Monthly Archives: August 2014

Cheap votes: political degradation in government, business, and venture capital.

I’ve written a lot about how people in the mainstream business culture externalize costs in order to improve their personal careers and reputations, and the natural disconnect this creates between them and technologists, who want to get rich by creating new value, and not by finding increasingly clever ways to slough costs to other people. What I haven’t written as much about is how these private-sector social climbers, who present themselves as entrepreneurs but have more in common with Soviet bureaucrats, managed to gain their power. How exactly do these characters establish themselves as leaders? The core concept one needs to understand is one that appears consistently in politics, economics, online gaming, and social relationships: cheap votes.

Why is vote-selling illegal?

First, a question: should it be illegal to buy and sell votes? Some might find it unreasonable that this transaction is illegal; others might be surprised to know that it wasn’t always against the law, even if it seems like the sort of thing that should be. Society generally allows the transfer of one kind of power into another, so why should individual electoral power be considered sacred? On theory alone, it’s hard to make the case that it should be. 

I’ll attempt to answer that. The first thing that must be noted is that vote-buying matters. It increases the statistical power of the bought votes, to the detriment of the rest of the electorate. On paper, one vote is one vote. However, the variance contribution (or proportion of effect) of a voting bloc grows with the square of its size. In that way, the power of a 100-person, perfectly correlated (i.e. no defections) voting bloc is 10,000 times that of an individual. 

Let’s give a concrete example. Let’s say that the payoff of a gamble is based on 101 coins, 100 white and one black. The payoff is based on the heads flipped, with each white coin worth $1 and the black coin worth $100. The total range of payoffs is $0 to $200, and the black coin will, obviously, contribute $100 of that. So does the black coin have “half of” the influence over the payoff? Not quite; it has more. The white coins, as a group, will almost always contribute between $30 and $70– and between $40 and $60, 95 percent of the time. It’s a bell curve. What this means is that whether a round will have a good payoff depends, in practice, almost entirely on the black coin. If it’s heads, you’ll almost never see less than $130. If it’s tails, you’ll rarely see more than $70. The white coins matter, but not nearly as much, because many of the heads and tails cancel each other out. 

Both the white and black coins have the same mean contribution to the payoff: $50. However, the variance of the single black coin is much higher: 2500 (or a standard deviation of $50). The white coins, all together, have a variance of 25, or a standard deviation of $5. Since variance is (under many types of conditions) the best measure of relative influence, one could argue that the black coin has 100 times the mathematical influence of all the white coins added together, and 10,000 times the influence of an individual white coin. 

These simplifications break down in some cases, especially around winner-take-all elections. For example, if two factions are inflexibly opposed (because the people in them benefit or suffer personally, or think they do, based on the result of the election) and each has 45% of the vote, then the people in the remaining 10% (“spoilers”) have significantly more power, especially if something can bring them to congeal into a bloc of their own. That is a commonly-cited case in which individual, generally indifferent “swing” voters gain power. Does this contradict my claim about the disproportionate power of voting blocs? Not really. In this scenario, they have disproportionate decisive effect, but their power is over a binary decision that was already set up by the movement of the other 90%. 

Moreover, it’s improbable that the people in that 10 percent would form a bloc of their own. What prevents this? Indifference. Apathy. They often don’t really care either way about the matter being voted on. They’d probably sell their votes for a hundred dollars each. 

In quite a large number of matters, specific details are too boring for most people to care, even if those issues are extremely important. They’d much rather defer to the experts, throw their power to someone else, and get back to their arguments about colors of bikesheds. Their votes are cheap and, if its legal, people will gain power or wealth by bundling those cheap votes together and selling the blocs.

So why is vote-selling illegal? It causes democracy to degenerate (enough that, as we’ll see, many organizations eschew democracy altogether). The voters who have the most interest in the outcome, and the most knowledge, will be more inclined to vote as individuals. Though they will correlate and may fall into loose clusters (e.g., “conservatives”, “liberals”) this will tend to be emergent rather by intent. On the other hand, the blunt power of an inflexible voting bloc will be attained by… the bought votes, the cheapest votes, the “fuck it, whoever pays me” set. The voting process ceases to reflect the general will (in Rousseau’s sense of the concept) of the people, as power is transferred to those who can package and sell cheap votes– and those who buy them. 

