[LUAU] The VC Squeeze, Desktop Linux and Hawaii's future

[Jim Thompson]

Read this, and understand my vision for Hawaii's future software industry.

http://www.paulgraham.com/vcsqueeze.html

> During the Bubble, a lot of people predicted that startups would 
> outsource their development to India. I think a better model for the 
> future is David Heinemeier Hansson, who outsourced his development to 
> a more powerful language instead. A lot of well-known applications are 
> now, like BaseCamp, written by just one programmer. And one guy is 
> more than 10x cheaper than ten, because (a) he won't waste any time in 
> meetings, and (b) since he's probably a founder, he can pay himself 
> nothing.

Thats one man (or woman) with one inexpensive computer, running Free and 
Open Source software and some time.

> Largely because of Sarbanes-Oxley, few startups go public now. For all 
> practical purposes, succeeding now equals getting bought. Which means 
> VCs are now in the business of finding promising little 2-3 man 
> startups and pumping them up into companies that cost $100 million to 
> acquire. They didn't mean to be in this business; it's just what their 
> business has evolved into.

> Hence the fourth problem: the acquirers have begun to realize they can 
> buy wholesale. Why should they wait for VCs to make the startups they 
> want more expensive? Most of what the VCs add, acquirers don't want 
> anyway. The acquirers already have brand recognition and HR 
> departments. What they really want is the software and the developers, 
> and that's what the startup is in the early phase: concentrated 
> software and developers.

HOSEF's mission needs tweaking.   Introducing kids to computers is 
interesting and exciting, but Hawaii needs more startups, more 
businesses that can be run out of a spare bedroom or two.  I don't come 
to denigrate the efforts thus far, but I do think that HOSEF may be soon 
mired in "open source as its own end".  We put computers in public 
schools, but what do we do with them, other than load them with a 
Windows alternative?    We teach kids how to tear the machine to bits 
and re-assemble it, but what then?   Knowing how to field-strip and 
re-assemble your rifle is a necessary skill, but it won't help you hit 
the target.

Linux on the Desktop is an interesting debate, but Hawaii needs highly 
profitable businesses that don't involve huge capital outlays for 
manufacturing lines and hardware development not endless debate about 
Gnome .vs KDE .vs MacOS .vs WinXP/Vista, or even "SUSE .vs Red Hat .vs 
Debian .vs Fedora .vs Ubuntu .vs <roll your own>.

I fear that "using FOSS in your business" by way of endorsing Linux 
Desktops just continues the oligarchy where dreams end at middle 
management in the corporate drone world.  Hawaii has too much of that 
already.

Quoting Paul Graham again (http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html)

> Windows can and will be overthrown, but not by giving people a better 
> desktop OS. The way to kill it is to redefine the problem as a 
> superset of the current one. The problem is not, what operating system 
> should people use on desktop computers? but how should people use 
> applications? There are answers to that question that don't even 
> involve desktop computers.

HOSEF should find a way to teach classes in Ruby and Python and (yes, 
I'll say it), Lisp for those few who are driven to the final 
understanding.   We could train hundreds, if not thousands of young, 
bright minds to develop web-based applications in Python and Ruby with 
little more than what we have on-hand now and a few bright, motivated 
mentors.  Let O'Reilly slather away book after book on Java and Perl, 
these are the C++ and Fortran of tomorrow.   We should understand that 
the jobs of tomorrow are those jobs that are created in startups, not 
working in IT in the back of some hotel.  (Apologies to any on-list who 
do this.)

> I don't think people consciously realize this, but one reason downwind 
> jobs like churning out Java for a bank pay so well is precisely that 
> they are downwind. The market price for that kind of work is higher 
> because it gives you fewer options for the future. A job that lets you 
> work on exciting new stuff will tend to pay less, because part of the 
> compensation is in the form of the new skills you'll learn.
>
> Grad school is the other end of the spectrum from a coding job at a 
> big company: the pay's low but you spend most of your time working on 
> new stuff. And of course, it's called "school," which makes that clear 
> to everyone, though in fact all jobs are some percentage school.
>
> The right environment for having startup ideas need not be a 
> university per se. It just has to be a situation with a large 
> percentage of school.

Now go back and re-read that bit.  School.  Learning.  Gaining knowledge. 

HOSEF could even become the "Y-combiner" of Hawaii, taking a stake in 
its startups, and using the funds derived to seed new startups and 
further increase its education efforts.

In the past, I've taught secretaries to program.   I've taught 
microbiology graduates to program.  I taught (and continue to teach) 
myself to program.  

My (nearly) eight year-old son has a keen interest in robots, guess what 
he'll be doing soon...

Just some ideas, a bit more "bomb throwing" @ 4am.

jim