The myth of the humble nerd tycoon

As Shaun Rolph noted back when he analysed the birth of the Sadville hype - the business press are more prone to fantasies than even the ShowBiz journalists.

Maybe they just want to be in ShowBiz - and the "humble nerd tycoon" is just the equivalent of those "secrets of the stars" non-stories, designed to show the hack's intimacy with the subject.

In an age without believed deities, the need to re-invent Zeus remains. The wording is deliberate as there are plenty of deities and substitutes ( hello Richard D), but there is no general western acceptance of any of them, except for paper money perhaps.

Roger D

Not sure about the hard-wired bit.

Colin offers an unrepeatable anecdote and suggests - if you start the "I brought Branson's Lunch/Taxi/PhoneCall Club" youmight get quite a few people wanting to join.

I think there are two aspects to this - the ability of the great unwashed (including myself) to delude ourselves, and the implicit distrust of 'legacy' CEO types that make us implicitly trust guys in jeans by comparison. First, if a 'regular' person (e.g. not born with more money then some given GDP) can become ridiculously rich, then there's hope for the rest of us too. The industry where this has been most visible is the IT industry, which has grown and developed from naught in what - 40 years? Page & Brin are classic examples - two college students with a great idea and now they have more money than even Ford Prefect would be able to spend in an afternoon. What's not to like?

Secondly, remember that Google got to where it is because it was embraced by the IT community. It's hip and popular because Page & Brin are regular guys ("don't be evil" as a motto??? Come on!!!). Google may be a regular megacorp in most ways, but they haven't forgotten that it's the IT geeks that put it where it is today. And IT geeks (rightfully?) distrust MBAs. So Google is careful to cultivate an image that it's a worker's paradise, that it's run by altruistic geeks and that absolutely anyone can be a billionaire. I think a lot of .com 2.0 companies work that way - "we're just regular guys" to show that they're not there to make a quick buck at the expense of shareholders, employees and customers. Frugality reaffirms that message, and it appeals to the working masses. The IT industry seems to be particularly sensitive to it, perhaps because the memories of .com 1.0 are still fresh in the minds of many.

ER

It's all that bozo big mouth Netscape guy's fault -

I blame Mark Andreessen. The story I heard from someone who was sniffing around NCSA for entrepreneurial opportunities around the new Internet thing back in the day (1993ish) is that Mark was a very smart techie guy who was presentable enough to business and investor crowds and could parrot a business line without creeping people out with geek-speak. The business people knew they needed street cred among the young geeks, but they knew giving them total control would be disasterous. Think Internet Bubble.

Anyway, this someone made his millions selling software others developed for him in the early 1980s. He did it by bridging the product gap between the Homebrew Computer Club geniuses and all the fairly normal people who were captivated by the idea of the Apple ][ or IBM PC in their homes or small businesses.

To this day, if you listen to Mark Andreessen talk, he packs more nothingness and platitudes into 5 minutes of 78 rpm speech than anyone in the history of the spoken word. He is the perfect techie puppet for the money people. He's richer than Howard Hughes, but continues to jump into small meaningless startups and let investors flip their money based on his name.

-Brad

Ah, yes. The Guy Kawasaki School of Investment. ®