
The Rise Of The Gentleman Hacker - ericflo
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/03/the-rise-of-the-gentleman-hacker/
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grevutsky
There's no need to wait for a $100 million dollar exit to do this. If you have
a lifestyle business (say, a web design company, or an online agency) that
throws off enough cash, you can set up a team of hackers and UI people and
start throwing stuff at the wall.

In fact, if they are truly free to be creative, yet have some constraints in
terms of time and money, its likely to work better.

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wyclif
Can I just say that I despise the phrase _lifestyle business_? I know what you
mean by using it, but wouldn't it be more accurate to describe a project that
didn't take VC and has paying customers as simply a business? I would suggest
that not aiming for a Google or Facebook acquisition (or big IPO) actually
allows that kind of experimentation.

~~~
steveklabnik
It's about being more specific about the intentions. Yes, lifestyle businesses
could be simply 'a business', but startups are also 'a business.'

Try reading your post with s/lifestyle business/startup/g;... it's the same
point. More specific language isn't a bad thing.

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wyclif
As I said above, I understood what you meant. I just find the phrase slightly
damning--and indicative of a problem in this space. I see a trend in
commentary on tech blogs and conferences that imply that as a developer,
either you're creating the next Google or Facebook acquisition, or you've
traded the big payout for a "lifestyle business" that is probably turning a
profit and carrying no debt, with no hybrid examples in the vast middle. It's
a bit like saying, "Poor Joe Startup, he has a nice _lifestyle business_
there, but it'll never be Twitter, Foursquare, or Path.com." Personally, I'd
love to have those problems.

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steveklabnik
I agree, it's unfortunate when 'lifestyle business' is used in a derogatory
manner. I'd rather just take the term back, like "monkeypatching." Words can
mean good things in one crowd, and bad things in another.

(and I'm not the OP. ;) )

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StavrosK
I agree with that. I already use the term as something to aspire to. Indeed, a
"lifestyle business" is my dream job.

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wheaties
So, um, where do I sign up with these folks?

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blakeweb
To generalize from my very limited experience, people doing this use the same
hiring strategies as companies, but 1) rely on personal connections and
relationships more, since they're often trying to stay a bit under the radar,
and 2) are more connected with academia than your average hirer. One approach
could be to network at non-mainstream events in your area that are more about
creating and seeing cool stuff than networking, such as dorkbot. Also,
probably just networking aggressively would work, at whatever are the best
gatherings in your interest area, such as the web 2.0 summit, or health 2.0.
These people are probably there somewhere, and if not, their friends are.

If you're awesome and into bioinformatics, and are in austin, the bay area, or
the pacific northwest, ping me. I'm not in the same league as the folks in the
article, but this is more or less my approach right now, and I know another
couple people in similar situations.

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bioh42_2
I don't know if I'm "awsome" or not, but is this bioinformatics thing... what
ever it is, for real? Or it just a few enthusiast having fun learning?
(Nothing wrong with that, it's just not something that would dislodge me form
my "for reals" big corporate bioinformatics dayjob in the North East.)

~~~
blakeweb
To answer your question as best I can: it's exploratory at the moment, like
the examples in the original article. The immediate goal is to pursue
directions one of which will hopefully produce software and knowledge clearly
valuable enough to warrant significantly increasing resources devoted to it--
the next inflection point. Risks and rewards are high at this stage. I won't
go into a why starting or joining a startup is fantastic, though, as PG does
that just fine[1].

Capturing created value outside of the research arm of a big pharma company is
of course a key challenge in bioinformatics, and I'd love to meet or chat with
you if you're thinking about this too.

In the missionary vs mercenary divide that John Doerr uses to segment
startups, I'm now a missionary. The end goal is to cure disease.

[1]: <http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html>; <http://paulgraham.com/boss.html>;
<http://paulgraham.com/articles.html>

~~~
bioh42_2
I don't need convicing that it is easy to inovate outside of big pharma.
Altough bioinformatics startups do require quite a bit more cash then pure
software startups.

However, the biggest part of capturing value is the regulatory burden.

In other words, lets say you have a great way to discover biomarkers. Even
more so, you go ahead and DO discover a pile of biomarkers with great
potential.

Then you attemp to sell those biomarkers to big pharma, and that is when you
find out:

Even with all their beurocracy and horrible return on R&D investments, big
pharma is sitting on a huge pile of biomarkers.

Pushing any one tratment through the pipeline costs a metric tonne of cash and
takes 10 year before you even know if it's worth to keep going.

That is why there's a huge backlog of potential drugs, biomarkers, treatments,
etc.

Thus merely finding new things with potential is only slighlty better then
nothing.

~~~
blakeweb
Agreed. You've got to address the real problems, or you won't get anywhere.

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sasvari
Maybe this is the small-scale return of private research units like Bell Labs
or (Xerox) PARC (although both of them still exist, they are not as
significant as they once were) for the Web: put a group of awesome guys
together and just let them cook a bit and see what's coming out ...

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wyclif
It's more like the classic definition of skunkworks than "official" research.
A good example is NuCalc, which continued to be developed after the project
was cancelled by Apple.

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trotsky
_Get someone really young who wants responsibility and they may even work for
next to nothing in exchange for big equity stakes in their projects – sort of
a modified Y Combinator model._

It doesn't sound very gentlemanly to me to be rich enough that you've decided
to open a business just to screw around (hence force referred to as "the club
house") but to target employees that are young and dumb (tm) enough to accept
little to no compensation while you drive your SL class into the office every
day. If you can afford to pay a baseline wage but seek not to it's just a type
of exploitation.

~~~
wmf
I would assume these gentleman hackers are smart enough to realize that you
don't use the same compensation structure for a maybe-profit company with no
business model as for a for-profit startup. I hope Arrington is just
speculating (incorrectly) in this case and these "gentlemen" aren't
drastically underpaying their employees.

~~~
trotsky
I think you're right, this is much more likely to just be an arrington-ism
than anything else.

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tomjen3
This sounds like a really good solution to the classical problem about what to
do, once one has made enough money in a successful exit event.

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kayoone
yeah, what a horrible problem to have in the first place.

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winxordie
For me at least that's equivalent to solving the knapsack problem, but hey -
if it's easy for you to optimize usage of absurd amounts of capital according
to your utility function, then more power to you.

~~~
kayoone
what i was trying to say is, that first you have to work insanely hard and/or
have a huge amount of luck to be in a situation where you actually have that
problem. Then when you have reached that, you can think about how to solve it,
which i fould find a very nice problem to deal with.

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orblivion
Reminds me of this shirt:

<http://www.makertees.com/product/practice-hacking/>

Maybe this could be the official emblem of this new breed.

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marciovm123
It's like the cost of meaningful tech research has dropped so much with
software that the "public money -> universities" model can now be replaced by
"wealthy individual -> hacker shop" model. Interesting parallels to art world;
worked well for the Medicis.

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pluies
The article is interesting, but dear... The picture he uses is awful. The
basic composition is fine, but the blatant overuse of HDR is incredibly
annoying.

Sorry for the off topic, but I had to get that off my chest. :)

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noodle
can't we have both? a gentleman hacker farm? a small countryside farm where
you can go to bootstrap your own startup. i mean, we've kind of discussed
similar in the past and i still actually kind of like the idea.

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mybbor
Sign me up!

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krmboya
Maybe then, they can focus on 'real' problems like global warming and green
energy.

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axod
I assume you're being ironic? I think the jury's out on both of those things
being real problems.

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pringle
Correct, with the only qualifier being that this only applies to juries that
are composed of anti-reason, science illiterate individuals.

