Also, back in the late 90s defcon days, w00w00, CdC, New Hack City, each had an entrepreneurial spirit. w00w00 perhaps more than most. I remember when CdC launched BackOriface, it was just as much a startup launch as anything.
Note: I don't claim to be a member of any.
We were all of us entrepreneurial, but being in w00w00 didn't get any any support from, say, d0b.
I'll do you one better: #!r00t'ers started a bunch of companies together. Other than WhatsApp (WHICH I ADMIT BLOWS THE CURVE), were there a lot of multiple-w00-person companies?
"Gotta disagree with you on this one. Lots of folks in w00w00 worked together. In that sense, they did invest in each other (with time and effort, if not cash)." -- that's correct and a good way of putting it.
All is a strong word. I was more #hack, but also spent time in #!r00t and the two communities overlapped a bit (tim(al), etc). I was terribly non-entrepreneurial back then. I ported the original iss.c to SunOS and Solaris but distinctly remember telling kewpie that a business around this would never fly. This is one example (of a few quite notable ones) of why people should not take business advice from me.
All that aside, yeah, this smacks of mostly post-hoc fallacy to me as well.
"And surprise surprise, people who used one of the more technical communications medium back in the 90s end up being technical people when they grew up."
I think that's your actual point: Smart technical young people became smart technical adults, and the hindsight of whats app could have been any number of channels, just as many of the members were parts of many "crews" or channels. Unlike most channels though, as you point out, they met up in real life, generally in august in vegas. :-)
This doesn't mean that list or whatever caused the success. This is the same problem epidemiologists face when trying to explain cancer clusters.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
This reminds of the Indian IT scene. Where today's so called managers/execs/leaders were just lucky to be in the path of immense inertia in the 90's.
Most of them probably have no experience at all, some of them as little as working in testing projects for a few months. They just had to be promoted because companies were growing 100% year on year, and the only way to get new managers were to promote existing people. People with as little as an year of experience from college became senior managers.
Now we have these people come and repeatedly lecture us 'We are so awesome, they had to make us VP's without doing any work at all'.
That's true. The Internet's "Skull & Bones" of black hat, darkside hackers is l0ck.
Apparently their leader made a fortune preparing for the coming deflation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTTFuOEOhEE
We're discussing here a group of people who started their careers dead smack in the middle of the dot-com bubble, practically all of them in software/network security, a field that has stayed valuable since its inception. Of course they've done well for themselves.
This would be interesting if the denizens of #w00w00 had, say, invested in each other's companies. But as I understand it (I was a #!r00t person; our biggest win was ISSX) that's not at all what happened.
Sorry to sound pissy. I'm just hoping to forestall another goofy HN conspiracy theory; the idea that w00w00 is, like, the Internet's "Skull & Bones". No.
Also, I suspect the stories about w00w00 as a "hacking group" that broke into people's machines: total BS.