Idolizing tech founders

Why, and why not?

When we idolize tech founders and other innovators (nice tag, credit: Scott Galloway) we annoy people. We annoy the old guard.

Innovators inspire us the same way rappers inspire teenagers. They promise to break the status quo, and this fact alone is enough to win our admiration. Most tech founders are young, brimming with confidence, socially inept — in some cases on the spectrum — and they frequently come across as unlikeable people. Never mind. We love them anyway. Or some of us do.

The status quo is being fiercely protected by the suits, the banks, the traditions, the old money and universities and the media. They are collectively shit scared of everything that isn’t the status quo. Meanwhile, those of us not born into privilege and not groomed to go into the top schools, realize that our only chance of ever breaking the status quo and rising to a financial state other than the one tattooed on our foreheads, is to be a founder or to be close to a founder, and to burn society’s cobwebs by innovating furiously against the status quo. Perhaps we’ll win, perhaps we’ll die trying. But we won’t obey the status quo.

I left a cushy job and a beautiful life in Neuchâtel, Switzerland 30 years ago to start a new adventure in Mountain View, CA. My friends thought I was insane. My apartment was the gate…