The Rise Of The Gentleman Hacker

http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/03/the-rise-of-the-gentleman-hacker/

by ericflo • 16 years ago

178 37 16 years ago

grevutsky• 16 years ago

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.

wyclif3• 16 years ago

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.

steveklabnik2• 16 years ago

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.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

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.

kayoone2• 16 years ago

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

winxordie• 16 years ago

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.

krmboya• 16 years ago

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

robryan• 16 years ago

I'd focus on the software side of 'real' problems and team up with others project focusing on the engineering side. Still keep to my core area I know best while still tending towards these kind of real worldwide problems.

I'd also love to fund research that misses out because it can't be monetized easily.

axod• 16 years ago

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

pringle• 16 years ago

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

smackay• 16 years ago

With money to burn you could certainly make great strides in improving software in many areas of the sciences. A lot of tools used daily in areas of biology for example are very capable but were typically designed for use by the original author only. You could improve the lives of countless grad students and other researchers simply by providing a decent UI and good documentation. The savings and benefits would be enormous but you certainly would not make any money doing so.

sasvari• 16 years ago

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 ...

wyclif3• 16 years ago

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.

koenigdavidmj• 16 years ago

We call that being a `research scientist', which basically means playing on the company's dime.

Of course, you generally have to have a Ph.D. and prodigious output of papers to get the job.

mybbor• 16 years ago

Sign me up!

trotsky2• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

trotsky2• 16 years ago

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

wheaties• 16 years ago

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

blakeweb3• 16 years ago

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.

bioh42_22• 16 years ago

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.)

abstractbill• 16 years ago

If you specifically want to sign up with Birch's Monkey Inferno, feel free to get in touch with me (bill@justin.tv) and I'll pass your contact details along - I know a couple of people who are involved.

godDLL• 16 years ago

I work for a business that is exactly like that, owned by a Gentleman general entrepreneur.

It's very weird, a little C/C++ in the morning, some PHP in the afternoon, and then massaging some huge datasets with Python and JavaScript in the evening could be just your regular day, in fact, I think I had at least three just like that. It could be fun, if you like that sort of thing. It can also be absolutely exhausting.

orblivion• 16 years ago

Reminds me of this shirt:

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

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

pluies• 16 years ago

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. :)

marciovm123• 16 years ago

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.

noodle• 16 years ago

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.

The Rise Of The Gentleman Hacker

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