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News & Updates - Monday, July 25, 2005

We're Nerds & We're In Charge Here Now

The past couple of decades or more have seen a consolidation of power in technology startups by the suits. A VC mantra has been that engineers require adult supervision or else they will steer their startups off a cliff with their nerd fantasies. The suits put trusted product managers in front of engineers to keep them on track and product marketing managers are added to keep the product managers honest and prevent them from going native with the geeks.

While it would be impossible to support with data, we believe we have experiencing a reversal of this trend and are now seeing more and more successful startups run by geeks without suit supervision. Each week, as we document the startup landscape from search to enterprise software, it seem we come across more companies that are run by geeks. The guiding light of this movement might be Google, which despite having a suited CEO is clearly run by its geek founders. So long as Google continues to best Yahoo and Microsoft, where the suits have been in charge for ages, geeks will have their guiding light.

Indeed it is much easier to launch a good startup without suits. A handful of engineer can quickly identify a market opportunity, pound out a product, and launch it for sale on the Net. Marketing is much easier than it used to be thanks to blogs and tech sites that will embrace solid products whether or not they are led to market with marketing fanfare. Watch your back suits, the geeks are on the rise.