Hacks and combinators

By Ian, on July 9th, 2006

I have been lucky enough to interview Paul Graham, partner at venture firm Y Combinator and author of Hackers and Painters, about Web 2.0 and some of the business issues it has provoked. Paul has an interesting take on who is going to be powerful in coming years: “A hacker with design sense is really dangerous, especially as a startup founder”.

Below is a little taster. The full transcript is on Paul’s site here.

8. What ideas/values/approaches do you think will be permanent changes from Web 2.0 to whatever Web 3.0 brings?
I doubt there will be such a thing as Web 3.0. I think so many people will use the phrase “Web 3.0″ for their pet theory about the future of the Web that it will lose all credibility, and by the time there’s a change big enough to warrant a name like that, no one will want to use it. “Web 2.0″ is already close to the edge of credibility. Few people I know can bring themselves to use it seriously. “Web 3.0″ is probably already dead.
But as for the underlying question, yes, there are definitely trends I think will be permanent. One is the increasing focus on users. There are a couple promising variants. The most obvious are the social networking sites, which are entirely about the users. But there are also subtler variants — news sites where the top stories are determined by voting, like Digg and Reddit, and sites where people post their own stuff, like Blogger and now YouTube. This “stuff” is presently called “user-generated content” but if it becomes the default it will probably get a shorter name.
Another trend that’s here to stay is web-based software. This began in the nineties, but you can do so much more now that everyone can see it’s the future — even Microsoft. I think in twenty years most of the software people use will be running on servers.
There’s also a social trend that will last: the startup world will increasingly be ruled by technical people rather than business people. As in so many other areas, Google is the pattern for the future. The hackers dominate Google, and that’s why Google wins.
A lot of the most characteristically lame startups of the Bubble were that way because they were started by business guys, who then went looking for hackers to implement their ideas. That model may have worked in 1960, but it didn’t work so well in 1998, and it gets more obsolete every year. I think the future belongs to the hackers. Technology is an ever larger component of business, so of course power is shifting to the people who are experts in that, rather than management or finance.