Thoughts on "When the Nerds Go Marching In"

The stakes are high. The egos large. The talent arguably the best. The timeline absurd.

Within this bubble, Alexis Madrigal's piece in The Atlantic offers us robust and insightful analysis not just about how one campaign (Obama 2012) embraced and integrated technology and technologists, but how tech roles and culture affect the business of creativity, ideas and engagement.

"The strange truth is that campaigns have long been low-technologist, if not low-technology, affairs. Think of them as a weird kind of niche startup and you can see why. You have very little time, maybe a year, really. You can't afford to pay very much. The job security, by design, is nonexistent. And even though you need to build a massive 'customer' base and develop the infrastructure to get money and votes from them, no one gets to exit and make a bunch of money. So, campaign tech has been dominated by people who care about the politics of the thing, not the technology of the thing."

This is an eyes-wide open view into the reality of making ideas now and in the future. And it's just as applicable to business as politics, or the arts.

To scale ideas and succeed, our founding teams must now include technology and technologists. These roles and their associated culture must be welcomed inside the process, not adjacent to or merely in service of ideas. In fact, it is the incorporation of different perspective (e.g. tech versus digital) and different approaches to idea solving that create competitive advantage.