Wealth & Money Quote by John Patrick

The line skewers a familiar corporate mistake: mistaking transferable competence for cultural fluency. Patrick points at the dotcom era’s hiring spree, when startups raided “serious” companies for people with polished resumes in finance, marketing, and distribution, then acted surprised when those hires didn’t thrive online. The phrasing does the real work. “Quite experienced” flatters traditional expertise, but the pivot - “but not necessarily” - is a dry playwright’s knife twist, exposing how experience can become a liability when it hardens into habit.

“Web culture” isn’t just tech skills; it’s a whole operating system of assumptions: speed over certainty, iteration over hierarchy, user behavior over boardroom theory. Patrick’s subtext is that the early internet wasn’t simply a new channel for old business. It demanded different instincts about authenticity, community, and experimentation, and it punished people trained to manage risk by smoothing out the very volatility that made the web powerful.

The context is the late-1990s/early-2000s dotcom boom, when companies scaled headcount faster than they built judgment. His intent isn’t anti-expertise; it’s anti-copy-paste. He’s warning that importing the “grown-ups” from legacy firms can smuggle in legacy reflexes: polished campaigns instead of conversations, distribution plans instead of network effects, control systems instead of learning loops. It reads like a postmortem on a generation of startups that wanted the internet’s upside without submitting to its ethos.