Ed Cotton: Corporate America Needs To Embrace Hacker Culture

Paul Graham’s piece on Yahoo’s demise is a must read for anyone looking for answers to the fail from grace of a once iconic brand.

Graham’s rationale for Yahoo’s failure is put down essentially one thing; its lack of a “Hacker Culture”. It didn’t have brilliant engineers at the heart and soul of its organization and it tried to make do without keeping and attracting the best.

Interestingly, this is the opposite of Facebook and perhaps, one can argue, the very reason for its success.

Back in October of 2009, Y-Combinator invited Zuckerberg to speak at its Start-Up School and he was asked the question about keeping and attracting talent.

This was his response.

“Our goal isn’t necessarily to keep people forever. There are companies that train people really well. A lot of Harvard people went on to McKinsey. A lot of people went to IBM because that was the best place to learn sales. A lot of people go to USC to learn how to play football. One of the things at Facebook is have a place where it’s one of the best places to learn how to build stuff. If you want to learn how to build really good products and practices and have a large impact, I would argue there’s no better place to do that than at Facebook.

If people want to come here for one, two, or three years. Steve Chen, who founded YouTube, was working on Facebook before. I’m not encouraging people to work at Facebook to leave. But I think you learn valuable skills. We’re not pretending we’re building a company that hackers are going to want to work at forever. I want to be a part of building some institutions to be great hacker institutions in the long-term.”

Zuckerberg is making two things clear from this statement.

1. He wants to hire hackers

2. His promise to to his talent is clear, it’s simply the best place to learn how to build stuff. If you are an engineer, what more could you ask for?

(Continue reading here.)

Ed Cotton is the Director of Strategy at BSSP, and is curious about all things relating to brands, marketing and culture. Read more at influx insights