Real-life examples

Official buying and selling of votes is illegal, but indirect forms of it are both legal and not uncommon. For example, over ninety percent of voters in a typical election will give their vote, automatically, to the candidate of one of two major political parties. These candidates are usually chosen, at this point in history, through legitimate electoral means: the party’s primary. But what about the stages before that, as incumbents in other offices issue endorsements and campaign checks are cut?

Effectively, the purpose of these parties is to assume that cheap-vote congealment (and bloc formation) has already happened, tell the populace that it’s down between two remaining candidates, and make the voters feel they have a choice between two people who are often quite very similar in economic (in the U.S., right-of-center) and social (moderately authoritarian) policies while differing on superficial cultural grounds (related to religion in a way that is regional and does generalize uniformly across the whole country). The political parties, in a way, are the most legitimate cheap-vote aggregators. They know that most Americans care more about the bike-shed difference between Democratic corporate crooks and Republican corporate crooks– the spectator-sport conflict between Springfield and Shelbyville– than the nuances of political debate and the merits of the issues.

The vote-buying process is more brazen in the media. While expensive and thorough campaigns can’t turn an unlikeable person into a winner, they can have a large effect in “swing states” or close matches. There are some people who’ll be swayed by the often juvenile political commercials that pop up in the month before an election, and those are some of the cheapest voters. The electioneer need not even buy their vote directly; it has already been sold to the television station or radio show (a highly powerful cheap vote aggregator) to whom they’ve lent their agency. 

This is one of the reasons I don’t find low voter turnout to be distressing or even undesirable, at least not on first principles. If low voter turnout is an artifact of disenfranchisement, then it’s bad. If poorer people can’t get to the polls because their bosses won’t let them have the time off work (and Election Day ought to be a day off from work, but that’s another debate) then that’s quite wrong. On the other hand, if uninformed people don’t show up, that’s fine. I don’t get involved in civic activities unless I know what and who I’m voting for; otherwise, I’d be, at best, adding statistical noise and, at worse, unwittingly giving power to the cheap vote sellers and buyers who’ve put their preferred brand into my head. 

All this said, cheap-vote dynamics aren’t limited to politics. In fact, they’re much more common in economics. Just look at advertising. People vote with their dollars on what products should be made and what businesses should continue. A market, just like an election, is a preference aggregator. The problem? No one knows all of the contenders, or could possibly know. As opposed to a handful of political candidates, there might be twenty or two hundred vendors of a product. Quite a great number of them will buy not based on product quality or personal affinity but on reputation (brand) alone. Advertising has a minimal effect on the most knowledgeable (Gladwell’s “Mavens”) but it’s extremely powerful at bringing in the cheapest votes, the on-the-fence people who’ll go with what seems like the least risky choice. 

Venture capital

Maybe it’s predictable that I would relate this to technology, but it’s so applicable here that I can’t leave the obvious facts of the issue unexplored. 

Selection of organizational leadership almost always has a cheap-vote issue, because elections with large numbers of indistinguishable alternatives are where cheap votes have the most power. (A yes/no decision that affects everyone is where cheap votes will have the least power.) Most people see the contests as wholly external, because all the credible candidates are (from the individual’s point of view) just “not me”. Or, more accurately, if no one they know is in contention, they’re not going to be invested in the matter of which bozo gets the tallest stilts. As organizations get large, the effect of this apathy becomes dominant. 

Therefore, it’s rare in any case that selection of people will be uncorrupted by cheap vote dynamics, no matter how democratic the election or aggregation process may be. While some people are great leaders and others are terrible, it’s nearly impossible to reliably determine who will be which kind until after they have led (and, sometimes, it’s not clear for some time afterward). If asked to choose leaders among 20 candidates in a group of 10,000, you’ll see nuisance (by “nuisance”, I mean, uncorrelated to policy) variables like physical attractiveness, charisma, and even order of presentation (making the person who designs the ballots a potential cheap-vote vendor) take a disproportionate effect. This is an issue in the public sector, but a much more egregious one in the private sector, given the complete lack of transparency into the “leadership” class, in addition to the managerial power relationships and the general lack of concern about organizational corruption. 

Corporations (for better or worse, and I’d argue, for the worse) eliminate this effect by simply depriving employees of the ability to choose leaders at all: supervisors and middle managers and executives are chosen from the top down, based on loyalty to those above, and the workers are assumed to be voting for the pre-selected by continuing to work there. The corporation cheapens the worker’s vote, in effect, by reducing its value to zero. “You were going to sell your vote anyway, so let’s just say that the election happened this way.” Unless they can organize, the workers are complicit in the cheapening of their votes if they continue to work for such companies and, sadly, quite a large number do. 

