They turned into 800-pound gorillas.
"More tech workers subvert unfit geek stereotype" by Callum Borchers | Globe Staff, November 12, 2013
Picture a technology whiz kid who starts an Internet marketing company in his college dorm room and becomes an overnight millionaire. He’s brilliant, but probably has an unhealthy pallor, sloppy looks, and a body misshaped by a diet of pizza and Red Bull.
Andrew Bachman looks nothing like that, subverting the stereotype of geek entrepreneurs as 90-pound weaklings or slovenly misfits.
“They’re totally taking the ‘Star Trek’ techie type of thing into the health and fitness space,” Bachman said.
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In the world of technology start-ups, it’s always crunch time, and the traits that enable athletes to thrive under pressure are the same characteristics that make successful entrepreneurs. Athletic and business pursuits both require drive and discipline, an ability to endure the long grind that typically precedes a payoff, and a competitive streak to beat out rivals.
Agenda-pushing analogies all over the place!
“Athletes by their nature are competitive, and in the technology start-up space there’s a ton of competition,” said Noah Gordon, a former college baseball player who runs a start-up that is developing a mobile app for car diagnostics in Boston.
“We thrive in that type of environment. We’ve been playing on sports fields our entire lives, and now we’re just considering the field to be a different type of field — the field of play right now is in business.”
The assimilation of people such as Gordon is making the technology community everywhere more diverse. And because technology itself has become more accessible and easier to use, developers don’t have to be a traditional engineering type to invent new products that reflect their varied interests.
So you have recreational marathoner Jason Jacobs cofounding Boston’s RunKeeper, a popular mobile app that logs workouts, and former Marine Yinon Weiss starting RallyPoint, a professional networking website for military personnel, based in Boston.
I'm not sensing a whole lot of diversity here.
“As more people have become computer literate, there is less of a barrier to becoming someone who can create technology,” said Aquil Abdullah, an engineer at the Boston big data start-up CargoMetrics and an Olympic rower in 2004....
I suppose I stand corrected?
The Globe also speaks with a Hannah Connealy and Justin Mendelson, and hacking is such fun!??!
The technology community is also remarkably social, making it easier for outsiders to join up, be welcomed, and stay hooked. On any given day in Greater Boston, there are multiple “meetups” — gatherings where ambitious entrepreneurs mingle with one another and with industry veterans and potential investors....
Investors such as MIT and the CIA!?
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