Thursday, September 30, 2004
This t-shirt is my stupidity repellent
Paul Graham, who's wildy insightful about geek culture and who wrote the genius essay Hackers & Painters, offers these gems in his new essay What the Bubble Got Right.
Nerds don't just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity.
I thought it would be useful if I explained what a nerd was. What I came up with was: someone who doesn't expend any effort on marketing himself. A nerd, in other words, is someone who concentrates on substance.
What makes the Bay Area superior is the attitude of the people. I notice that when I come home to Boston. The first thing I see when I walk out of the airline terminal is the fat, grumpy guy in charge of the taxi line. I brace myself for rudeness: remember, you're back on the East Coast now.
Technology is a lever. It doesn't add; it multiplies. If the present range of productivity is 0 to 100, introducing a multiple of 10 increases the range from 0 to 1000. One upshot of which is that the companies of the future may be surprisingly small.For this last quote, it's illustrative to see an article in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle about Bacterin, a startup in Belgrade, MT, that has 60 employees and is working on going public.