There are people, of course, who are energetic and creative and naturally anti-authoritarian. Such people dislike an environment where their votes have already been cheapened, bought for a pittance, and sold to the one-party system that calls itself corporate management. The argument often made about them is that they should “just do a startup”, as if the one-party system of Silicon Valley’s venture capital elite would be preferable to the one-party system of a company’s management. By and large, it’s not an improvement.

In fact, the Silicon Valley system is worse in quite a large number of ways. A corporation can fire someone, but generally won’t continue to damage that person’s reputation, for fear of a lawsuit, negative publicity, and plummeting internal morale. This means that a person who rejects, or is rejected by, one company’s one-party system can, at the least, transition over to another company that might have a better one party in charge. There is, although not to the degree that there should be, some competition among corporate managers, and that generally keeps most of them from being truly awful. On the other hand, venture capitalists, with their culture of note-sharing, collusion, and market manipulation (one which if it were applied to publicly-traded stocks instead of unregulated private equities, would result in stiff prison sentences for all of them; alas, lawmakers don’t much care what happens to the careers of middle-class 22-year-old programmers) frequently do damage the careers of those who oppose the interests of the group. Most of the VC-era “innovations” in corporate structure and culture– stack-ranking, the intentional encouragement of a machismo-driven and exclusionary culture, fast firing, horrendous health benefits because “we’re a startup”– have been for the worse. The Valley hasn’t “disrupted” the corporate establishment. It’s reinvented it in a much more onerous way. 

So how do the bastards in charge get away with this? The Silicon Valley elite are, mostly, the discards of Wall Street. They weren’t successful in their original home (the corporate mainstream) and they aren’t nearly as smart as the nerds they manage, so what gives them their power? Who gives up the power that they win? Once again, it’s a cheap vote dynamic in place. 

Venture capitalists are intermediaries between passive capital seeking above-normal returns and top technical talent. There’s a lot of passive capital out there coming from people who want to participate, financially, in new technology development. Likewise, there are a lot of smart people with great ideas but no personal ownership of the resources to implement them. The passive capitalists recognize that they don’t have the ability to judge top talent from pretenders (and neither do the narcissistic careerists on Sand Hill Road to whom they trust to their assets, but that’s another discussion) and so they sell their votes. Venture capitalists are the ones who buy those votes and package them into statistically powerful blocs. Once this is done, the decision of a single venture capitalist (bolstered by others in his industry who’ll follow his lead) determines which contender in a new industry will get the most press coverage, the most expensive programming talent, and sufficient evidence of “virality” to justify the next round of funding. 

As programmers, we (sadly) can’t do much to prevent pension funds and municipalities from erroneously trusting these Bay Area investor celebrities who couldn’t tell talent from their own asshole. I’ve said enough, to this point, about that side, and the cheap-vote buying that happens between passive capitalists and the high priests who are supposed to know better. In theory, the poor returns delivered by those agents ought to result in their eventual downfall. After all, shouldn’t people lose faith in the Sand Hill Road elite after more than a decade of mediocre returns? This seems not to be happening, largely because of the long feedback cycle and high variance intrinsic to the venture capital game. Market dynamics work in a more regularized setting, but when there is that much noise and delay in the system, capable direct judgment of talent (before the results come in) is the only reliable way to get decent performance. Unfortunately, the only people with that capability are us, programmers, and we’re near the bottom of the social hierarchy. Isn’t that odd?

So let’s talk about what we can do. Preventing the flow of capital from passive investors into careerist narcissists at VC firms who fund their underqualified friends is probably not within our power at the present time. It’s nearly impossible to prevent someone with a completely different set of interests from cheapening his or her vote. Do so aggressively, and the person is likely to vote poorly (that is, against the common interest and often his own) just to spite the regulator attempting to prevent it, just as a teenage girl might date low-quality men to offend her parents. So let’s talk about our votes.

VC-funded companies (invariably calling themselves “startups”) don’t pay very well, and the equity disbursements typically range from the trivial down to the outright insulting. Yet young engineers flock to them, underestimating the social distance that a subordinate, engineer-level role will give them from the VC king-makers. They work at these companies because they think they’ll be getting personal introductions from the CEO to investors, and join that circuit as equals; in reality, that rarely happens unless contractually specified. They strengthen the feudal reputation economy that the VCs have created by giving their own power away based on brand (e.g., TechCrunch coverage, name-brand investors). 

