CandidCapital

Over the past 20 years, the image of entrepreneurs in the UK has been transformed from dubious middleman to innovative hero. But geeks still do not receive the respect they deserve: how can they gain the same status in Britain as in America?

Another New Black

Yesterday’s seminar on how to improve entrepreneurship and innovation in the UK did not produce any unexpected policy recommendations. But it did throw up one idea that I found both novel and revealing.

In our break-out group (an entity that rarely inspires, I know) when we were reviewing how the overall climate has improved in recent years, an extremely successful entrepreneur turned business angel suddenly came up with the following insight into how geeks – his word - are perceived.

He kicked off by saying that the big cultural transformation in the innovation space since the 1980s is the turnaround in the status of entrepreneurs: no longer shady characters in sheepskin coats running unregistered businesses out of white vans on the Old Kent Road but dynamic, often young, bright and sassy heroes. So far, you might harrumph, so obvious.

But he went on to say that what we need next is a similar transformation in public attitudes to geeks. And the example he chose as geek archetype was Bill Gates, the perception of whom is 80% positive in the US, but 80% negative in the UK.

Divided by a Common….

This particular transatlantic difference had never occurred to me before but it is another of the many subtle ways in which American English can be a disarmingly foreign language that trips Brits up. Sometimes the problems are specifically linguistic and sometimes they are more contextual.

Think of former President Clinton being interviewed on BBC radio about Senator John Kerry as presidential candidate in 2004. When Bill Clinton said that candidate Kerry would make ‘quite a good president’, his UK interviewer pounced on this phrase as damning with faint praise. But the real problem was not President Clinton’s opinion of Senator Kerry (and whatever his opinion might have been, Clinton is too polished a performer to go off-piste in public) but the strange journey that that little word ‘quite’ has made back and forth across the Atlantic. Over the past 50 years in the UK, ‘quite’ has migrated from mainly meaning ‘quite something’ to being closer to ‘fair to middling’.

But over the same period in America, ‘quite’ has gravitated away from ‘so-so’ to ‘substantial’ (‘he’s quite a guy’). Granted the ambiguity persists on both sides of the pond (‘quite interesting’ as a review of your presentation is ‘quite wounding’ in York or New York), but other things being equal ‘quite’ turns the heating down in the UK and up in the US.

Other misunderstandings can be much more dependent on physical context than tone or syntax. Two weeks ago when back in Palo Alto I said to a friend who has lived there for years that we now have many more business angels around Cambridge (England!) than we used to. He thought I meant hundreds; I was thinking perhaps 30 on a good day with the wind behind you at full moon when there’s an ‘R’ in the month. It’s just that in a region where angels are legion, ‘many’ implies three-figures, whereas around here ‘many’ means ‘more than I can name without consulting my Rolodex’.

Geek Taxonomy

How does this relate to improving the image of geeks in Britain – if, indeed, that is something you consider worthwhile? Well, first of all it reminded me instantly of a classic ‘episode’ of that consistently on-the-button comic strip of geek-grad land, Piled Higher & Deeper Comic.

Take the strip for 1/7/2004 (or 7/1/2004 if you are English – or, for that matter, if you are filling in US immigration and customs forms – you see the common-language problem?). Tajel, the ‘international’ Social Science grad student and former Berkeley undergrad, asks Cecilia – the brightest, cutest techie, who is working on whether ‘intersymbol interference optimization should be formulated as max weighted rate sum frequency partitioning to reduce computational complexity’ – the following key question: ‘what is the difference between a geek, a dork and a nerd?’

Cecelia’s reply neatly sums up the problem before us:

’GEEKS are intense fanatics of unconventional subject matter, who proudly memorize its minutiae and incorporate it into every aspect of their lives

‘A NERD is an 80’s term we’d all like to forget.’

Celebrate Your Inner Geek

This brought home to me a subtle difference between US and UK English connotations of 'geek'. It may be subjective on my part, but I think Brits still use ‘nerd’ much more than they use ‘geek’. ‘Geek’ has something positive about it: deep knowledge, commitment, passion, mastery of subject. Whereas ‘nerd’ implies that geekiness has made you a dork – but the two do not need to be co-extensive, as Cecilia pointed out to Tajel.

It’s true that working as I do in an innovation centre in the geekiest town in England I often wish that the other inmates could avoid the dorky side of the coin by having a tad more sense of ‘the normal rules of social interaction’: better hygiene, a wardrobe which contained more than just the one tee-shirt, and the ability to avoid talking to their own Birkenstocks when you address them.

But still, an irrational passion gives you reason to live and often inspires others infectiously as well. To give meaning to your life, merely reacting to greed and fear alone is not enough; you have to be motivated by vision as well. Vision is really geekiness with focus and can be as simple as learning to play the violin badly or as complex as setting up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, dedicating huge resources to eradicating preventable diseases. I can see why my business-angel neighbour at yesterday’s seminar sides with the Americans in seeing Bill Gates as 80% positive.

Geeks and Entrepreneurship

To come back the business context, in technology entrepreneurship you can no longer get by without some streak of geekiness in you, even if it does not amount to the total surrender Cecilia talked about.

The appropriate degree of geekiness will depend in part on your role (founders may have a lot of it, later recruits, such as a CFO or a CMO less, a successful CEO might be right on the cusp between the domains of tech and business) but to be plausible to customers and investors alike, you must at least understand the technology behind your product and have some passion for what it does.

The days of the early 1990s when investment committees could refuse on principle to consider any project that involved coloured wires or a Petrie dish are thankfully behind us. And I hope that even the UK clearing banks have gone through a sufficient transformation that Mike Lynch of Autonomy - now a UK-based company with a $4bn market capitalisation - would no longer have the same conversation as he had shortly after the firm was founded in 1996:

‘I went to my bank first and met a very nice chap, very friendly. It turned out he was normally doing things like lending money to people to set up newspaper shops. He did not really feel qualified to comment on my adaptive non-linear pattern recognition technology. But he did give me a good piece of advice, which I carry with me even now, which is that people will always buy confectionery.’ (Quoted in The Obsever, 5th December 1999)

Revenge of the Geeks

The upshot of that conversation in the break-out group yesterday is that I’m looking for ways to present a positive image of geeks in Britain. ‘Nerd’ is proscribed from use as an 80s term, as Cecilia said. It’s perhaps relevant that the movie Revenge of the Nerds that popularised the term was released in 1984 and since then, given the rise and rise of Silicon Valley, the nerds have truly had their revenge.

For the time being, I have no particular plan for how to make geeks as popular in the UK as they are in the US – or as popular as entrepreneurs have become – except to keep reading Piled Higher & Deeper, and to encourage you all to do the same.

But if you’re feeling really creative and are up for improving the standing of geeks in Britain, why not start publishing your own regular strip, perhaps set in an innovation centre in the UK? It could be ‘quite’ a successful business idea. After all, Jorge Cham, who created Piled Higher & Deeper abandoned his academic career at Caltech - no less - to run the PHD site full time. Revenge of the geeks indeed.

5th October 07