Sublime

Sometimes I wasn’t sure what motivated John. It certainly wasn’t money. To most investors, the prospect of a quick sellout to IBM would be irresistible. But for John, investing in high technology was a calling, and monetary reward was the byproduct of a successful mission. The higher goal was to create something enduring, a growing enterprise that

On the other end of the spectrum were kids like Larry Page, who would come in and say, “Here’s what I think I can do.” And his proposals were crazy. He’d come into the office and talk about doing something with space tethers or solar kites.

Page named Harris to the newly invented position of “product philosopher.” But then: Nothing much changed. In a 2016 profile in the Atlantic, Harris blamed the lack of changes to the “inertia” of the organization and a lack of clarity about what he was advocating.

Blair Reeves, a Principal Product Manager at SAS and coauthor of Building Products for the Enterprise: Product Management in Enterprise Software (O’Reilly),

software—in all its expressive glory—is in charge.

Bruce Horn, one of the precocious teens recruited to test Smalltalk, would go on to join the LRG staff, where he contributed to Smalltalk. He later joined Apple and helped design the original Macintosh.109 By describing kids like Horn as a “‘hacker phenomenon,’”110 Kay inadvertently points to another impediment: their designs targeted an idealized

john@whatmatters.com.

Marc Andreessen, perhaps the world’s bellwether venture capitalist,