When young people work for these VC darlings under such rotten terms, they’re devaluing their votes. When they show unreasonable (and historically refuted) trust in corporate management by refusing to organize their labor, they are (likewise) devaluing not only their political pull, but the credibility and leverage of their profession. That’s something we, as a group, can change. We probably can’t fix the way startups are financed in the next year; maybe, if we play our local politics right and enhance our own status and credibility, we’ll have that power in ten. We can start to clean up our own backyards, and we should. 

Sadly, talent does need access to capital, more than capital needs talent. The pressing needs of the day have given capital, for over a century, that basic supremacy over labor: “you need to eat, I can wait.” But does talent need access to a specific pool of capital controlled by narcissists living in a few hundred square miles of California office park? No, it doesn’t. We need money, but we don’t need them. On the other hand, if the passive investors who provide the capital that fuels their careers even begin to pay the littlest bit of attention, the VCs will need us. After all, it’s the immense productive capacity of what we do (not what VCs do) that gives venture capital the “sexiness” that excuses its decade-plus of mediocrity. Their ability to coast, and to fund suboptimal founders, rests on the fact that no one is paying attention to whether they do their jobs well, the assumption being that we (technologists) will stay on their manor, passively keeping our heads down and saying, “politics is someone else’s job; I just want to solve hard problems.” As long as we live on the VCs’ terrain, there is no way for passive investors to get to us except through Sand Hill Road. But there is no reason for that to continue. We have the power to spot, and to vote against, bad companies (and terrible products, and demoralizing corporate cultures) as and before they form. And we ought to be using it. As I’ve said before, we as software engineers and technologists have to break out of our comfort zones and (dare I say it?) get political.

Silicon Valley may not be fixable

I’ve come to an upsetting conclusion about Silicon Valley. There’s always been a hold-out hope that I’ve had that it could be fixed, and the balance of power restored to where it belongs (lifelong technologists and engineers) rather than where it currently resides, and categorically does not belong (managers, investors, non-technologists). Traditional business culture, focused on power relationships and emotions and influence peddling, has invaded the Valley and created a rash of startups with mediocre products, terrible treatment of talent, and little respect for users, employees, or technology as a whole. The result has underperformed from a return-on-investment perspective, but remained in force because it makes the well-connected exceedingly rich (at the expense of average workers, and of passive investors).  

This is disturbing because, while there are many in Silicon Valley who think that they are ready to rule, that is proven false by some humiliating, and public, failures of that ecosystem. For one thing, the real winners, in the Bay Area, aren’t technology people but landlords. The housing situation in San Francisco alone is sufficient to prove that “nerds”, at least of that stripe, aren’t ready to rule. 

We’ve also seen a hard-core Damaso Effect. The highest-status people in the Valley aren’t lifelong technologists, but people who failed out of the corporate mainstream, and are bossing nerds around as a second act. Passed over for MD at Goldman Sachs? Go to California, become a VC partner, and boss nerds around. Bottom 5% of your class in business school, untouchable even by second-rate management consultancies? Congratulations, you’re now the VP of HR at a well-funded, 100-person startup.

If the highest positions in the Valley are reserved for people who failed out of the dominant, old-style, “paper belt” culture, then we’re not going to see much innovation or “nerdiness”. Indeed, most of the winners in this crop are well-connected, full-blooded douchebags like Evan Spiegel and Lucas Duplan, who couldn’t even code themselves a better haircut. The unsettling but faultless distinction of being the last genuine nerd to succeed in the Valley probably goes to Mark Zuckerberg.

The new Valley isn’t one where underdogs can succeed. It’s not a place where land is cheap and ideas flow freely. Instead, it’s where highly productive and often creative, but politically disorganized, people (“nerds”) are treated as a resource from which value is extracted. The dominating culture of the Valley now is that of resource extraction. Economically, the latest incarnation has more in common with Saudi Arabia than with what Silicon Valley used to be. The only difference is that, instead of oil being drilled out of the ground, it’s hours of effort and creative passion being mined from talented but politically clueless (and usually quite young) software professionals, who haven’t figured out yet that their work is worth several times what they’re paid to do it, and that the importance of their skills ought to command some basic respect and equity. 

