An interesting take on hackers vs. businesspeople

We don't disagree where he thinks we do. He thinks the world is divided into hackers and business people, and that I despise the latter. Actually I think there are people who can hack and people who can do business, and there is substantial overlap, as in the classic Venn diagram. The best founders are in the lenticular region in the middle. The people who can only hack can migrate to it more easily than the people who can only do business.

IBM's rule that each group has to have both hackers and business people reflects their belief that the world is partitioned between them. It only makes sense if you believe there is zero overlap in the Venn diagram. That's where we really disagree.

I'm struck by (and commented directly on the blog) how much the author wants "Extreme Blue" to be seen as comparable to YC...where the similarities are superficial and the differences are vast.

That comment hasn't shown up, so I'll point out the highlights here:

- EB encourages kids to build things. For IBM.

- YC encourages people (not just kids) to build things. For the people building them.

- EB teams must have "business" and "technical" people, selected by a random manager at IBM.

- YC teams are self-selected, and are judged by what they produce, not what label they use to describe their abilities.

- EB teams build something that may, or may not, ever see the light of day in the market.

- YC teams build something that, if they work hard, can hit the market whenever they're ready. No manager ever has to sign off on the project.

In short, EB is a corporate internship and YC is an opportunity to build something great (you don't need YC to build something great, but for many folks it can help). Corporate internships are fine, and I'm sure everyone has a great time and IBM gets its pick of some great talent discovered through the process, but it is just a corporate inernship. It is distinctly not a radical new process to encourage spinning up new businesses.

I'm not disparaging IBM here. This sounds like a great idea for them. But don't pretend it is something that it clearly is not.

This whole hacker vs. suits thing is lame. Lets please post more insightful material. Most writing on this subject has been boring and repetitive with a lack of depth.

PS: I make this comment because we can't down mod stories.

> They aren't systems thinkers. They are the business equivalent of a bench researcher that simply pours blue stuff into green stuff, watches to see if it turns yellow, and then informs his boss of the result. In both science and business, most people aren't actually innovating.

Hypothesis: I think that this is the most important thing to a startup, regardless of whether you can write code or not. Startups need systems thinkers and innovators on the code side as well as the business side, people who can grasp a problem and come up with unique solutions. You can find these people no matter their background and this trait is likely quite tied into creativity in all its forms.

Things that can be easily quantified tend to be overvalued.

Corollary: Both the smartest and the dumbest members of society tend to develop unhealthy obsessions with numbers.

"we carefully picked the business members of the teams for their excellent technical savvy"

At what level of expertise in both areas do you stop pigeonholing people?