Power of the Alpha Geek

One interesting theme that has surfaced on a number of occasions at the O'Reilly Etech conference is the idea that the best way to find a piece of information is to follow the expert. This is no great revelation in some respects but how you put it to use can be. For example, in his talk called O'Reilly Radar, Tim O'Reilly described one way in which he stays on top of technology trends. Tim explained that he has a group of "alpha geeks" who he follows closely to see what things they find interesting. These alpha geeks tend to be bleeding edge indicators of the direction of future trends in computing.

Tim's description of leveraging the alpha geeks reminded me a bit of Cory Doctorow's VC pitch for OpenCola circa 2000. Cory explained that he was a collector of Disneyland Memorabilia and spent immense amounts of time on Ebay scouring for interesting stuff. When it ultimately became too large of a task to do by hand, he wrote a script to look through Ebay on his behalf. But even that became too large a task, churning hours worth of processing time to get through all the Ebay Disney postings. What Cory observed, however, was that when he did find an interesting piece of memorabilia for which he was willing to bid, he was almost always bidding against the same group of people. So he came to the realization that the best way to find the interesting stuff wasn't to scour Ebay himself (or using a bot) but rather to keep track of what auctions the "Disneyland memorabilia alpha geeks" were bidding on and look only at those things.

Similarly, In his talk about blogging this afternoon, journalist Dan Gillmor engaged in a conversation with a conference attendee. The attendee, in discussing the proliferation of technical content on the web, pointed to information about clinical trials underway and how powerful this raw data is. When Gillmor suggested that raw data about clinical trials was out of his technical grasp, the attendee said something to the effect of "you'd be surprised what you can learn and understand when you are sufficiently motivated." Gillmor thought about this for a second then said that when he was sufficiently motivated to get the answer to a medical question he called his brother-in-law -- who is a doctor -- and if his brother-in-law didn't know the answer (and he usually didn't) he'd know someone who did. Gillmor's brother-in-law was is own personal "medical alpha geek."

This idea of the alpha geek as a leading indicator is an interesting one and certainly one that many of us in the venture industry leverage. Smart VCs know better than to think that they are the alpha geeks -- they turn to others who live and breath a particular technology to help them reasonably assess potential developments in that field. VCs also look to alpha geeks to introduce them to interesting new companies in that individual's area of expertise. So if you're starting a company and want a fast track to funding, one of the most highly leveraged things you can do is get endorsed by the leading alpha geek in your field.

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