All this said, I’d like to step away from the name-calling and mudslinging. This isn’t some high-minded rejection of those impulses, because I love name-calling and mudslinging. I just want to take a more technical tack. It is fun to pillory the worst people (and that’s why I’m a faithful reader of Valleywag) but, nonetheless, their mere existence shouldn’t prevent the good guys (“nerds”) from succeeding. And, of course, the tribalism that I sometimes invoke (good nerds versus evil businessmen) is, if taken literally, quite ridiculous. There are bad nerds and there are good business people, and I’ve never wanted to imply otherwise. What’s distressing about the Valley is that it so rarely attracts the good business people.

In fact, the bad reputation of business people in the Valley, I think, stems largely from the fact that the competent ones never go there, instead working on billion-dollar Wall Street deals. This makes it easy for a young programmer to forget (or to never know) that they exist. The competent, ethical business people tend either to stay in New York and climb the finance ladder and end up running hedge funds, or deliberately downshift and run smaller “lifestyle” businesses or elite consultancies. Either they win the corporate game, or they leave it, but they don’t half-ass it by playing a less competitive but equally soulless corporate game on the other coast. It’s the inept and malignant ones who tend to find their way out to the Valley, attracted by the enormous “Kick Me” sign that each generation of young software engineers has on its back. 

The degenerate balance of power in the Valley attracts the bad business people, those who can’t make it on their home turf. Meanwhile, the talented and scrupulous ones tend to avoid it, not wanting the association. If the worst students out of Harvard Business School are becoming startup founders and venture capitalists and building nerd armies to build toilet check-in apps, then the best students from those programs are going to stay far away from that ecosystem. 

So why is the balance of power so broken, in the Valley? I think the answer is its short-term focus. To put numbers to it, let’s note that a typical Valley startup requires a business co-founder (who’ll become CEO) and a technical one (who’ll become CTO). The business co-founder raises money, and the technology co-founder builds the product and team. The general rule with founder inclusion is “Code or Contacts”. If someone’s not packing either, you can’t afford the complexity and cost of making him a founder. Both seem important, so why does the “Contacts” side tend to win? Why can’t “Code” people catch a break?

Let’s look at it as a bilateral matching problem, like dating, and assign an attractiveness level to each. For the purposes of this essay, I’m using a 10-point rating scale. 0-2 are the unqualified, 3-4 are the hangers-on, and 5-6 are average among the set (a fairly small one) of people equipped to found startups at all. 7-8 are the solid players of evident high capability, and 9-10 occur at a rate of a few per generation, and people tend to make “Chuck Norris” jokes about them.

You’d expect 10s to match with 10s, 4s with 4s, and so on. Of course, externalities can skew the market and push one side down a notch. In a typical college environment, for an example, women are more attractive to older men (including graduate students and professors) and therefore have more options, and thus more power, than their same-age male counterparts. Mature women simply have no interest in 18-year-old men, while older men do frequently pair off with young women. That power dynamic tends to reverse with age, to the point that women have a justified grievance about the dating scene later in life; but in college, women hold all the cards. 

What does it look like in technology? I’m a Technology 8 and, realistically, I couldn’t expect to pair with a Business 8. It’s not that the Biz 8 is rarer or better than the Tech 8. It’s just that he has more options. Technology people are rated based on what they know and can do. Business people are rated based on connections and what they can squeeze out of their pre-existing relationships. A Business 5 would be a typical graduate of a top-10 MBA program with the connections that implies. A Business 6 has enough contacts to raise venture funding, on reasonable terms, with a product. A Business 7 can raise a Series-A without a product, is frequently invited to lunch with CEOs of large companies, and could become partner at Sequoia on a conversation. What about my at-level counterpart, the Business 8? He’s probably not even in venture-funded technology. He likely has a personal “search fund” and is doing something else. 

The Business 8s and 9s have so many options outside of the Valley that they’re almost never seen there. In fact, a genuine Business 8 who entered the Valley would likely become the most powerful person in it. On the other hand, Technology 8’s like me aren’t nearly as rare. In fact, and it seems almost tautological that it would be this way, Tech 10s and 9s and 8s are found predominantly in technology. Where else would they go?

In a weird way, the Tech 10s are in a disadvantageous position because they have to stay in the industry to remain Tech 10s. The typical Tech 10 works on R&D in a place like Google X, and there aren’t many jobs that offer that kind of autonomy. If he leaves that world, he’ll slide down to Tech 9 (or even 8) status in a few years. The technical co-founder’s major asset requires continual work to remain sharp, and at the 7+ level, it’s pretty damn competitive. The business co-founders asset (connection) is much less perishable. In fact, the weird benefit of connections is that they get more powerful with time. College connections are taken to be much deeper than professional ones, and prep-school connections run deeper still. Why? Because connections and pedigree are all about nostalgia. Blue blood runs deep and must be old; otherwise, it won’t be properly blue. For all of our mouth-honored belief in progress as a technological society, we’re still run by people who are inflexibly backward-looking and neophobic. It’s no wonder, one might remark, that Silicon Valley’s greatest contribution to the world over the past five years has been a slew of toilet check-in apps. 

