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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 can picture all the recorded media company execs getting together in small cabals, swapping stories on ways they'd like to kill Bram Cohen.
How can this company be worth 8.75 million
When Fortune magazine runs a story on the CEO.
The name BitTorrent is alone worth that. This is a name millions and millions of people know - it would take more than $8.75 million dollars to achieve that through advertising.
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
Asperger's lies on the Autism Spectrum. However, the Autism Spectrum is extraordinarily vast, ranging all the way from barely impaired to completely nonfunctional. Most geeks are probably somewhere on the spectrum, they just aren't severe enough to consider getting tested. Since this guy is self-diagnosed, it's impossible to tell where on the spectrum he is. Most Asperger's people have perfectly normal lives, and can learn to be great communicators with training.
In my Management class last semester, we had a few CEOs of local companies come in. One said he had always been extremely introverted and technical (Asperger's? Possibly), but had learned to overcome it to an extent. As long as he could have his required periods of downtime by himself, he could handle the day to day CEO duties, including the public and social aspects.
A person with Asperger's is not necessarily retarded, and in some ways can be profoundly gifted. In my mind, someone with the analytical frame of mind that most Asperger's people have is the perfect candidate for a CEO position, which is concerned mainly with long-term strategy.
I mean, after all, anybody can set up a Web site. How could a company possibly make money doing that??
Breakfast served all day!
Aspergers isn't an illness -- it's a neurodevelopmental disorder on the autism spectrum. It's also not "shortcomings" to be designed to do things differently than most people.
According to experts on autism Baron-Cohen, Atwood, and Wing, people identifying as being on the autism spectrum are accurate 99% of the time, because the internal characteristics are so striking. They can include severe sensory sensitivity, extreme motor clumsiness, weak or lacking depth perception, difficulty speaking (often with loss of speech under stress), extreme difficulty changing from one task to the other even if we want to, native use of different (autistic) body language that is incompatible with that of non-autistics, having multiple senses report one sense's information (like seeing colors for sounds)...
A LOT of stuff that comes nowhere near the neurotypical experience, and that we're aware is different long before we can name it.
Speaking as the moderator of three of the largest online discussion groups for adults on the spectrum, plus having been heavily involved in the community for four years now, I can pretty much verify their claim. Out of the many hundreds of people that have joined thinking that they're AS, I can only offhand think of one clearly that was obviously wrong, and two or three where I was uncertain.
Also, I can't imagine why anybody would *want* to claim they're one of us if they aren't. It doesn't get us out of anything that isn't obviously a meltdown-inducing problem (plus rarely even then), we're subject to constant criticism based on our differences or what we are... I'm proud to be autistic, but I hate the prejudice I encounter.