Fortune Takes a Look at Bram Cohen 200
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."
It's all about the community (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's all about the community (Score:5, Insightful)
Your first line should read - "It's all about the community - what Bram did was to unify the community into donating bandwidth & pornthrough BitTorrent...". He made it popular by offering pr0n. See he has some marketing skills in him. I think he is qualified to be CEO.
bittorrent as a business??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Worth (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Worth (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just the dollar value of how much capital investment the company has received. Obviously someone thinks the company has potential, just because you are not privy to their business plans doesn't mean that the plans are not feasible.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Worth (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Worth (Score:1, Insightful)
However, its also worth noting that virtually the same criticism was leveled against Google at one time. It wasn't until they developed a solid advertising model (ad-sense) that they became profitable, and worth much more than a few million in VC.
Just because its not obvious how to profit from bitorrent, doesn't make it impossible (although you make a good point -- its pretty damn unlikely). This AC thinks that it really depends on the userbase and what they'll put up with.
enough with the aspergers (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:Worth (Score:1, Insightful)
that's why the guy has investors and you don't. He has a plan, and people think that it's a great plan.
Re:Ummm (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Yeah - because when someone has ideals and vision and doesn't care about profits, they DEFINITELY wanna hook up with venture financing people. I hear those big money guys are all about dreams and couldn't give a fuck about profits.
Or the Web. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ummm (Score:2, Insightful)
Fortune = Barbara Walters of Businesss Mags (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:enough with the aspergers (Score:5, Insightful)
God it was stupid and pathetic the first time, and each successive mention just compounds the stupidity.
He wrote Bit Torrent, he didn't create the world in 6 days.
I wish him luck (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ummm (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's all about the community (Score:2, Insightful)
Hear that, Mr. Cohen? There's a better than even chance you're reading this, so here's my advice: ditch your app, rebadge a version of Azureus, and make that the "official" Bittorrent application.
you made a mistake when you said the word (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Ummm (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would they make the claim? Probably it gives them an "excuse". It's no longer "their fault" that they're clueless when talking to people.
Of course one post on Slashdot does not equate to seeking out and joining one of your groups. I have no doubt that your claim is true.
Re:Or the Web. (Score:3, Insightful)
When your big, bandwidth finds you. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I wish him luck (Score:2, Insightful)
yes, its oversimplification; but it seems like something that is possible.
dude.
Re:It's all about the community (Score:4, Insightful)
For years, most of us have been thinking "The more people downloading the file, the slower it goes for every user", and have been trying to solve this delima.
Bram looked at the problem and said, "What if... the more people downloading the file, the faster it went?" And then he coded it.
I understand the technology, but I'm still in awe of its seeming ability to just shrug off the confines of the known universe in order to solve the problem. It's like someone walking into Boeing and saying, "Hey, instead of building these planes to carry people... what if gravity pulled people upward?" and then proceeded to make it happen.
This is the programming revolution of the decade, mark my prophetic words - BitTorrent and subsequent derivative technologies will be the biggest thing to happen to information technology this decade. If it doesn't awe you, you're just too jaded.
~Will
Re:I hate to point out the obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
It uses gears to commute energies that are intrinsicaly present wherever the user is (provide they're metabollically prepared) to propel them forward at great speeds.
Given the combined utilty of this elegant technology and the Bays' extensive public transport system a car can be easily viewed as more of a liability in terms of cost and convienence when the factors of parking and gas prices ( ~ US $3.00 'round here) are factored. In my group of friends and aquaintances a good half, if not more, do not own cars. The brute force approach to transportaion (ie. internal combustion) seems to me a poor method for general use when the energies spent are overwhelmingly directed at transporting the system itself rather than it's passengers and payload. I was in Berlin last year where it is very common to see people using large hand carts to move heavy loads about. That is also a large cosmopolitan city where cars can be extremely inconvienent for everyday use. I'm no luddite, but the perception that combustion engines are a technical advancement over alternatives like sails on boats or gears on feet always seemed strange to me.
Re:short sighted (Score:3, Insightful)