The Tech 8s and 9s and 10s are generally funneled into technology, because few other environments will even let them maintain (much less improve) their skills. On the other hand, the Biz 8s and 9s and 10s are drawn away by other and better options. Alone, this wouldn’t be that devastating. On both scales, there are more people at each level than at the ones above it, so the absence of the Biz 8+ might have the Tech 8-10s pairing with Biz 7s and the Tech 7s pairing with Biz 6s. Fine; they’ll live. A Biz 6 or 7 can still open plenty of doors. Speaking as a Tech 8, I’d be happy to pair with a Biz 7 as an equal partner. 

Unfortunately, the advantage of business co-founders seems to be about 3-4 points, at any level. That’s what you way pay for their connections. If you’re a Tech 6 and you pair up with a Biz 2-3 co-founder, you’ll probably split the equity evenly (but raising money will be extremely difficult, if not impossible). Pair with a Biz 4, as a Tech 6, and you’ll probably get a third of what he does. If you pair with a Biz 6 co-founder, you’re likely to get 5%. It’s unfair, and unreasonable, but that’s where the market seems to have settled. Why? Removal of the Business 8+ from the market is not, alone, enough to explain it. 

I’ve explained that the business people have up-flight options into other industries. They also have down-flight options when it comes to picking co-founders. If a Tech 8 turns down a Biz 8 to work with a Biz 6, then he’s saying no to someone with millions in VC funding that is essentially already-in-hand, in order to work with someone who might be able to deliver Sequoia after 6 months of work on the product. The Biz 8 is so trusted by the investors that the Tech 8 will probably get a raise to take the founder job; if he works for the Biz 6, he’ll end up working for free for half a year. What, on the other hand, happens to a Biz 8 who turns down his Tech-8 counterpart for a Tech 6? 

The answer is… (crickets) nothing. Investors simply don’t care about the difference. The Biz 8 could pair with a Tech 3 or even another business guy and, while the technical infrastructure of company would be terrible, it wouldn’t really matter. In the Valley, technology is just made to be sold, not actually used. Why hire a Tech 7+ who’s going to make annoying sounds about “functional programming” and “deep neural nets” when you can just hire another VC-connected salesman? Why worry about building a company “for investors” when, with more-connected people involved, you can always just get more investors to pay back the early ones? 

At any chosen level, the business co-founder can choose a tech co-founder 2 to 4 points below him and not lose very much. Strong technical leadership matters if the business is going to last a long time, but these companies are built to be sold or shot dead within four years, so who cares if the technology sucks? To the Biz 8, a Tech 4 willing to take a terrible equity split is a good-enough substitute for the Tech 8. The same doesn’t hold for the Tech 8. Expecting a Biz 4 to handle the VCs is just not an option for him. Even if a Biz 4 or 5 is able to get venture capital, and that itself is unlikely, he’ll probably still be eaten alive by the investors, resulting in terms like “participating preferred” that will emasculate the entire company. 

What all this means is that the business co-founders are more essential because not only are they rarer, but because these businesses don’t last long enough– and aren’t built to last, either– for poor technical leadership to really matter. In such a climate, the leverage of the Tech 7+ is incredibly weak. The value offered by a genuine Tech 8 in the early stages is crucial to a company if one takes a 5- or 10- or 20-year-view, but no one does that anymore. No one cares beyond the sale. The perverse result of this is that technical talent has become non-essential on its home turf. As a result, more power accrues every month to the vision-less, egotistical business guys running the show in Silicon Valley, and lifelong technologists (“nerds”) are even more of a marginalized class. 

I’d like to say that I know how to fix this, how to kill the next-quarter mentality and drive the invaders back out of this wonderful territory (cutting-edge technology) where they are most unwelcome, but the truth is that I don’t know what to do. The short-term mentality seems to be a permanent fixture and, in that light, I don’t think that talented technologists are ever going to get a fair shake against influence peddlers, manipulators, and merchants of connections. I’m sorry, but I can’t fix it, and I don’t know whether it can be fixed.