I get what you're saying about hackers, but I don't see why you'd necessarily correlate hackers with entrepreneurs. There's a very narrow overlap in that Venn diagram, precisely because hackers (orig. definition) don't do what they do to make money or build businesses. Hacker/founder/entrepreneurs are a rare enough breed.
Well, for true hackers[1], it is not about getting shit done. It is about how shit is done or, to be precise, how proof-of-concept shit is done. And getting enjoyment out of the process itself.
I wish people(hackers) would spend same amount of time building and marketing/selling their idea. Unfortunately, i think its human nature, it is always easy to start with the fun part, and give up when the steps need to be taken become uninteresting/difficult.
Hackers love creating stuff, but when it comes to the selling that idea to their potential users, they dont have enough energy.
You're talking about entrepreneurs not hackers. While there's obviously room for overlap, this particular guy doesn't fall within the intersection between the two subsections of our social Venn diagram.
Definitely agree, however more for the case of someone looking to build a business. I constantly even have to remind myself that with the goal of building a business, writing code or learning new technologies is just not the best investment in time when so much progress can be made towards creating a business by shortcutting the technology upfront.
In fact this is why I happen to disagree a bit with Paul Graham that being a "hacker" is such an essential trait to entrepreneurship. I think a hacker just represents intelligence, which is beneficial to building a business among many other things. For that reason I think PG confuses the trait of being a hacker as having a casual relationship with being likely to succeed as an entrepreneur.
But on the note of paying freelancers, that can get pretty damn expensive if you're just flat out paying for solutions before they're validated as businesses.
While I get your point, isn't it today's hackers that become the best entrepreneurs? In fact, I think one could say that if one is a successful entrepreneur, then one is necessarily a good hacker (although obviously not necessarily the other way around, and hence your point which, again, is not missed).
This seems a bit off-topic, but is more interesting to me than the topic, so I'll roll with it. :)
I don't think the hacker ethic is necessarily about saving the world, and I while I can hypothesize a startup that aligns with a hacker ethic, I have not in practice seen any examples.
The hacker ethic is about gaining a deep functional understanding of a system, and then using that deep functional understanding to make that system do something unexpected or cool.
As soon as you bring money into the equation, it causes people to do all sorts of predictable and boring things. There are certainly people with hacker cred who have gotten rich, but the money was incidental to the hacking. For example, Woz has it because he designed computers he wanted to use and that happened to turn out to be very profitable.
That is the point. We should stop calling founders and businessmen hackers. A hacker is a person dedicated to technology and freedom. A silent hero, fighting everyday against against oppression, law and order. A person whose sole interest is keeping information free and accessible to everyone. Maybe he is not the best guy in socializing and communicating his interests and maybe some hackers are doing pranks and breaking your phone switches. But these are the people who are the front line the only ones who are willing to carry the fight for freedom and equality into the internet and against the people who are now calling themselves "Hackers". Businessmen, lawyers and founders all those people which interests are to make money and obey. YOU silicon valley guys aren't hackers anymore. you have become the mass you have sold your ambitions. I'm going to shed a tear now for all of you. Hacking is about rebellion hacking is keeping the internet free of scum like fascists and governments Hacking is the way of autonomous thinking. Hacking is keeping freedom in your heart and helping the oppressed. Hacking is so much more then "finding the best way to optimize your workflow"
I've always found that hackers should hack and business people should just conduct business, but each with as deep an understanding of the other as possible. One of our co-founders both programs and helps on the business side, because he insists on it, and it just doesn't work. However, his understanding of what we do from a business perspective and our non-tech cofounders basic understanding of programming has proven crucial to proper planning and communication.
I'm a bit puzzled by the notion and expectation by Y Combinator & folks on this forum that you absolutely need to be a "hacker" to have any shot at being a good entrepreneur. Even the application form for startup school asks you about what systems you've hacked in the past.
I am a fairly intelligent guy, if I can say so myself, who somehow ended up in computer science, ended up going to grad school but realized later on that my true interests and calling really lie somewhere else. I'm not a hacker so to say and I don't particularly enjoy programming - certainly not to the extent that I could have orgasms doing it and spend countless hours just doing it for fun. I look at it as a means to an end, do it to get my job done and happen to be decently good at it. I'm in the process of launching a site here and have already launched a beta version of it in India (our initial target audience). I learned RoR/AJAX/CSS and all else associated with deploying it in my spare time (my day job is a systems one with C coding). I truly enjoy the process of taking an idea from concept to launch and building a successful business around it. I spend much time thinking and working on it, learning about all aspects from the engineering to the business side. I've been working on my idea for over an year and half now, all in my spare time, riding many ups and downs and persevering through.
But please explain, why this ridiculous idea that to be an Internet entrepreneur, you should just absolutely be in love with programming & hacking anything and everything to death!
I would add that most folks who go into business are motivated primarily by seeing the dollars appear, while most "hackers" I know are primarily motivated by the rush they get when they've understood the new problem/solution.
That's painting with broad strokes obviously and a person can be motivated by both. But that's the axis I would draw the distinction on.
I didn't use the word entrepreneur, either. That's a bad stab at replying to me, and you know it. You often imply, although in not so many words, that the essence of what it means to be a "hacker" is to do a "startup".
I agree that hacker-ism is about keeping truth and contempt for authority. A true hacker will create an innovative solution for that problem. Good example is Richard Stallman, when others used law and authority to stop him from hacking, he went on to create GNU, wrote emacs and released it under GPL. Some hackers may write a language or OS, while other hackers may create a business. There is nothing wrong both. It is based on the personality and specific problem they are hacking. The point of this post is that we focus on the positive aspect.
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