Influx

Paul Graham’s piece on Yahoo’s demise is a must read for anyone looking for answers to the fail from grace of a once iconic brand.

Graham’s rationale for Yahoo’s failure is put down essentially one thing; its lack of a “Hacker Culture”. It didn’t have brilliant engineers at the heart and soul of its organization and it tried to make do without keeping and attracting the best.

Interestingly, this is the opposite of Facebook and perhaps, one can argue, the very reason for its success.

Back in October of 2009, Y-Combinator invited Zuckerberg to speak at its Start-Up School and he was asked the question about keeping and attracting talent.

This was his response.

“Our goal isn’t necessarily to keep people forever. There are
companies that train people really well. A lot of Harvard people went on
to McKinsey. A lot of people went to IBM because that was the best
place to learn sales. A lot of people go to USC to learn how to play
football. One of the things at Facebook is have a place where it’s one
of the best places to learn how to build stuff. If you want to learn how
to build really good products and practices and have a large impact, I
would argue there’s no better place to do that than at Facebook.

If people want to come here for one, two, or three years. Steve Chen,
who founded YouTube, was working on Facebook before. I’m not
encouraging people to work at Facebook to leave. But I think you learn
valuable skills. We’re not pretending we’re building a company that
hackers are going to want to work at forever. I want to be a part of
building some institutions to be great hacker institutions in the
long-term.”

Zuckerberg is making two things clear from this statement.

1. He wants to hire hackers

2. His promise to to his talent is clear, it’s simply the best place to learn how to build stuff. If you are an engineer, what more could you ask for?

There’s much more to this than meets the eye; it’s the philosophy of “Hacker Culture” that not only applies to the stuff you build, but how you approach business overall.

You kind of want “hackers” everywhere, because they are never satisfied with the status-quo and always looking to improve and better things. They never sit still and they constantly making the future.

While it’s easy to see why “Hacker Cultures” scare most of corporate America, but it seems like the thing that a number of companies need more of right now.

An interesting exercise could be to define and codify the hacker skills set, so it would make sense for non-engineering types.

The reality is every company one day in the very near future will need an army of internal hacker engineers.

The difference is, these won’t be the “digital cowboys” in the back office, they will be running the show. 

Posted by Ed Cotton