Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, April 3

• Dyson Is the Apple of Appliances (and Just as Secretive): When Michael Aldred joined the British home electronics maker Dyson two decades ago, he had a simple goal: to quickly build a robotic vacuum cleaner. But Mr. Aldred and his team kept running into roadblocks. Their first attempt, unveiled in 2001, was too clunky for James Dyson, the company’s founder. The next prototype involved creating a computer vision system that would allow the machine to skirt independently around furniture; it took more than a decade to perfect. As smartphones became everyday tools, Dyson’s robotics team again had to rethink the vacuum cleaner, adding internet connectivity so the machine could send notifications — with a heat map of where it had cleaned — to a mobile device. After a nearly 20-year odyssey, the robot cleaner, priced at an eye-watering $1,000, finally hit stores worldwide last year. “At times, I really asked myself what I had signed up for,” Mr. Aldred said in an interview at Dyson’s rural headquarters near the border with Wales. “But James Dyson always told us to focus on the product. Everything else would follow.” Not many consumer electronics brands would spend almost two decades — and tens of millions of dollars — building a vacuum cleaner that retails for more than a top-of-the-line laptop. But combining an almost obsessive eye for design and engineering, the privately held Dyson has cornered the nonglamorous market of high-end vacuum cleaners, lights and hair dryers — and in the process bucked the technology truism that companies rarely make money in the difficult arena of hardware. Even as other hardware brands like Samsung, the smartwatch maker Fitbit and the camera designer GoPro have struggled with physical products because of low-priced copycats and thin profit margins, Dyson has shown an uncanny ability to mint money. Its latest robot cleaner, which is selling briskly, exemplifies that and puts Dyson in rarefied company alongside Apple as one of the few tech companies worldwide to consistently profit from consumer gadgets.

• Why do developers who could work anywhere flock to the world’s most expensive cities? I believe there’s a more fundamental economic divide opening than the one between haves and have-nots. I think we are witnessing a growing rift between the world’s Extremistan cities, in which truly extraordinary things can be achieved, and its Mediocristan towns, in which you van work and make money and be happy but never achieve greatness. (Labels stolen from the great Nassim Taleb) The arts have long had Extremistan cities. That’s why aspiring writers move to New York City, and even directors and actors who found international success are still drawn to L.A. like moths to a klieg light. Now it is true of tech too. Even if you don’t even want to try to (help) build something extraordinary – and the startup myth is so powerful today that it’s a very rare engineer indeed who hasn’t at least dreamed about it – the prospect of being where great things happen is intoxicatingly enticing. But the interesting thing about this is that it could, in theory, change; because — as of quite recently — distributed, decentralized teams can, in fact, achieve extraordinary things. The cards are arguably stacked against them, because VCs tend to be quite myopic. But no law dictates that unicorns may only be born in California, and a handful of other secondary territories; and it seems likely that, for better or worse, Extremistan is spreading. It would be pleasantly paradoxical if that expansion ultimately leads to lower rents in the Mission.

• Jerks and the Start-Ups They Ruin: The tech industry has a problem with “bro culture.” People have been complaining about it for years. Yet nobody has done much to fix it. That may finally change, if the people in charge of Silicon Valley — venture capitalists, who control the money — start to realize that the real problem with tech bros is not just that they’re boorish jerks. It’s that they’re boorish jerks who don’t know how to run companies. Look at Uber, the ride-hailing start-up. It’s the biggest tech unicorn in the world, with a valuation of $69 billion. Not long ago Uber seemed invincible. Now it’s in free fall, and top executives have fled. The company’s woes spring entirely from its toxic bro culture, created by its chief executive, Travis Kalanick. Bro cos. become corporate frat houses, where employees are chosen like pledges, based on “culture fit.” Women get hired, but they rarely get promoted and sometimes complain of being harassed. Minorities and older workers are excluded. Bro culture also values speedy growth over sustainable profits, and encourages cutting corners, ignoring regulations and doing whatever it takes to win. Sometimes it works. But often the whole thing just flames out. The bros blow through the money and find they have no viable business. For example: Quirky, founded in 2009 by the 20-something Ben Kaufman. It raised $185 million to build a “social product development platform” that sold kooky gadgets, but filed for bankruptcy basically because the “brash” and “unorthodox” chief executive had no business being a chief executive. One indication that Mr. Kaufman is a bro? Well, the first reference he lists on his LinkedIn page is: “He’s a dick … but hilarious.”