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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 don't mean to troll, but given that he has Asperger's Syndrome, should it not be in his best interest to give the job of CEO to somebody who is more charismatic (in the sense that he can communicate exactly what people will want to hear), in an attempt to gain extra customers?
+1 funny, -2 overrated. Life isn't fair.
I can picture all the recorded media company execs getting together in small cabals, swapping stories on ways they'd like to kill Bram Cohen.
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.
Besides, CEO's of american companies are usually in it for the quick buck and end up screwing over the company they work for and all of it's workers. One CEO of a rather large company, forget his name...well...he presided over the company while its stock plumetted 20%, took a massive severence package and ended up making $54,000 an hour when it was all said and done. The average yearly salary of his employees...$35,000.
For one thing, I think Asperger's Syndrome is a very real condition, but the jury's still out on whether or not it just describes a variation of normal behavior, or whether it's something worthy of considering as a "mental illness" - implying a need for treatment.
The simple description of "a mild form of autism" leaves it pretty wide open to describe a whole spectrum of behaviors. But the condition interested me, personally, only because I realized that I probably have it myself after reading enough about it. In my case, I think I've partially "overcome" it as I've gotten older and forced myself to break myself of some of my older, more "anti-social" habits. But the side-effect? It seems pretty unlikely I'll ever accomplish any brilliant or great projects anymore, either.
In the case of BT's creator, it seems to me like the guy is following the same path I did - and I'd predict his days of intensely focused, marathon coding sessions are nearly over. (He got married, etc.)
He's the one who created BitTorrent, so he's the best choice to head up any company trying to market the technology. According to the article, he already hired on a guy to communicate his product to the recording industry execs, realizing he wasn't able to do that so well himself. He's smart enough to get the right people for those jobs, as needed.
They often suggest Bill Gates had Asperger's too, and he seemed to manage to make a semi-successful company out of Microsoft over the years as C.E.O.
In the very last paragraph, it mentions Bram dropping by an old Bell Labs friend to talk about "satisfiability testing". If they're talking about 3SAT, does this mean he's working on P-NP?
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
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
... but an undereducated, socially-crippled, obsessive-compulsive, uncouth geek found a fertile, viable woman to not only marry him, but bear him child thricefold...
dude is just getting his license. this is far more amazing than bittorrent and deserves its own thread.
does anyone know if she's hot?
un burrito me trampeó.
Bram Cohen, congratulations on your accomplisments.
May you continue to live a productive and happy life and continue offering innovative and hopefully open source software.
Let this serve as encouragement to all of us: with desire, dedication, brains, a computer, and Internet access, anything is achievable.
Do what you do best; for most of us this is coding!
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
I mean, after all, anybody can set up a Web site. How could a company possibly make money doing that??
Breakfast served all day!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ah. The Barbara Walters of business magazines. You want a puff piece, read Fortune. You want news, read Business Week or the Wall Street Journal or even the Economist.
As a founder of a funded startup myself I hope he suceeds, but statistically he won't. Maybe i'm alone here, but i'm having a hardtime envisioning the business model of such a company (and doubt his ability to lead it to profitability). Sure bittorrent is a neat technology: but its just that a technology, and an open one too. It appears to be a long shot, and thats why funding came from venture capitalists. From most slashdotters POV i'm sure that sounds awesome until you realize what accepting venture capital is typically about: 90%+ stock takeovers with rider clauses allowing the investment firm first dibs on any money withdrawn from the company. I hope he hires someone to run the company that can translate whatever products he comes up with into something that can actually be sold.
if sign.nil? Sig.new
"doctors"
everything after that is a mistake
i'm talking about personality, not medical conditions, and the way society talks about each other
if we were in a hospital, talking about patients with liver disease or cancer, you would be 100% right
but we're not, we're talking about this hychondriac way people talk about simple personality differences
the world i am after is a world with more tolerant of more ranges of personality differences
as cohen is a ready example of, it is not all negative to have a quirky personality
but in a world you are living in, where anyone vaguely outside the norm is diagnosed with a medical system, we are talking about a world that is promoting sameness and conformity
at the loss of what?
at the loss of people like cohen!
so that is why i find it disgusting that anyone, including cohen (we're all hypochondriacs... read any psychology text book describing mental disorders and i defy not to say at one paragraph or another "hey! i've felt like that before!"), should think that just because he can concentrate hard and can't tune into what people are saying that great, is someone with a medical disorder
same with ADD
what if ritalin and prozac and other drugs are destroying the cohens of this world?
is ADD all negative? well, is asperger's all negative? what great writers, comedians, directors, etc. have been destroyed because they were treated with drugs, someone with an ability to focus on other things than the here and now- that's all negative? well i can describe asperger's in dire negative ways... but cohen is a shining example of why its not all negative!
so how about LESS medicalization of personality types, and MORE tolerance and acceptance of a range of quirks?
because the only people who win in the world you describe- the medicalization of personalities, are pharmaceutical companies, who want to prescribe us a pill for every perceived quirk of character that someone can pin down
it's disgusting, it will turn us into a society of robots so that some pharmaceutical company has some more cash in its bottom line
well how many riches are lost when our picassos and shakespeares and einsteins and cohens and hitchcocss are medically treated into personality sameness?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"In mid-October, Apple unveiled its long-rumored video iPod and started making some TV downloads and Pixar shorts available through its popular iTunes service. Navin says that the Google and Apple moves are both competition, but that BitTorrent's market will offer much more than just movies and TV shows. Plus, he speculates that Apple is paying "an astronomical price for bandwidth."
