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Fortune Takes a Look at Bram Cohen
jackstack writes "Fortune has an interesting article about bittorrent creator Bram Cohen. 'Right now I'm the CEO because I don't trust anyone else to be the CEO,' Bram says. The article goes into some interesting detail about Bram's state of mind, his poor history in college, and gives a glimpse of what it's like to go from being an unknown, brilliant geek - to the CEO of an $8.75 Million startup company."
Bandwidth costs money, and offering, say, Linux ISO's is expensive. But, if people opt in (BitTorrent) each person is joining a community and helping out with the cost of bandwidth - especially those who are accessing via an ISP and not through work.
It's the same level of cooperation that makes OSS so special.
I may be a good way to share files, but I'm afraid the investors are throwing their money away. It's like trying to make money off of FTP.
How can this company be worth 8.75 million. What does it do that is worth that much a year? As far as I can see nothing. The only "product" it has it gives away for free. If it started charging a dozen open source versions would appear in it's place. Even if they didn't the system can be copied by others for virtually nothing. What is it with these really high value estimations?
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Why should he hand over his title to some facist punk that will bank on his hard earned work. He's the brilliant guy that came up with this, he should run the company as he sees fits. Sometimes it's not about profit, but about ideals and vision.
Life is not for the lazy.
The job of a CEO is to provide direction and strategy for an organization. I would say that maybe he needs a PR person. He seems to be doing quite well as the CEO.
The other thing that has me thinking - who diagnosed his illness?
I've met quite a few people who said that they had various illnesses. When I asked them about the diagnosis and what the physician (or some other qualified expert) said, they don't say anything about an expert diagnosis: just something vague. I don't know about him, but I think a lot of folks use popular illnesses as an excuse for their own shortcomings or as an excuse for not doing something that they're not interested in doing.
Forgive my spelling, but I have spellexia.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
there's always been smart people who can do complex topological analysis in their head but can't balance their checkbook
likewise, there have always been people whose minds always flit from one subject to the next every second- in other words, attention deficit disorder
but now we have these buzzwords, asperpgers and ADD and others, and people think its some miraculous discovery, and its all they talk about and they act like it explains all sorts of behavior
but it's just a fad, and meanwhile, the conditions have always been there, always will be there, and those who have these conditions are no more special or less special than the rest of us
cohen is a smart guy, and he can concentrate on a complex math problem, and he likes to do it, that's all, that's it
i'm just so sick of everyone jumping on the buzzword bandwagon, it doesn't mean anything
there once was a time in the 1800s when everyone thought phrenology was the end-all explanation of character and intelligence
it's long forgotten, like the racist pseudoscience it was
meanwhile, in a hundred years, when our language and our attention isn't controlled by the marketing department of large pharmaceutical companies, our hypochondriacal way of looking at our mental differences will have moved onto the next stupid fad
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I mean, after all, anybody can set up a Web site. How could a company possibly make money doing that??
Breakfast served all day!