Frogs in a pond.  You might call San Francisco Bay a pond.  Like the goofy frogs in this piece, Silicon Valley companies and their venture capitalist overlords may be the object of scorn or ridicule but there's a lot to learn by seeing what's behind their ribbits and croaks.

If you are a techie, it is tempting to find a perch above the pond and pour bile upon the dot com excesses, vulture capitalists and the well-worn tales of greed, dishonesty, hubris and fat self-congratulations that characterize Silicon Valley.  In disgust, you might turn away and look towards the East Coast to hear Joel Spolsky chirp from his perch in New York City, about growing organically, being a technologist and hiring smart people.  Or, you could look to the Midwest and coo sympathetically as Eric Sink lays out his perspective on a perfectly logical business world with special attention paid to microISVs.  These Silicon Valley outsiders are admirable, true, but they are admirable techies selling the dream of small-time entrepreneurship to other techies.  If you only listen to outsiders and never sift through the muck of Silicon Valley yourself, you can't really understand the software industry and, probably, won't be capable of building anything more than a dreamy software boutique.

At a gut level, few techies understand the Silicon Valley.  Most of us are too logical and insensitive to "get it" without study.  We're innocents.  That's because Silicon Valley logic isn't techie logic; it's business logic.  Business logic is mushy: it's rules-of-thumb, psychology, pragmatism and uncertainty.  To learn about business in the Silicon Valley is not fashion a gleaming marble statue that shows you how you wished the business world worked or, for that matter, how much more logically and efficiently it could work.  Learning about the Silicon Valley is to dissect a hundred billion dollar industry.  It is to see how global fortunes and a global industry are sustained from a tangle of idealism, arrogance, blind loyalty, stupidity, intelligence, laziness, avarice, unfairness, corruption, waste and pragmatism.  It isn't a polished, perfect worldview.  It isn't marble; it's mud.

But that mud has its own upside-down logic.

For example, most software companies, whether based in Silicon Valley or not, have messy code.  Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, Intuit and whomever else you might name inevitably have more indecipherable, spaghettized, obsolete code than they have well-commented, modern, Spolsky-esque code.  Why?  Languages and algorithms that were state-of-the-art yesterday are obsolete and messy today.  To keep code "good", it takes sustained effort and attention which is hard, especially when you're a big, sprawling company.  And, well, that's a lot of work and not work that's easy to brag about, either.  Not to mention that the amount of code grows far faster than the number of employees.  So, while techies can often rattle off five or more hard-nosed business reasons why messy code costs lots and lots of money, the practical reality is this: any work that is easy to blow off is blown off.

This may not be an amazing revelation in itself but it does show how a techie can overthink.  Money is wasted in Silicon Valley, lots of it, and complicated but clean theories that ignore waste and stupidity prevent you from seeing how the machine really works inside.

My objective here is, of course, not to make you to swallow a new, polished worldview based on "business logic" to replace your current worldview.  But, instead, I encourage to heap a little less abuse on Silicon Valley (at least initially) and look a little harder to see why the people here are the way they are.  All too often, the answer is: they don't know any better.  Once you see why they act the way they do, see if you can learn a lesson or find a way to do it better.

Silicon Valley can be understood.  It also has weaknesses, weaknesses that self-funded software companies can exploit but rarely do.  Weaknesses where you can dive in and give them a black eye.

In future articles, I'll present deeper views into specific areas of the Silicon Valley.  I'll also point out where self-funded software companies can learn a thing or two.