The two inflection points are correct and it's important to note that 2008 was a double driver: The investment banking world had a major contraction AND companies like Facebook were taking off. By the time that Facebook IPOs and ZIRP has turbo-charged venture investment, the transition is complete.
I would say that SV culture does still value "smart" - but it's a particular kind of engineering-oriented smart. Socially incompetent co-founder CTOs are still very much a thing - but they will be paired with a "visionary CEO" type who you know absolutely thinks of themselves as the second coming of Steve Jobs / Elon Musk/ Jeff Bezos.
It's interesting that Paul Graham doesn't say what evidence he used to measure popularity, in order to then rank each group (just 'everybody knew') - it sounds like people who are similar sat together, and that he decided that people who are disabled were bottom of the league and the butt of the joke. I hope the article really has aged badly on that front, but it does smack of a certain toxic masculinity that now defines techbroism too.
Into your article I started thinking about the influence of salesmen on tech culture. Jobs of course is the urtext of sales guy self-made into "cool nerd", which isn't your full fledged techbro but is on the spectrum. The appeal of nerds to anyone who wasn't a nerd was always "I could make a lot of money with this guy", and the lucky and ruthless ones did. I believe your overall thesis is entirely correct though. The guys who can't get into finance go into tech.
I am reminded of that scene in The Big Short (movie version, the one with Margot Robie in bubbles) where an asian-descent nerdy type (with glasses!) is paraded by an MBA type with "this is my quant! look at him!".
I would not be surprised if the current GenAI boom has the same pattern, the shifty money types running the show and tech types in the engine room — where they belong...
The charlatans were always there, even in the 1990s tech scene, but they were hemmed in by the fact that they were a minority. They made a lot of money as salesmen, but they weren't calling technical shots, and they understood that smart people needed to have real prospects if the company was to have any vitality.
I think the charlatan intrusion started in the late 2000s when Williamsburg hipster types—the parentally funded losers who claimed to be artists because they went to Burning Man—started trickling in, but then the 2008 crash accelerated this and brought in far more charlatans than the culture could absorb. That said, I think finance bros were calling the shots before then, as VCs made a lot more money and had much better career prospects excluding top-1% outcomes—it's just that 2008-14 is when people realized the takeover had occurred and could not be reversed.
"two migration waves from the financial industry" I think many in SV haven't realised that VC, in many ways, has thoroughly become another finance asset class - where people go for clout, or to get rich, or to be "serial entrepreneurs".
It's very different to a few years ago when people had a really good idea, that they knew in depth but needed someone to take a punt and get funding. These people took the punt, took the risk even though there was no clout that came with it.
Of course, both groups of people still exist, but it feels like it's less of the second than previously.
Or perhaps Paul Graham's unpopularity in High School was because he was a sociopath, people famously unable to maintain long term healthy relationships. By the time your average sociopath has reached high school, most of their classmates from grade school and junior high have clued into the fact that they cannot be trusted, and should be avoided if at all possible. Such people seem to latch onto people who are on the autism spectrum (often stereotypically geeks) because they're easier to trick and mess with.
"It's no surprise, then, that a computer programmer would want to bask in some of the peripheral coolness that comes with painting, especially when he has an axe to grind about his own work being 'mere engineering'. Yet while this might be charming or quirky in the abstract, it gets seriously annoying when real facts start getting butchered ..."
Actually, I think the author of that piece, Maciej Cegłowski, is excessively generous to Graham, who does indeed appear to be a proto-techbro in the sense that he's a rich man who fancies himself a genius merely because he's managed to acquire a pile of money.
"... a culture that doesn’t particularly value smart anymore.": I'm not sure it did even circa 1998, which is when when Graham went to Silicon Valley. "Smart" was people like Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, and Steve Wozniak. By 1998, as Michael Lewis wrote in "The new new thing" (one of his better efforts, I think):
"Microsoft was twelve years old before people started talking about Microsoft millionaires; Netscape was one and a half. Up until then the typical engineer's decision about where to work turned on old-fashioned considerations, like salary and benefits and the inherent technical interest of the work. Suddenly, all of these were overshadowed by stock options. The engineers who went to work for Netscape were no different from you. And yet ... they - not you! - were getting rich. Worse, they were the B team. The A teams of engineering had been, in general, too well treated by their companies to take a flier on what appeared, from a distance, a doubtful new venture. Netscape ushered in an age of doubtful new ventures."
The two inflection points are correct and it's important to note that 2008 was a double driver: The investment banking world had a major contraction AND companies like Facebook were taking off. By the time that Facebook IPOs and ZIRP has turbo-charged venture investment, the transition is complete.
