The Elder Bulls

Every founder I know is one elder away from a disaster.

In 1992, in a national park in South Africa, the rhinos started dying.

The killer was bigger than any predator on the continent. And nobody could figure out who it was.

Between 1992 and 1997, roughly fifty white rhinos were killed at Pilanesberg National Park. Their horns were intact. Poachers had not touched them. Their backs were broken. Their bodies mutilated. Something was hunting them down not for meat, not for horn, but for what looked like rage.

Rangers put up cameras. Trackers walked the bush. Theories piled up. Too many rhinos, too little space. Territorial disputes. Some new disease. None of it fit. Because the wounds on the dead rhinos looked strange, big, blunt. Nothing about them said predator. Everything about them said tusk.

The killers, it turned out, were elephants.

Young male elephants, specifically. A whole generation of them. And when the ecologists at Pilanesberg finally understood why, the answer said less about elephants than it said about how any complex social system falls apart.

The orphans

In the 1970s and 80s, Kruger National Park had a problem most parks would love to have. Too many elephants. So the park culled the adults. And the babies, the orphaned calves left behind, were relocated to other parks that needed animals. Pilanesberg was one of them.

A generation of young elephants arrived at Pilanesberg with no adult bulls, no matriarchs old enough to remember the rules, no hierarchy to teach them what elephant behaviour looked like. They were fed, they were healthy, they grew. And for fifteen years, everything seemed fine.

Then they hit puberty. And then the killings began.

The mystery cracked open when a biologist named Rob Slotow, working with the Pilanesberg field ecologist Gus van Dyk, noticed something specific. Male elephants have a state called musth. Testosterone surges, aggression spikes, the animal becomes dangerous. In a normal population, musth begins around age thirty and lasts a few days.

The Pilanesberg orphans were going into musth at twenty. And staying in it for three months.

No older bulls meant no hierarchy. No hierarchy meant nobody to teach these young males how to de-escalate. Nobody to spar with them and win, teaching them what losing feels like. Nobody to say, quietly, through fifty tonnes of body language, not now, young one, not like this.

The young bulls were running around Pilanesberg with a decade too much testosterone and no experience of losing. So when they encountered a rhino at a waterhole, and the rhino did what rhinos normally do, which is de-escalate, walk away, the young elephants chased them down. Because they had never learned to stop chasing.

The fix

In February 1998, park rangers loaded six adult bull elephants into specially designed trucks at Kruger National Park. These were big animals. Old animals. Animals who had been through musth themselves, thirty times over, and who had learned every one of the ten thousand small ways an elephant tells another elephant to stand down.

They were driven eight hundred kilometres and released into Pilanesberg.

Within weeks the killings stopped.

Not because the older bulls fought the young ones, though they did. Not because the older bulls punished them, though they did that too. But because the young bulls, for the first time in their lives, encountered animals who were bigger than them, older than them, and who had scar tissue they did not. Their musth cycles began to shorten within eight months. The aberrant behaviour disappeared. The population settled.

The scientists later published a paper in Nature. The conclusion was clean.

Older bulls control young males.

The translation

I told this story at a leadership networking meeting recently. Most of the room was founders. A few were CEOs of larger companies. Nobody was an elephant biologist.

But every single person in the room recognised themselves in the story somewhere.

Because this is not really about elephants. Every company, every team, every community without elders is a Pilanesberg waiting to happen.

The best hires you make as a scaling founder are, by design, young bulls. Ambitious. Fast. Aggressive. Willing to break things to get things done. This is not a bug. It is exactly what you hired them for. In the early years of a company, this energy is what builds the thing.

But somewhere between year three and year seven, if there is no elder in the room, that energy stops building the company and starts breaking it. The best hires start colliding with each other, chasing rhinos that should have been left alone, staying in musth for months. Not because they are bad people. Because there is no hierarchy old enough to teach them how to lose.

The startup with no board member who has been through a real crisis. The team with no senior engineer who has shipped a wrong thing and lived with the consequences. The company with no advisor whose scars visibly outnumber their credentials. Every one of these is a Pilanesberg with the killings about to start.

The founder does not have to be the elder. Nobody in their thirties has enough scar tissue yet. What the founder has to do is find the elder. Bring them in. Give them room in the herd. Let their body language do the work.

The counterintuitive part

The bull who calmed Pilanesberg was not the oldest bull in the truck.

He was the one who had been through the most.

This matters more than it sounds. Because when founders start looking for elders, the first instinct is to hunt for age or credentials. The retired CEO. The industry veteran. The name on the board slot. Sometimes these people are elders. Often they are not. What makes someone an elder is not the number of years, it is what those years did to them.

The advisor who lost a company and rebuilt one is worth more than the advisor who ran a large company for thirty years without ever being wrong. The board member who was fired once, badly, is worth more than the board member with a perfect resume. The senior engineer who watched a launch fail publicly is worth more than the senior engineer who never touched a launch that could fail.

Age is a proxy for scar tissue. It is not the same thing.

The close

Ten years into running Enigma, I am starting to understand that finding elders was the most important hiring problem I did not know I had. The technical problems solve themselves eventually. The market problems solve themselves eventually. But a company full of young bulls, running at full musth, with no elder to teach them how to de-escalate, will destroy itself from the inside long before any competitor arrives.

Find your elders.

Or become one.

And remember, the bull who calmed Pilanesberg was not the oldest in the truck. He was the one who had been through the most.

Onwards and upwards.

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