… you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company. Netscape’s early success and rapid growth caused us to stop getting the former and start getting the latter.

💬 Jamie Zawinski

Not just Netscape. You can see it in many companies. Remember when Google brought in Eric Schmidt? Why? ‘He was going to be the ‘grownup’.

Back in the day Oracle took an idea that started at IBM and made it their own. In the early days Larry, Bob and Ed recruited for option 1 - as did the people they recruited and so on. I think option 2 started to happen after the existential crash in 90 and Nippon Steel’s cash injection in 91.

Ray Lane was pulled in from BAH the following year - the first time that a senior role had been filled from outside of the company ranks. His tenure (by revenue and profit measures) - was very successful. But it was during that tenure that recruiting for option 2 became much more the norm.

Seriously? You create a business that beats out another business and many of its immediate rivals - and then you recruit the people from those organisations?

I think this the foundation of where everything started to go wrong in the Valley. It just wasn’t so obvious at the time.