GoKawiilWhat the Fuck Happened to Nerds
12 Jun, 2026
I've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest friends are former coworkers. I've also encountered the most egocentric, delusional, irritating personalities imaginable in tech.
It is a mixed bag, like anything. But increasingly, the egomaniacs are not only taking center stage at the most influential tier of their respective companies - whether as 'founding engineers' or founders/CEOs/CTOs/ETCs or 'GTM engineers' - but they're also talking about themselves incessantly online.
That is not good for any of us.
This blog is long so here is the short version: the technology industry spent forty years accumulating a very specific kind of trust and mostly had boring motives, which made us appear trustworthy and largely benign. Over the last decade and change, its leadership discovered that this trust could be liquidated and converted into a different asset, attention, at what looked like a great exchange rate. The problem with liquidating an illiquid asset though is that you don't find out the real price until you try to buy it back. The Founder's Fund Mafia video is the most egregious example of this. If there are any founders out there considering doing their own version of the Mafia video, please don't. Instead, focus on publicizing your core nerd values: a love of learning, curiosity, an obsessive interest in your domain, and an admirable humility re: how you present yourself to others and talk about your accomplishments. This will probably catch on slower and be less viral, but it will pay off in the long-run once people 'turn against' tech founders as reality stars, which they eventually will.
The charming & visionary nerd trope
Ten years ago, the cultural idea of the technologist was still basically Jobs and Wozniak.
Jobs was flawed and everyone knew it, but it was all par for the course. He was aggressive in his ambition, uncompromising about even the most minute details of his company, and occasionally arrogant (not always, IMO. Sometimes you're just right.)
But people admired him anyway because the products he made worked well and were more tasteful/subtle/beautiful than any consumer electronic that had come before it. When Jobs was cruel, in the public's memory at least, he was cruel about kerning or whatever. The cruelty was bad, but it was presented as if he was cruel for our sake - for the sake of the customer. You could model him as a man who wanted the customer experience and the legacy of his business to be perfect, and that's exactly what we want our CEOs to do.
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