What's the Alternative To "Indie Hacker" vs "Startup Founder" in Tech?

There seem to be two currents in tech startups. One we might call the maker ethos. The other we might call the finance ethos.

The cliché is that these are best described as the "indie hacker" vs. the "startup founder".

The indie hacker wants to build useful and beautiful things. The act of building may be an end in itself. The indie hacker is a craftsperson first and foremost. Money is merely a positive side-effect. "Can this thing make just enough money that I can keep making?" There is no focus on scale. In fact, scale might be the enemy because scale may mean less freedom, more meetings, and therefore less making.

The startup founder focuses on solving business problems as quickly and aggressively as possible. They want growth and to reach enormous scale so the business can be acquired. Financial runway and signs of growth/managing investor perceptions comes first. Pushing the team to execute quickly comes second. Quality and attention to craft come somewhere far down this list.

In its rawest form, the startup founder ethos believes that worrying about technical debt and test coverage is a waste of time. Setting goals for disciplined execution, reaching profitability, and even merely telling the truth are old fashioned ideas for beta-male dweebs, not masters-of-the-universe.

I'm turned off by the "indie hacker". It can too often seem like the refuge of a self-righteous artist or where a good programmer goes to avoid learning business skills. The dislike for sales and marketing seems silly.

But I've also never felt comfortable with the aggressive short-term thinking and "reality distortion fields" that define the typical venture backed startup.

I want to build products with a broad reach — of true usefulness to large numbers of people — and I also believe that quality and craft matters. Can't you believe that test coverage is part of solving customer problems like a good entrepreneur since a broken solution is no solution at all?

I don't like this indie hacker vs. startup founder divide. Both visions seem wrong to me. "Indie hacker" vs "startup founder" get all the glory and media coverage, but there must be a third way.

What would such a tech identity look like?

Perhaps it already existed. The Millennial (and now Gen-Z) tech worker has endured many years of hyped-up tech journalism and low interest rates fueling investment. Maybe this has obscured another way.

Consider this:

We could embody the hacker/maker ethos in Steve Wozniak and the Unix geeks of Bell Labs. And we could embody the startup founder ethos by party-crashers like Travis Kalanick of Uber and (if you're feeling especially cynical) Adam Neumann of WeWork.

But where would we put Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard of HP? What about Andy Grove of Intel?

To me, these founders and their companies represent a golden age in technology. There is no doubt that these founders valued quality work. Semiconducters don't allow much room for sloppiness.

These men were makers with long-term perspectives. And yet they were also hard-nosed business operators who focused on execution and the bottom line. "Bill and Dave" defined a generation of flat-hierarchy orgs and Grove invented OKRs! And they achieved massive scale.

Sadly, HP (founded 1938) and Intel (founded 1968) just aren't that sexy anymore. It's hard to imagine lots of young software entrepreneurs in 2020 idolizing Andy Grove.

What are some newer companies that embody this Bill & Dave/Andy Grove maker-founder ethos? Possibly the startups Superhuman or Figma represent this third way. I'm not sure.

There are surely many lesser-known companies that have this ethos. Why don't we hear more about them? They probably raise reasonable investments on strong terms, so they don't get written about in the press. They may achieve profitability rather than "hypergrowth", so they don't get invited to speak at conferences. They may work on mundane but useful problems, so they're household names only to their customers.

How can we elevate the cultural status of this type of maker-founder and their companies?

P.S. Some people have shared the DHH / Basecamp view in response to this article. But it isn't as simple as rejecting investment. HP started with $538 as their seed capital, but Intel started with $2.5 million. The anti-investment mentality doesn't make sense -- investment is a useful tool like any other.