Tech Schlubs

My attention was directed to this piece on the New York Times site (go read it now, while you can still do it for free) about the sartorial habits of tech entrepreneurs. Disturbing, to say the least. We all know that engineers and programmers and developers generally don't care much about how they look (I worked with a group of guys who proved this every day), but the implication of this article is that Silicon Valley types seem to think that T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers are how they need to dress in order to capture venture capital funding.

Allow me to quote directly from the article: “It seems that if you dress up too much, you run the risk of not being taken seriously,” said Erica Zidel, a Seattle-based Web entrepreneur who attended Harvard around the same time as Mr. Zuckerberg. “There is an unspoken rule in entrepreneurial culture that your look should be laid back.”

That notion is really disturbing. Of course I believe that what a person is capable of is more important than how that person dresses, but business attire represents a sense of respect for the process. I don't like the idea that someone might view a person dressed in a suit and grown-up dress shoes as trying too hard. I guess this is one more reason I'm not a tech entrepreneur.

(This also begs the question: what do the VC's wear?)

Nonetheless, I hope that there are entrepreneurs who are willing to challenge this mindset and dress well because they like to dress well.