Venture capitalists are often contemplating the most intriguing questions in the technology community, and this post from Paul Graham is a wonderful essay speculating on how programmers react to their environment.

Graham is a VC involved with Y Combinator (not to be confused with Yahoo’s startup division). Y Combinator is a very interesting early funding structure for new companies that combines a modest level of financial support with a fairly good dose of team building and advice from experts. The financial support is usually $5000 + 5000 x the number of founders involved, so a 3 person startup would only get about $20,000 cash. Y combinator gets on average 6% equity for this contribution plus all the help they give the startup.

Graham’s speculation is that computer programmers react very differently depending on their surroundings and circumstances of employments. He notes how different “big company” programmers seem to act from the startup folks with whom he is more familiar. Most interesting is his speculation that large companies have become too large to optimize the human element. In a sense he’s suggesting that programmers are probably at their best “in the wild” running small startups than “domesticated” in large corporate structures.

I think he may be on to something here in that most of human evolution happened in close knit family and tribal environments where you would only need to navigate and negotiate with a few dozen - or at most perhaps a few hundred - other people.

Only recently, in the broad terms of evolutionary history, have humans interacting as tiny parts of massive organizational structures. One can reasonably argue that our brains and thinking are more likely optimized to work within the smaller structures we encountered through most of our evolutionary history than the large structures we now find in business and society at large.

If Graham is right then many big companies may have IT organized in ways that are out of synch with the best use of our natural tendencies, and should even consider breaking up into more autonomous parts where individuals are given more power, more involvement, and more of a stake in the outcome to encourage innovation and performance.