It’s really interesting thinking about what changed in tech and why all the leaders are like this. It used to be people developing and fitting technology to goals - mapping the world, enabling democratic power or niche hobby relationships - and that generally ended up being exciting and helpful.
But at some point tech became captured by a few specific ideas and technology - SaaS, AI, data mining - and every CEO now tries to fit the goals to the technology. It no longer matters to these people what the benefit to the user is, they just work backwards from what the technology can do and rationalize whatever it is as the goal.
When they stopped being run by engineers and all became ran by MBA’s.
That’s not to say there aren’t MBA’s with engineering degrees etc but they didn’t actually build anything themselves. They sycophanted their way to these positions of power and they’ll never be able to bring the wonder and passion into tech because they have none. They have passion for business but if you get turned on by privacy policies scam story telling, who boy the world is your oyster right now.
Now you could argue zuck was a founder engineer and he’s terrible as well. I’d say he’s a bad example at being anything.
So there are exceptions. Sergey Brin is an example of an engineer that drifted but Larry was the brains. Just like woz to Steve, just like Bill to Balmer.
Always two. One genius. One cheerleader. The cheerleader is always trapped by what is making them wealthy to parrot.
Who is Sundar Puchai’s cheerleader? Prabhakar Raghavan? We are so far away from a Larry Page keeping an idiot like Sergey in line.
Or Satya? A sub contracted Sam Altman maybe?
There is no culture except the culture of business to these guys. Quiet strategic relationships, reduction of ego which means no risk, no research, no bravado, and no muscle for creating.
From what I’ve seen in Startups both during the 90s and more recently, the spirit in them changed from “solve a cool problem” in the 90s to “find a way to make lots of money for founders” after the Net Crash and more often than not the chosen way to make money was sell the company to investors rather than actually selling anything to customers, so the tech just needed to look like “the next big money maker” in order to get said investor money and “tech” messaging became dominated by investor hype.
The almost pure-grifer incentives and spirit I saw become dominant in Startups from the 00s now seems to pervade the whole Tech industry.
Pretty much. The industry was for ‘those nerds’ in the days, then dot-com came and holy shit, money to be made, but for a time, let the nerds cook because the investor class had no idea and kind of knew they had no idea.
Then the crash put the investor class firmly at the wheel and the industry has been significantly distorted since then, motivation wise.
Clearly good things have happened, but there’s always this anti-user angle at play now.
These people are so out of touch
It’s really interesting thinking about what changed in tech and why all the leaders are like this. It used to be people developing and fitting technology to goals - mapping the world, enabling democratic power or niche hobby relationships - and that generally ended up being exciting and helpful.
But at some point tech became captured by a few specific ideas and technology - SaaS, AI, data mining - and every CEO now tries to fit the goals to the technology. It no longer matters to these people what the benefit to the user is, they just work backwards from what the technology can do and rationalize whatever it is as the goal.
When they stopped being run by engineers and all became ran by MBA’s.
That’s not to say there aren’t MBA’s with engineering degrees etc but they didn’t actually build anything themselves. They sycophanted their way to these positions of power and they’ll never be able to bring the wonder and passion into tech because they have none. They have passion for business but if you get turned on by privacy policies scam story telling, who boy the world is your oyster right now.
Now you could argue zuck was a founder engineer and he’s terrible as well. I’d say he’s a bad example at being anything.
So there are exceptions. Sergey Brin is an example of an engineer that drifted but Larry was the brains. Just like woz to Steve, just like Bill to Balmer.
Always two. One genius. One cheerleader. The cheerleader is always trapped by what is making them wealthy to parrot.
Who is Sundar Puchai’s cheerleader? Prabhakar Raghavan? We are so far away from a Larry Page keeping an idiot like Sergey in line.
Or Satya? A sub contracted Sam Altman maybe?
There is no culture except the culture of business to these guys. Quiet strategic relationships, reduction of ego which means no risk, no research, no bravado, and no muscle for creating.
From what I’ve seen in Startups both during the 90s and more recently, the spirit in them changed from “solve a cool problem” in the 90s to “find a way to make lots of money for founders” after the Net Crash and more often than not the chosen way to make money was sell the company to investors rather than actually selling anything to customers, so the tech just needed to look like “the next big money maker” in order to get said investor money and “tech” messaging became dominated by investor hype.
The almost pure-grifer incentives and spirit I saw become dominant in Startups from the 00s now seems to pervade the whole Tech industry.
Pretty much. The industry was for ‘those nerds’ in the days, then dot-com came and holy shit, money to be made, but for a time, let the nerds cook because the investor class had no idea and kind of knew they had no idea.
Then the crash put the investor class firmly at the wheel and the industry has been significantly distorted since then, motivation wise.
Clearly good things have happened, but there’s always this anti-user angle at play now.