Is it hard to be motivated when you know that low risk investments could keep you comfortable? Though I'm sure the pleasure of a fancy car wears off, what about a beautiful home or travel etc? Is there life long satisfaction from the achievement (ie not the money but the job well done)?
Getting rich can be a danger to people who aren't very driven. But you don't have to worry about that problem if you're starting a startup. If you're not driven, it's unlikely your startup will make you rich.
Didn't you write two Lisp books and start Viaweb before you got rich? Would you say you and your co-founders were just as motivated afterward?
As I understand it, the Zenter people darn near killed themselves leading up to the Google acquisition. Realistically, I wouldn't see them continuing at that breakneck pace afterward.
After the Apple II disk drive, Woz took it easy -- really easy. He doesn't even walk anymore, he Segways!
Taking it easy seems to be the norm. The exceptions to this get mega-rich, like Jobs and Gates. I used to wonder why Gates didn't just take his billions and retire somewhere; reading a biography makes it clear that his life IS Microsoft, including his social circle. It's his whole identity; it's not a job. He didn't do it so he could get rich and do something else; he did it because it's the thing he wanted to do the most anyway! And of course Jobs has always been on a transcendental mission to change humanity via consumer technology.
The Zenters worked super hard more because they had a deadline than because they had no money. I'm just as frazzled before deadlines. I worked 16 hour days for about a month straight to get Hackers & Painters in by the deadline.
That is interesting, because when I lived in Cambridge I worked in a circle of serious lisp/hacker nerds who busted ass to get rich, and then promply retired from doing anything once they cashed out. They are now exactly like what the guy mentions in the first post; they chill on the sofa and read stuff on the internet. Maybe the Harvard grad school hacker scene had a different personality type than the one at MIT.
The only issue I see is that YC seems to be entirely focused on success in the Web 2.0 and software arenas. PARC had a much broader remit.
It appears to me that nobody is doing blue sky research in the computing field. Rather, it has all become a case of building a better mouse trap.
You don't hang around the Haskell crowd very much. ;-)
Seriously, blue-sky research is alive and well in the computing field. You just don't hear about it much because blue-sky research, by definition, is useless. And usually highly technical as well. Techcrunch gets far more readers by covering the latest Reddit clone than Lambda: The Ultimate gets by covering the latest advances in dependent typing.
But nothing on there has ever come across as radical more of an evolution and sometimes it's just plain ego stroking.
As for Haskell, it's in danger of losing it's chance for wide spread acceptance. The further they take it away from being a good language for multi-processor machines the further away it is from being useful.
With the death of Von Neumann in sight, at last, Haskell is galloping away from it's biggest selling point to the average pgmr. I'm starting to think Erlang might become a mainstream language instead of Haskell. Would sort of prove the need for a language to have a single designer.
The sort of things I'd hoped to see in research are :- Genetic design of machines with 1000+ simple cpus with multi level communication and storage. Proof that the brain works on a quantum level. Cyc tied into machine learning so that it auto updates it's rules. Rules for understanding complexity from simple components.
Basically, I want to see the big problems that are just within grasp tackled.
Oddly enough, YC itself is an example. We may make money eventually, but our main motive for doing it was that it was a cool idea.