Tech Evangelism

Evangelical language permeates tech culture. “Angel investors” provide financing to small start-ups, business how-to books compare dedicated customers to “true believers,” and many technology companies have people on their payroll with the official title of “evangelist.” Part marketer, part missionary, and part teacher, the technology evangelist “educates customers and other key market players about the benefits of specific technology, including platforms, software tools, and applications.”[i]Based on interviews with technology evangelists and an analysis of the business literature that gave rise to technology evangelism, this paper traces how since the late 1980s what I call Christianesque ideas about the transmission of life-changing good news, conversion, and discipleship have come to structure the interpersonal and financial relationships at the foundation of technological innovation, sales, and adoption.

Although the term “angel” for investors dates from the early twentieth century, when it referred to wealthy individuals who financed expensive Broadway productions and shared both the risks and the profits, it entered the general business lexicon in the early 1980s when William Wetzel Jr. “coin[ed] the term ‘business angels’ for people providing the same kind of risk investments to young entrepreneurial ventures,” and especially for “technology-based” start-ups.[ii] Evangelism entered the discourse shortly after with Guy Kawasaki’s books The Macintosh Way (1990) and Selling the Dream: How to Promote your Product, Company, or Ideas—and Make a Difference—Using Everyday Evangelism (1991). In Selling the Dream, Kawasaki sets out to make his readers into evangelists, arguing that “to make products, companies, and ideas successful, you must … get people to believe in your product, company or idea and to share your dream.”[iii] To hone his methods, Kawasaki attended a five-day Billy Graham School of Evangelism conference in 1990, making twentieth-century Evangelicalism one of his models.[iv] However, unlike the fusions of capitalism and Christianity characteristic of the 1950s and 1960s that, as Kevin M. Kruse argues, helped craft the United States into a self-consciously Christian Nation, Kawasaki does not aim to Christianize. Rather, he transforms evangelism into a secular tool.

As the practices of tech evangelists show, the secularized tool of evangelism consists in a distinctive mode of relationality. They are friendly, cheerful, fun, ambitious, visionary, and inclusive. In Kawasaki’s terms, evangelists “embody a vision,” “make people better,” “generate big effects,” “catalyze selfless actions,” and “polarize people.”[v] These behaviors generate value for the companies that evangelists represent. This value, however, derives not from the manufacture of goods but from the creation of relationships, and these relationships do not bear economic fruit on a predictable timeline. One of my interviewees exemplifies this dynamic. A product evangelist for a smaller tech company in the ecosystem of one of Silicon Valley’s giants, he hosts a “Newbies Breakfast” every year at the giant company’s user conference. At 6 AM at a restaurant on the edge of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, he greets attendees with a smile and helps connect them to each other. First-time conference attendees walk away knowing several other people, and the breakfast is so popular that for many it now functions as a reunion. My interviewee earns no money for his efforts, donating all proceeds to a local charity, and only mentions his employer at the end of the breakfast when thanking its sponsors. What he builds are friendships. At some later date, these friendships may generate leads. Again and again, my interviewees described how the friendships they made through events like the Newbie Breakfast and user groups led to jobs, promotions, and new customers.

Kawasaki cites the parable of the Sower (Luke 8:4) to describe the value created by these relationships as a process of sowing, cultivating, and harvesting.[vi] Despite Kawasaki’s reference to scripture, most of the time the religious terms that populate business discourse about technology start-ups elicit no commentary from their users. I call these ideas “Christianesque” because, although built on symbols, metaphors, and stories borrowed from the Christian tradition, such as the guardian angel or Paul the evangelist, these terms do not have sectarian resonance for those who use them. Rather, tech discourse freely mixes Christianesque concepts with symbols and ideas from other cultural and religious traditions, like mindfulness and self-help.[vii] Tech evangelism, I argue, thus reveals both how corporate culture borrows from evangelicalism and how the affective bonds that nurture financial transactions in tech ecosystems can be more than extractive.

[i] “How To Become a Technology Evangelist.”

[ii] Hans Landström and Colin Mason, “Business Angels as a Research Field,” in Handbook of Research on Business Angels, ed. Hans Landström and Colin Mason, Handbooks in Venture Capital (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2018), 2–3.

[iii] Guy Kawasaki, Selling the Dream: How to Promote Your Product, Company, or Ideas-and Make a Difference-Using Everyday Evangelism (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), vii. Emphasis in original.

[iv] Kawasaki, Selling the Dream, 162–64.

[v] Kawasaki, Selling the Dream, 14–16.

[vi] Kawasaki, Selling the Dream, 111–50.

[vii] On mindfulness, see Carolyn Chen, Work, Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022); On self-help, see Beth Blum, The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).