What the Fuck Happened to Nerds – Mr. Market
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 frie...">
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 frie...">
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 frie...">
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What 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.
Then there was Woz, the patron saint of computer science: bashful, generous, humble, averse to the spotlight, and content with having a reasonable amount of wealth but not an absurd, evil-seeming amount of wealth. He gave away early Apple stock to colleagues because he felt weird about having so much and went back to teaching fifth grade. Woz was the proof of concept that you could be at the absolute center of the most important industrial transformation of the century and still not clamor to be famous for it. Instead, you could just do what you loved and make great money and share ideas about what you'd learned.
Together they told this story: the people building your future are, at worst, perfectionist jerks, and at best, gentle obsessives, and in either case their attention is mostly focused on their work, not at 'the world' with its glamorous sins.
Whether this was accurate or not is irrelevant. It is what the public thought. We trusted those people partly because they didn't seem to want our attention. They were nerds with money who mostly just wanted to be left to their projects, and it made sense that they were in charge of our digital experience.
We have strayed pretty far from that.
A short history of how tech leaders went from charming nerd to terrifying overlord
I'm going to massively simplify the transition from 'helpful, obsessive nerd who makes bank' to 'tech oligarch from hell who people joke is not human' into 3 phases.
Phase one (late 1970s to 2007): the founder as charismatic, mysterious byproduct. Founders appeared in media, but the coverage was mostly centered on what they were building. There was a mythology to them and they'd take photos in their garage surrounded by sparkling machinery, and they'd do keynotes and magazine...