I don’t think a whole lot has really changed, just the actors. VCs have thrust themselves in to the conversation when they basically stayed more behind the sce

I don’t think a whole lot has really changed, just the actors. VCs have thrust themselves in to the conversation when they basically stayed more behind the scenes years back. They’ve been trying to make themselves in to rockstars that last decade or so which is a little different and I think it promotes the profit based nature of SV a bit more; you know many by name and reputation and reputation means how much they’ve made. That and there has been some substantial innovation in terms of business models, google, Facebook, etc makes giant money and most of their users have never given them a dime. The ability to fully comprehend that (is that the “innovation half-life?”) has just about reached the point where average joe consumer understands it. These service companies draw a softer crowd of engineers than the hardware firms did, design and ux are things now and those types of engineers are a bit more ready and willing to say “hey look what I did” than a firmware engineer on a primitive MP3 player might be. They used to say ‘you never got fired for buying IBM’ but you also never took a beating for talking shit about IBM and there is a deep hacker tradition of that. We have a few more IBMs these days.