What happened to the nerds? An essay on tech founders and self-promotion

A long essay published on the Mr. Market blog on June 12, 2026 asks a blunt question about the culture of the technology industry: what happened to the nerds? The author, writing from inside the industry, calls the experience a mixed bag of thoughtful, curious people and egomaniacs, and argues the second group is increasingly the sector's public face.

A trust that was spent, not kept

The essay's core argument is economic. Over roughly forty years, it says, the technology industry accumulated a very specific kind of trust through mostly boring motives, which made it look benign. In the last decade and a half its leadership discovered that this trust could be liquidated and converted into attention, a trade that looked like a great exchange rate. The catch, the author writes, is that you never learn the real price of an illiquid asset until you try to buy it back.

Three phases, from Woz to reality television

The piece sketches three phases. From the late 1970s to 2007 the founder was a charismatic byproduct: coverage orbited around garages, machinery and products, and Steve Jobs was admired because what he shipped worked and was more tasteful than what came before. Steve Wozniak became the patron saint of computer science — bashful, generous, giving away early Apple stock to colleagues and eventually returning to teach fifth grade.

Between 2007 and 2015 the founder became a parable. TED talks, The Social Network and Y Combinator turned starting a company into a career path, and the founder-as-protagonist narrative became the industry's recruiting funnel. Since 2015, the author argues, the sector has drifted toward something grift-adjacent, with figureheads leaning hard into it.

The Mafia Game video and a charm offensive

The most egregious example, in the essay's view, is a slickly produced show from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund in which Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey, Bryan Johnson, Moxie Marlinspike, Dylan Field, Ryan Petersen and a rotating bench of the firm's favourite characters play a party game about deception. It is hosted by Mike Solana of Pirate Wires; the debut episode is titled Can Tech Legends Find the Liar?, and it was filmed at Tosca Cafe in San Francisco, the same bar where the PayPal Mafia posed for their famous 2007 photo shoot.

The author calls it a charm offensive in the technical sense — an offensive conducted with charm — and warns that reality television is a laundering technology: it takes someone you would keep at arm's length and makes him a recurring guest in your living room. Given that the cast holds capital, weapons contracts and a line to the White House, that familiarity looks sinister rather than entertaining.

Keep the nerd, lose the flex

The essay does not ask founders to disappear from public life; building in public has too many advantages. It asks for transparency about goals, a balanced ego and less constant flexing, pointing to Basecamp's Jason Fried as a founder whose presence stays humble. Attention earned through product decisions and customer value arrives more slowly, the author concedes, but it outlasts a reputation spent as an attention asset.