Paul Graham: Brilliant and Blinkered?
Paul Graham is one of my favorite writers, and a lot that he pioneered with Y Combinator is going into our project, YET Lab. So calling him out on his perspective regarding ‘biztech’ – which I will be doing in a moment – isn’t easy. The thing I like most about Paul is that he is a boundary crosser. Where I went from directing theater to owning a business to being in high-tech management at IBM, Paul combined professional art training with a PhD in computer science, then discovered business in the form of tech startups. I may be able to write some code – even got paid for it occasionally in my career – but Paul went all the way. He is a legitimate technical leader with deep communication, art and business-innovation chops. My hero, seriously.
Every boundary crosser does his dance a little differently. Paul plays to his technical strengths and suggests that tech teams don’t need business thinkers, as he did in his now famous 2005 blog entry called “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas”. Maybe Paul’s major tech chops blind him to something that I saw at IBM’s Extreme Blue - 14 biztech labs spread around the world that run very much like Y Combinator, pumping out some of IBM’s best and brightest talent, producing great technology, and proving radical new business opportunities, all with projects that run in under 3 months. At Extreme Blue, every project had to include both technical and business people on team, working as equals.
What I saw in that process – partly because we carefully picked the business members of the teams for their excellent technical savvy – was the business thinker actually turning boring technical directions into much more interesting inventions. Yeah, that’s right…the business person creating quality technology that the technical team had missed. (By the way, many of the most technically savvy team members had undergrad majors not in computer science or microelectronics but in philosophy, literature, and political science. What they had in common was a distinct lack of fear of deep technology. They could see not only how things worked but how they could, and could not, be changed.)
I also saw the technical folks running into the lab on a Monday morning, tackling their business team member, and showing her a whole new business opportunity enabled by a new invention that nobody had noticed before. Yeah, technical people spending the weekend thinking about business models!
I think what Paul may be responding to in what I infer as disdain for business people is the fact that most teams treat their business people as “managers”, relegating them to a functional role on the boring business/commercial side of the house. We do not see them as a part of the development team. Also, 97% of business people I interview have a knack for neither technical invention nor business concept innovation. They aren’t systems thinkers. They are the business equivalent of a bench researcher that simply pours blue stuff into green stuff, watches to see if it turns yellow, and then informs his boss of the result. In both science and business, most people aren’t actually innovating.
On both the ‘biz’ and the ‘tech’ side of BizTech, what we need to look for are rule-changers, the three percenters – the ones who can take a tool like Y Combinator’s Fuzzwich animation-maker, and actually change how people organize themselves, do business and live their lives. Maybe if we find more people like this, regardless of their specific background training, we will see fewer ‘tech tool’ projects burning up venture funding with no sense of what the technology should be used for.
“…what we need to look for are rule-changers, the three percenters – the ones who can take a tool like Y Combinator’s Fuzzwich animation-maker, and actually change how people organize themselves, do business and live their lives.”
What do you mean by this? Fuzzwich may not “change how people organize themselves” but it’s really addictive. And rest assured, they have plenty of business savvy (even if they don’t wear khakis) and an impressive business model to show for it
I think the worry is in this culture where one finds it fitting to say “even if they don’t wear khakis”. The other negative statement, of course, would be some crack from the khaki side about the “troglodyte code mashers”. Extreme Blue’s mission was to foster a generation of coders who saw no difference between themselves and the business folks – and vice versa. After all, everyone from a good scientist to a good business modeler is simply playing with patterns. We are all engaged in the same activity applied to different domains. (Funny, I look down and notice that I’m wearing not khakis but a t-shirt that reads: “Them = Us.”)
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the guys at Fuzzwich had a lot of business savvy. Paul Graham – being a brilliant business innovator himself – would be unlikely to back anyone who didn’t. Interesting to note – if Innovation is taking know-how and tools and changing the rules of how people organize themselves, do business, and live their lives (and I would submit that is exactly how innovation should be understood – it separates it from other words like Invention and Improvement) then Y Combinator itself is the most significant innovation to come out of Paul’s project to date. It fundamentally changes the rules of angel investing and the practice of fostering startups. Ironic that the tech guy’s greatest innovation is not based on a particular technology but rather on a business model and a philosophy. This is service innovation.
The business thinkers and the technical thinkers on Extreme Blue teams often were indistinguishable. I remember one MBA in particular – from Duke University who was a poly sci undergrad but happened to have taught himself to write code and was making small applications for…wait for it…his vintage Newton – asked me what he was supposed to do on this team of techies. I said, “Look, you can write a business plan sure, but that code better be different as a result of your input. You are a developer now.” He and the team were personally responsible for several patents and created one of the most kick-ass, rule changing, disruptive businesses we ever developed based on the technology they were building…which by the way was going in a totally different direction before he put the biz and the tech together in his head. Biztech.
Point of clarification: This blog is about rule-changers, innovators. Somewhere in the ‘about’ section we talk about how inventions, improvements, creativity and other such things can be very worthwhile, valuable even, without being used to innovate – to change the rules.
Fuzzwich is a lot of fun. I wouldn’t say I’m addicted to it, but I enjoyed making a little movie with it. It is certainly a worthwhile piece of work. It’s cool.
If nothing else, it shows off the skills and creativity of some smart developers. If they are holding somewhere else a business model that will allow them to take the capabilities of this tool and change the rules somewhere, all the better. Again, innovating is not a prerequisite for being valuable.