The Pay-It-Forward Culture

Open source fits "pay it forward" very well. I'm a little surprised that it wasn't mentioned.

As someone who has only been in the software development culture for about two years, I can firmly say that it truly has some incredibly helpful people. People are always eager to help others (I.e. Stackoverflow, Lean startup circle, etc) and interestingly enough, humility is more common than one would expect from a group of absolute geniuses.

'The goal of the club was: “Give to help others"'<p>Why don't we see more companies with goals like this? The "avoid the negative" mottos are the popular thing in Silicon Valley these day (e.g. Google's "Don't be evil" and Facebook's "Don't be lame"). It seems to me that avoiding evil or lameness does very little to help you avoid other bad things.<p>A corporate motto like "Pay it Forward" or "Excite the Customer" or "Be Entrepreneurs" or "Hack for Good" seems like one that would benefit a company and the ecosystem it operates in much more.

"They were the beginning of the Pay-It-Forward culture, the unspoken Valley culture that believes "I was helped when I started out and now it’s my turn to help others."<p>That's not how I interpret "pay it forward". I understood that to mean "I have done a good deed to you, now you do a good deed for someone else". <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_it_forward" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_it_forward</a><p>The examples given are about mentoring and cooperation. Different, but heart warming nonetheless.

I'm surprised there's no attempt to reconcile the notions of: secrecy, competitive advantages and the corporate prime directive (to profit), with information sharing like in the Semi Conductor Fab example.<p>I'm definitely not coming down on the other side of "pay-it-forward" and Steve seems to invoke the "rising tide lifts all boats" idea with the Finland dinner story, but surely there's a moral imperative not to spill the company beans.

In Michigan there are two things that I have observed that are done differently in Ann Arbor that have made it the states startup center:<p>1. Strong support for entrepreneurs by the University of Michigan<p>2. A pay it forward culture<p>I think any city that has both has a fighting chance.

I can't think of a better place that exemplifies this than Hacker Dojo in Mountain View.

I had no idea Fairchild was the grandfather of so many companies.