Does Your Company Have Geek Cred?

It used to be that in the tech entrepreneurial culture, geeks were not prized, particularly in leadership. They were the folks that made the product, but they could not drive your business. You needed an MBA. Or a sales guy. The geeks were little more than the factory.

And I think, among many VCs, that is still the thinking. The strategy is to push the technical founder out of the way and make room for the *real* business people. But an interesting thing is happening in the marketplace. The customers are thinking different. If you look at the companies that are succeeding in the marketplace, the one thing that most of them have is geek cred. They are generally led by a tech focused leader, or the organizational DNA of the company is inherently technical.

This is because the Internet is an incredible truth filter. No slick-haired glad hander, or glossy marketing plan is going to convince a customer that a product that isn’t good really is. Because the geeks will figure it out. Geeks have power now. Email travels everywhere. Blogs are public and easily accessible. Regardless of where they are in an organization, truthful, perspectives can be heard. And so there is less friction preventing the good stuff from emerging. On the other hand, bad stuff is more often than not, smashed instantly. In other words, it is no longer possible to hide bulls**t with a coating of sugar.

If you look at the major Internet properties/companies today, we can draw an almost direct correlation between geek cred, and whether they are on their way up or down. While this is not an absolute because obviously companies can have good runs without any real technology, it is interesting to explore the correlation between geek cred and current success. Below is a review of some of the major companies geek cred factors, on a 1 - 10 scale. Yes there are a few zeros. This is not a mistake.

Have Geek Cred

Amazon / geek cred: 9
Amazon was always considered smart because they made collaborative filtering work, though their geek cred has skyrocketed in the last year as a result of Amazon Web Services (EC2,S3,etc.)

Google / geek cred: 10
Duh.

FaceBook / geek cred: 7
Facebook is led by a programmer. For this reason Facebook’s DNA is inherently programmerish. Releasing the Facebook API solidified that positioning, and exposed it to thousands of programmers. Also, Facebook is putting cool technology out into the open source. We geeks love that.

Apple / geek cred: 10
This is obvious, but Apple is the only real thought leader in consumer devices and computers. Now that their OS is Unix based, Apple has even more geek cred.

HP / geek cred: 8
HP has a geek culture that goes back to its founding, and its history as a maker of testing instruments and RPN calculators. Today, they are in the PC industry, and while they are certainly not thought leaders in that category (because there are none other than Apple), their leadership in imaging, ink chemistry, and the like, along with their heavily geekified storied past give them lifetime geek cred emeritus status.

Adobe / geek cred: 10
Geschke and Warnock were the ultimate geeks. They solved some of the hardest problems available to solve. Adobe calls their programmers "computer scientists." Adobe rocks, and all geeks know it, even if photoshop's UI does sucks.

Don’t Have Geek Cred

Yahoo / geek cred: 5
Yahoo never really had much geek cred. They were, after all, initially a human curated web directory, not a software company. They did come out of Stanford which gave them a shot but they never really could pull it off. Hiring Semel as CEO did horrible things to their geek karma. He was the ultimate anti-geek, and so, while he shored them up in the intermediate term, in the long term, having no geek cred may be fatal. The specific embodiment of this problem is their total inability to create competitive search technology.

eBay / geek cred: 2
Meg Whitman is a management consultant, not a geek. They have no significant tech in the company beyond operations expertise (the ability to scale). They have lots of sales expertise. But no hard core tech, and a horrible user experience. And now Meg is leaving and they are probably going to bring in the number two. Another non geek management consultant. The ultimate reflection of their non-geekiness is their purchase of Skype. They thought it was cool, but really had no idea what they were buying. No good geek would have done it.They look dumb.

MySpace / geek cred: 0
No tech at all. Their systems are based on Microsoft servers because Microsoft helped them. That drops you to zero immediately because no other major players are based on Microsoft. But even if they hadn't based everything on MS, MySpace is *painfully* geek free. You never see any MySpace employees on the tech lists I hang out in. I wonder whether any programmers work there :) The company has grown under Rupert Murdoch, but as a long term play, they will suffer the fate of AOL. Still, it was a brilliant cash flow generating purchase for Rupe.

Dell / geek cred: 2
Michael Dell doesn’t believe in tech. He is essentially anti-tech. This worked for a good long while, but now, not not developing *anything* is starting to look like a problem.

Motorola / geek cred: 4
They had great geek cred as a chip maker, and as a phone hardware maker. But they spun off chips, and phones have become about software as the hardware and manufacturing becomes a commodity. They have *no* geek cred in software. As a result they are in danger of shrinking to irrelevancy. The rats are leaving the sinking ship.

Palm / geek cred: 3
When Jeff Hawkins left, this was the end of Palm. It was a long time coming but it is here now. They have demonstrated no ability to do anything technical beyond milking the initial Palm Pilot innovation bone dry. Jon Rubinstein of iPod fame is the new chairman. I fear its too little too late. Like a liver transplant for a 110 year old man. The new rev of Palm’s OS is slated for 09. RIP.

IAC/ geek cred: 0
Barry Diller is brilliant, but not as the leader of a technology company. Barry, and the market, misperceived the Internet as being primarily about media. It isn’t. It is about access, which is about technology. Barry has failed because he thought IAC was going to be a media company. Not. They will continue to generate cash flow but there is no substantial growth there, even as 5 separate companies, as is the plan. He will ride out their incredibly lame tech like Palm, and the companies will all eventually become irrelevant as tech savvy competitors eat their lunch.

AOL / geek cred: 0
AOL never had any geek cred, even when they should have in the very beginning. This was a failure in leadership, because they were in a position to have great geek cred. Their failure became apparent to all geeks when they made it clear they didn’t believe in the Internet. Instead, Steve Case viewed them entirely as a media company. This killed them. Though, for AOL shareholders, the merger with Time Warner was brilliant financial engineering for those that got out in time.

Losing it But Not Lost

Microsoft / geek cred: 6
Microsoft is, perhaps, a unique situation. They have lots of great technology and are incredibly smart. But they are losing their geek cred. Talent is leaving. And they are flat footed in response to the Internet. They will not die any time soon, but it seems they really don’t get the Internet. And Bill Gates’ lionizing of Ray Ozzie I don’t get. Notes? Ugh. Groove. Double Ugh? They do have long term geek cred, but they may not be able to capture any Internet mojo.

Nokia / geek cred: 6
Nokia has the same problem as Motorola, they are just slightly better positioned. Nokia has hardware cred, but no software geek cred. Their handset hardware has been highly valued for many years. But hardware is becoming a commodity. They partnered with and invested in Symbian to gain some software cred. But this failed as Symbian is viewed with disdain by most of the software development community. Now software is key and they are looking down the Apple gun barrel. Though the analysts haven’t picked up on this yet, because Nokia is kicking Motorola's teeth in. But Nokia’s time will come. They cannot become a software company. The die is cast.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who recently launched a new blog: Why Does Everything Suck? exploring the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet.