The tech industry used to be home to a disproportionate number of misfits and weirdos. Geeks. Nerds. People who needed to know how machines worked; needed to take them apart, make them better, and put them back together again.
People who existed a little apart from society’s established hierarchy … and often saw that hierarchy as another machine to be deconstructed and improved.
That is no longer the case. Now that technology is the dominant cultural and economic force of our time, and startup execs have become rock stars, the establishment is flocking to the tech industry. Rap stars and movie stars want to be tech investors. “Tech firms and consultants both appeal to the growing number of students who want to gain the right experience to start their own business,” observes The Economist. “Elite Grads in Business Flock to Tech,” concurs the Wall Street Journal.
Tech is becoming the finishing school and springboard for the upper-middle-class, the way law and finance were a decade ago. Now that the tech industry is cool, the pretty people are taking over, flooding out of top-tier universities with MBAs and social graces and carefully coiffed hair, shouldering the misfits and weirdos out of the way. And often, paradoxically, despite their privileged backgrounds, they have much less appetite for risk.
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