowthjourney. A bell that gets rung when someone closes a deal or reaches inbox zero. If you feel guilty using PTO or find yourself apologizing for not journaling after an offsite, it might be time to reassess.

So...Is It a Cult?

Let’s be honest. All startups flirt with cult energy. They kind of have to. They’re built on belief. Often irrational belief in a future that doesn’t exist yet. A little messianic branding. A little aesthetic overreach. A lot of post-ironic merch.

But when the mission supersedes reality, when the language becomes code, when dissent becomes betrayal, you might not be scaling a business. You might be giving your life to a vision that wears Futura Bold like a cloak.

And if you’re still unsure, ask yourself this: would you keep working there if the free matcha disappeared?