For anyone big, bandwidth becomes more and more of a non-issue. Only the little guys actually pay a significant amount for it.
Having worked for a web hosting company that went from small, averaging only 50mbits/sec in total, to over 800mbits/sec their overall bandwidth costs actually went DOWN. Why? Because once they started pushing over 100-200mbits/sec they could sign free, or next to free peering agreements with major Tier 1 providers. As long as you don't piss them off, and the agreement continues to be mutually benficial you get "free" bandwidth.
I'm sure Apple and any other big players pay fractions of a cent on the dollar for bandwidth.
I still believe Cohen's company can help out the little guys sell their wares, at least until they push enough bandwidth that it becomes cheaper to host the content themselves. I doubt you'll ever see Apple or the MPAA paying him money to host content though.
Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
It's Ali G's older brother
He is a doctor though at Cambridge Simon Baron-Cohen
not Sasha Baron-Cohen
That's Ali G
Heard their proud of each other though..awww
you like my sig, he likes you too. can't you just feel it!
when you talk about "social anxiety disorder" instead of shyness
or you talk about "attention deficit disorder" instead of inattention
the next thing out of people's mouths is "how do i treat that?"
the language you use to describe something has meaning
watch fox news: instead of calling it suicide bombing, they call it homicide bombing
i don't really care about suicide bombing/ homicide bombing, i'm not trying to make an ideological point about that here, i'm simply trying to drive home to you the point that the LANGUAGE you use matters when describing something, it has meaning, the words you use matters
why prochoice versus prolife?
why not prochoice versus antichoice?
why not antilife versus prolife?
do you understand how it matters?
why speak about personality in terms of medical terminology?
newsweek
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'd have to say your list of symptoms allows for a pretty wide spectrum...
.. and that kind of thing.), or the few people that were close to me just saw the "other side" of me, where I was much happier, being around my friend with similar interests and all. Still, I "solved" this problem on my own, by convincing my folks to pull me out of the private, all-boys' school I was attending, and switching to a public school where I felt like I had a chance to make a "fresh start" in a much more "normal" social environment.
I won't address *all* of those points of yours one by one, but I can comment on a number of them selected at random to try to illustrate my point.
1. Thoughts of suicide? Yes, I spent most of my first couple years of high-school thinking about "just ending it all" practically every day. I was extremely unhappy and depressed, yet most people probably never had a clue I really felt THAT bad. Most of them were either too busy just having fun at my expense (Hey guys, let's steal his shoes again and run off with them so he goes bezerk trying to get 'em back!
2. Codependent? I suppose, but not *extremely* so. I lived at my parents' house a lot longer than some people I knew, but by the time I was 21, I did move out. Screwed up with my first apartment and roommate due to not finding a decent job to pay my share of the bills, and had to go back to mom and dad for another stint... But I finally did buy a house and move out on my own. I guess this was partially the "fear of the unknown" thing plus a bit of laziness, but I didn't have parents that were pushing for me to leave either. In fact, my folks still cried the day I moved out - and called all the time wanting me to come back to help them with any number of misc. things they'd come up with.
3. Social interaction? I definitely had problems in this area. To this day, keeping eye contact with someone while talking to them is really difficult for me and always feels very uncomfortable. I've learned to force myself to do it in situations where I know it's expected of me (job interviews and such) but I'm very bad about doing it with someone I care about (a lover, a good friend, etc.) because I'm comfortable with them and don't feel the need to force myself to do it anymore around people who have already fully accepted me as a friend. I used to be very shy around people too, and I can't imagine ever just striking up conversations with strangers at a dance club or bar, to this day. But I'm very talkative when I'm in a small group and can chat one-on-one with people about anything of interest.
4. Hyper-focusing. This is one of those areas where my "disorder" was surely an advantage, work or project-wise. I used to be able to absolutely absorb myself into a project - like writing and working on an early BBS system I put together. I made it into one of the most popular ones in town (and greatly expanded my social circle in the process) - but I was walking around in classes with the greenbar paper printouts of my code and editing things with a pencil during school whenever I could get away with it. It was an obsession, simply because it really interested me. Nowdays, I don't even get the opportunity to get myself into that "mode" because all the responsibilities of having a kid to take care of, a house to take care of, bills to pay, my own business to build up, etc. etc. removes that option.
Sorry, but how is it his fault that your ISP can't handle the amount of data that its customers are trying to access? I'm trying not to have an "IGMSFY" attitude, but honestly, I don't see the logic in your statement.
"In the case of BT's creator, it seems to me like the guy is following the same path I did - and I'd predict his days of intensely focused, marathon coding sessions are nearly over. (He got married, etc.)"
Marathon coding sessions are not a symptom of Asperger's. If that were the case you'd hear a lot more people whining about being afflicted with this condition.
If anything, Coen is a hypochondriac, because let's face facts, anyone who can get married, have a kid, go out and meet some bigshot CEO for drinks and actually make a positive impression, and who can actually go out and do something big with his little project, is someone with "all the right stuff", and not Asperger's.
Now, if his sob story included things like the inability to speak coherently in the presence of a woman or an audience focused on him, an inability to deal with people one on one without offending them with unintentionally offending gestures, or just not impressing them in the slightest, then I might have a bit of sympathy.
Christ, the more I think about it the more it pisses me off, here's a successful guy in pretty much every way and he goes and whines to the world about how sick he his and how much of a hero people should consider him for battling his horrible ailment. Makes me sick.