Do you find the story of Linus Torvalds’ upbringing and creation of Linux inspiring, interesting, or irrelevant? How does his story compare to other computing industry titans such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg? What do you wish your story to be?
Linus Background
Linus became a hacker because his childhood was set up like a lab. Family of journalists and academics, so arguing about ideas was normal. Grandfather who needed a computer for statistics work, so a kid got hands on a machine years before most people. Cheap computer mags full of code you had to retype by hand, which meant you stared at every line long enough to wonder what would happen if you changed it. From there it is a short jump to “what if I wrote all of this myself.”
The other hack was social. Being part of a linguistic minority in Finland is a quiet way of being an outsider. You are in the country, but slightly adjacent to the mainstream. That outsider stance is very compatible with free software culture. You do not automatically accept the default. You write your own.
When he finally surfaced on comp.os.minix in August 1991, the tone is almost funny in hindsight. He describes Linux as a “free operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu)” and asks people what they like or hate in MINIX. No grand business plan, no deck, no TAM slide. Just: I built this thing because I wanted it to exist, does anyone else care.
How serious was he?
Psychologically, it was “just for fun” and he literally titled his memoir that. Strategically, it was more serious than he admitted. He chose a monolithic kernel design because he cared about performance and direct control. He engaged Tanenbaum in the famous microkernel vs monolithic debate, which you do not do if you are treating it as a toy. He released early and often, invited patches, and let the best ideas win, which turned into a ruthless but effective development model that scaled to thousands of contributors.
At the beginning he worked alone in the literal coding sense, but from almost day one Linux was a multiplayer game. People ported Bash and GCC, wrote drivers, built installers, wired in X11. Linus’s real long term job was to be the deterministic core, the person who says “yes, this patch is in” and “no, this breaks the model.”
So the origin story is tiny: a bored, opinionated student and a 386 box. The outcome is massive: most of the servers on earth, Android, ChromeOS, half the internet.
Compared to Linus, the other tech titans feel like different archetypes. Same industry, very different stories and very different collateral damage.
Zuckerberg first. His legacy, for me, is defined by betrayal. Eduardo Saverin did the early work, wrote the first checks, and trusted a friend. Then came the dilution, the lawsuits, the settlement, the NDA. You can dress that up as “just business,” but at a human level it is unforgivable. Layer on top a company that helped turn personal data into a political weapon and optimized society for outrage, and it stops being “imperfect founder” and starts looking like harmful infrastructure.
Bill Gates lands differently. Larry Ellison’s line about Gates has always felt right to me: there are plenty of people smarter than Bill, very few with his focus and endurance. I grew up inside the Microsoft universe. Windows on every school machine. Office as the default language of homework and work. That was my first mental model of software. Later I moved myself onto Arch Linux, piece by piece, and discovered what happens when the machine stops being a sealed appliance and starts being something you can actually understand and modify. That shift from “consumer of software” to “tinkerer of systems” feels like a small thing on paper, but it completely rewired how I think.
Steve Jobs sits in a third bucket. The myth is “visionary in a garage,” but the reality is more interesting. Don Valentine at Sequoia writes the early Apple check, asks the hard market questions, and acts as the sharp board member who forces clarity. Michael Moritz shows up first as a journalist telling Apple’s story in The Little Kingdom, then later as an investor and chronicler of multiple generations of founders. Mike Markkula quietly stabilizes the company and gives it operating spine. Wozniak is the engineer who actually builds the magic. Jobs is the center of gravity, but Apple was never one man. It was a network of very specific people who each carried part of the load.
The people I keep coming back to are the quiet ones who shaped entire waves of technology from the background. Don Valentine as the person who backed Apple, Atari, Oracle, Cisco and a long list of others, and who kept asking “what problem are you solving” in a way that cut through founder mythology. Michael Moritz as the writer-turned-investor who understood that telling a company’s story well is not decoration, it is part of how capital, talent, and attention get allocated. Andy Grove as the operator who took Intel through strategic inflection points and then wrote the manual on paranoia, discipline, and survival.Paul Graham as the essayist who explained hackers to the world and made generations of young founders believe that building real things is both allowed and required. These are the silent role models. They did not just build single companies. They changed how people think about building, full stop.
And then there is Linus, sitting off to the side like a different species entirely. No big stagecraft, no brand of personal enlightenment, no foundation with his name on it. Just the ultimate hacker. A student who did not like the Unix options in front of him, wrote his own kernel for a 386, put it under a license that let everyone else pile in, and accidentally created the thing most of modern computing now stands on. He is not trying to curate a public persona. He just cares about correctness, collaboration, and code that survives reality.
The story I want
If you line all of them up, the gravity that pulls me strongest is still Linus. I am more founder than he ever wanted to be. I care about customers, markets, capital, all the unromantic parts of company building. But the instinct is similar. I care about plumbing. I care about tools. I care about whether the system holds when you lean on it.
What itch do I have right now
The one that never shuts up in my head is about data. Not “big data” in the buzzword sense. Very boring, very specific data.
The world is full of little fragments that look like: source plus tidbit. Article plus claim. Paper plus conclusion. Tweet plus hot take. Most systems care about the tidbit. I care much more about the source, the lineage, and the collision of tidbits from different places. Which sources agree. Which ones disagree. Where the truth probably lives once you stack them.
So the fun project in my head is an information engine that treats sources as first class objects and tidbits as edges between them. Something that lets you pull answers out of the mess faster, but with receipts and comparison baked in. Less “I googled it” and more “here are the arguments, the people making them, and how reality has treated those people in the past.”
Underneath all of that is a very simple itch: I want to write better code. Not as an aesthetic hobby, but as a way to move through complex systems with actual competence. I want to be able to drop into a messy codebase, reason from first principles, and leave it cleaner than I found it. That is where I see myself long term. Somewhere between Jobs and Linus, between Grove’s paranoia and Graham’s hacker romanticism, using what they built and what they taught to chase what is actually true and then turn it into working systems.
Do I find Linus’s story inspiring?
Yes, but not in the poster-on-the-wall way. What I like about it is how small it looks at the moment of creation. A kid, a frustrating OS, some borrowed Unix ideas, and an email saying “this is just a hobby.” No permission. No big plan. Just very high standards and a willingness to let the work speak.
Compared to Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg, his story feels clean. There is ego and sharp elbows in the email archives, absolutely, but the core of it is contribution and collaboration. It is much closer to the idealized hacker ethos I grew up reading about than to the corporate drama of diluted cofounders and surveillance capitalism.
The story I want is somewhere in that neighborhood. Not “the next Linus,” or “the next Steve Jobs,” nothing that cringe.
More like: the slightly obsessive founder who helped build an information stack where it is easier to find the truth than the noise, and who brought a group of strong weird people along for the ride.