I always thought this was PG's greatest gift to the tech world. To horribly generalize - prior to YC "business" people had a patronizing attitude toward developers. They were expensive assets - comparable to hw/sw and data-centers - that were required to successfully launch and grow a startup. But they weren't invited to the strategic table too often. They didn't get business.
I don't know this to be a fact but I always felt like PG responded with a "I'll show you!" after one too many patronizing comments from the old boys club of VC's or CEO's or SVP's of BD's. And show us he has. Certainly other factors (the lower entry cost to starting a startup) contributed to the rise of the wide spread geek business leader. But PG deserves a lot of credit.
Having said all that I almost feel like developers today are similar to women in the 80's (stick with me I know this is getting weird) Women in the 80's were supposed to have fulfilling careers and still be great mother's/spouses. They could have both! They just ended up with 2x the pressure to be great at what they did vs before. It seems today every developer is supposed to have a real side project that could blossom into it's own business at any point. Come to think of it; non technical startup folks are implored to "learn to code!" So maybe it applies to both devs and non devs in startups.
It's an interesting time. I think it's great developers can now lead companies with little or not stigma attached. In the long run though I believe in teams and specialization vs individuals and doing it all. I think we'll return to a more natural balance. And that tends to be that people who can build and nurture a forest tree by tree and row by row aren't the same people who can see the entire forest and what the seasons will bring. The forest does best when each person is in the right role.
Come on guys, Hewlett and Packard were engineers, and they _slightly_ predated pg, Larry, Sergei, and Mark Z. Even their mentor was a professor, not a "business guy". From Wikipedia[1]:
"Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard graduated with degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1935. The company originated in a garage in nearby Palo Alto during a fellowship they had with a past professor, Frederick Terman at Stanford during the Great Depression. Terman was considered a mentor to them in forming Hewlett-Packard. In 1939, Packard and Hewlett established Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Packard's garage with an initial capital investment of US$538."
Drones in khakis and blue shirts have been trying to infiltrate the valley ever since. It's true that their influence waxes and wanes, but they've never been the ones to drive things here.
While I agree with you, I wouldn't attribute the entire effect to Paul Graham. There's a steady progression: Phase 1 was Larry and Sergey: they tried their hardest to stay in charge, but the powers that be (i.e. the money) forced a CEO on them. The best they could do was limit the damage by making sure the CEO had as much technical chops as possible. In retrospect, Eric Schmidt was great: a real hacker in background who had made the transition into a business guy at Novell/Sun. Pretty good progress to getting hackers more power: at least when they were forced to hire above themselves, they picked one of their own.
But the next one in the line went better - Call this Phase 2: Mark Zuckerberg (the next big company founder) was somehow able to hold his own against the money. I think we can credit this to Peter Thiel: since Thiel had first hand experience at PayPal, he probably has tremendous respect for hackers (I don't know what his personal hacking skills are, but I suspect they are good). Thiel (as the primary money behind FB) gave the Zuck free reign to stay CEO, which moved the needle further.
And now we're in phase 3: Zuck has shown the money guys enough contempt (remember the articles in Businessweek or whatever where bankers were angry that Zuck wore a hoodie and not a suit at the IPO roadshows?), as well as established a ~50B company with hackers firmly at the helm. Now it's common knowledge that you don't really need a "business guy". The next guys are free from this tyranny.
I do think that PG helped though. A lot of the education has come from PGs essays: I'd be surprised if there was anyone in the valley who hasn't read them, or at least organically come to very similar conclusions that he has: notice how they overlap well with Peter Thiel's class notes for CS183 (at least in some of the assumptions they both make about how the world works). And the part of SV that PG doesn't influence (the bigcos, I imagine. I don't know, I'm speculating at this point...) Thiel influences. So take the lead-by-example of Google, then Facebook. The intellectual underpinnings by Thiel and Graham. The evangelizing of Graham and Hacker news, and that's what I would credit for this outcome.
>I think we can credit this to Peter Thiel: since Thiel had first hand experience at PayPal, he probably has tremendous respect for hackers (I don't know what his personal hacking skills are, but I suspect they are good).
Peter Thiel's educational background is in philosophy and law [1]. There's been no public demonstration of hacking ability from him. I'd suspect that his respect for hackers was (if it didn't exist from earlier years through his personal relationships) grown from his partnership with Max Levichin in founding PayPal and keeping it afloat during those tumultuous years via multiple technical breakthroughs (including fraud detection, researched and developed by Levichin).
I don't know, even before YC a lot (most?) of the prominent successful tech startups were started by pretty technical people Microsoft , Apple , Yahoo , Google etc.
That's why I emphasized "wide spread". And Google and Yahoo bought in "mature businessy" CEO's. And Jobs to me was always a business guy wrapped in the cloak of dev but that's a whole other discussion!
Yep. But he wasn't brought in to Google to tap his technical prowess. He was brought in to run the business side of it. The original founders weren't trusted at that point. Someone else made a good point about how they were sort of the stepping stone between the old world and Zuck who by then had no intention of stepping away.
>> That tends to be that people who can build and nurture a forest tree by tree and row by row aren't the same people who can see the entire forest and what the seasons will bring. The forest does best when each person is in the right role.
There are plenty of hackers who can see an entire forest. This is the meaning of abstraction.
It is correct to say that something is best when people are in their 'right' role, but I think it's absurd to say that people that are used to hacking and creating systems are unable to think about systems...
If what you're saying is true, however, that means a weakening of our socioeconomic position, so you better hope that you're wrong, and that we do in fact have the natural ability to learn, think about systems and be strategic.
I don't know this to be a fact but I always felt like PG responded with a "I'll show you!" after one too many patronizing comments from the old boys club of VC's or CEO's or SVP's of BD's. And show us he has. Certainly other factors (the lower entry cost to starting a startup) contributed to the rise of the wide spread geek business leader. But PG deserves a lot of credit.
Having said all that I almost feel like developers today are similar to women in the 80's (stick with me I know this is getting weird) Women in the 80's were supposed to have fulfilling careers and still be great mother's/spouses. They could have both! They just ended up with 2x the pressure to be great at what they did vs before. It seems today every developer is supposed to have a real side project that could blossom into it's own business at any point. Come to think of it; non technical startup folks are implored to "learn to code!" So maybe it applies to both devs and non devs in startups.
It's an interesting time. I think it's great developers can now lead companies with little or not stigma attached. In the long run though I believe in teams and specialization vs individuals and doing it all. I think we'll return to a more natural balance. And that tends to be that people who can build and nurture a forest tree by tree and row by row aren't the same people who can see the entire forest and what the seasons will bring. The forest does best when each person is in the right role.