I would say that SV culture does still value "smart" - but it's a particular kind of engineering-oriented smart. Socially incompetent co-founder CTOs are still very much a thing - but they will be paired with a "visionary CEO" type who you know absolutely thinks of themselves as the second coming of Steve Jobs / Elon Musk/ Jeff Bezos.
It's interesting that Paul Graham doesn't say what evidence he used to measure popularity, in order to then rank each group (just 'everybody knew') - it sounds like people who are similar sat together, and that he decided that people who are disabled were bottom of the league and the butt of the joke. I hope the article really has aged badly on that front, but it does smack of a certain toxic masculinity that now defines techbroism too.
Into your article I started thinking about the influence of salesmen on tech culture. Jobs of course is the urtext of sales guy self-made into "cool nerd", which isn't your full fledged techbro but is on the spectrum. The appeal of nerds to anyone who wasn't a nerd was always "I could make a lot of money with this guy", and the lucky and ruthless ones did. I believe your overall thesis is entirely correct though. The guys who can't get into finance go into tech.
Very nice buildup to the final sentence.
I am reminded of that scene in The Big Short (movie version, the one with Margot Robie in bubbles) where an asian-descent nerdy type (with glasses!) is paraded by an MBA type with "this is my quant! look at him!".
I would not be surprised if the current GenAI boom has the same pattern, the shifty money types running the show and tech types in the engine room — where they belong...
I am fascinated by your crawling the archeological digs from early tech. Great stuff, and that last line is just perfection!
The charlatans were always there, even in the 1990s tech scene, but they were hemmed in by the fact that they were a minority. They made a lot of money as salesmen, but they weren't calling technical shots, and they understood that smart people needed to have real prospects if the company was to have any vitality.
I think the charlatan intrusion started in the late 2000s when Williamsburg hipster types—the parentally funded losers who claimed to be artists because they went to Burning Man—started trickling in, but then the 2008 crash accelerated this and brought in far more charlatans than the culture could absorb. That said, I think finance bros were calling the shots before then, as VCs made a lot more money and had much better career prospects excluding top-1% outcomes—it's just that 2008-14 is when people realized the takeover had occurred and could not be reversed.
"two migration waves from the financial industry" I think many in SV haven't realised that VC, in many ways, has thoroughly become another finance asset class - where people go for clout, or to get rich, or to be "serial entrepreneurs".
It's very different to a few years ago when people had a really good idea, that they knew in depth but needed someone to take a punt and get funding. These people took the punt, took the risk even though there was no clout that came with it.
Of course, both groups of people still exist, but it feels like it's less of the second than previously.
Or perhaps Paul Graham's unpopularity in High School was because he was a sociopath, people famously unable to maintain long term healthy relationships. By the time your average sociopath has reached high school, most of their classmates from grade school and junior high have clued into the fact that they cannot be trusted, and should be avoided if at all possible. Such people seem to latch onto people who are on the autism spectrum (often stereotypically geeks) because they're easier to trick and mess with.
Here's an amusing takedown of Graham's intellectual and artistic pretensions as of 2005, titled "Dabblers and blowhards":
https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
"It's no surprise, then, that a computer programmer would want to bask in some of the peripheral coolness that comes with painting, especially when he has an axe to grind about his own work being 'mere engineering'. Yet while this might be charming or quirky in the abstract, it gets seriously annoying when real facts start getting butchered ..."
Actually, I think the author of that piece, Maciej Cegłowski, is excessively generous to Graham, who does indeed appear to be a proto-techbro in the sense that he's a rich man who fancies himself a genius merely because he's managed to acquire a pile of money.
"... a culture that doesn’t particularly value smart anymore.": I'm not sure it did even circa 1998, which is when when Graham went to Silicon Valley. "Smart" was people like Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, and Steve Wozniak. By 1998, as Michael Lewis wrote in "The new new thing" (one of his better efforts, I think):
"Microsoft was twelve years old before people started talking about Microsoft millionaires; Netscape was one and a half. Up until then the typical engineer's decision about where to work turned on old-fashioned considerations, like salary and benefits and the inherent technical interest of the work. Suddenly, all of these were overshadowed by stock options. The engineers who went to work for Netscape were no different from you. And yet ... they - not you! - were getting rich. Worse, they were the B team. The A teams of engineering had been, in general, too well treated by their companies to take a flier on what appeared, from a distance, a doubtful new venture. Netscape ushered in an age of doubtful new ventures."