About this site

Not a Tech Bro is a newsletter published by me, Mike Olson. I talk about social and economic issues at a time when MAGA challenges many of the socially liberal policies that characterized the tech industry during my career.

I came to California in 1979 as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. I eventually earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the institution. I dropped out of the PhD program in EECS to join a startup company commercializing the research we had been doing on database technology.

I started in a hands-on programming role and then took on a series of more customer-facing jobs, helping our sales team position and sell the product. I moved into engineering management, then into leadership roles in marketing and sales, before being named CEO of my company in the early 2000s. I co-founded a tech startup named Cloudera in 2008 and served as CEO there for five years before moving to chief strategy officer.

I retired from Cloudera in 2019 and have no operating role anywhere now. My lack of entanglements makes it easier for me to speak frankly than many of my former peers in industry.

Not a Tech Bro is where I do that.

The cover photo

I chose this photograph for the cover of the blog:

An old and spotted daguerrotype photograph of a young man, right hand tucked into the lapel of his jacket. He is looking slightly right and has tousled hair.
Daguerrotype self-portrait of Robert Cornelius

The shot is widely believed to be the first self-portrait photograph ever taken. It was made of (and by!) Robert Cornelius, an early innovator in photography. The photo itself is in the public domain and may be freely reproduced.

I imagine Cornelius to have been a curious guy who got interested in the new science of photography, and who experimented with the chemicals and equipment to see what he could do. That's kind of how I was about computers! I identify with him, or at least with the person I imagine him to have been.

I am pretty sure that Robert Cornelius was not a tech bro.

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