tech-company, software, teamThis question really bugs me, so I have to ask it.
The tech community, especially in the past few years, has become quite worthy of satire. With shows like Silicon Valley, there has been no shortage of all the hype the tech community brings to the startup community.
Having gone to school for four years, I saw an amazing amount of software being built by people who thought they wanted to do startups.
The reality is, these programmers had very unique traits which I observed:
What I’ve drawn from all of this, is that people are wasting so much time writing bad code. I don’t mean erroneous, sloppy, or even inefficient code. I mean that people are spending so much time writing code that nobody will ever use - and often these people think that their app is the next Zuckerbergian release.
I just rarely see tech people get anything done that people use, except the one out of a million billion dollar breakthroughs.
Some parallel questions, to reduce on any sort of opinionated response:
Does specialization fall apart in a company when there is a lack of relationship between different business verticals (software, marketing, etc.)? I just don’t get why the world is building so many inapplicable (but often highly skilled) programmers who have no idea how to write code that is economical.
Clarifications
I’d say that it depends on the size of the startup. If the founder is going solo, a certain amount of breadth is essential to get a business going at all. On the other hand, if the company has a handful of people, the roles can be a little more specialized.
One well-known example I can think of is the Steve Jobs/Wozniak combo in the founding of Apple. Wozniak tended more toward the highly-skilled/specialized category, while Jobs had the vision and breadth to turn it into an actual company. I don’t think either one on their own could have created the success that they had together.
I think that the problem you’re alluding to is caused because it’s hard to get both sets of skills together in the early stages of a company. A lot of founders overestimate their own abilities, either on the technical or the business side, and that’s where you see companies going off the rails. Either you get the brilliant technical mind that creates some widget that nobody actually has a practical use for, or you get the business side that over-promises and under-delivers.
Edit See also: the Dunning-Kruger effect. People unskilled in an area tend to grossly overestimate their own ability in that area. Furthermore, these people fail to recognize actual skill in other people. In the case of startups, this distorted perception could easily keep founders from seeking the help they need to create a successful business.
Variables to consider:
If selling to other people (B2B, B2C), the founding team needs to have business/marketing sense. You can build a crap widget and sell it to the sky but you don’t want to build a super product and keep it in your basement. Basically the founder(s) need to know how to market and sell. If they don’t know, they should figure out fast.
If building an app that you are going to directly profit from, say forex application, then sales/marketing doesn’t matter. Only your maths, coding & cunning matter.
If selling to others & you’re the sole founder, remember, being able to market and sell is wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more important than to build a cool widget that you’re mates admire ;) So, yes, tech founder must be well rounded.
If you’re not the sole founder, then you can afford to have a techie founder (aka a Wozniak), while the others can be more of the sales/marketing types.
Bottom line: Do you need to sell? Must have sales ability on board.
Interesting question. I’m starting to think it’s time for a [tag:feature-request] for a button that automatically types this for me, but I think it depends.
I think one of the most important aspects of entrepreneurship lies in awareness of the capabilities and limitations of oneself and others. Now, of course, it’s easy to read that and write off the idea of “capabilities.” Call that a character fault in our society, but it can sometimes be difficult to appreciate the capabilities of others, and it’s easier to find their limitations. But I think both are equally important.
The difference between, in my opinion anyway, an entrepreneur who winds up successful, and someone who just writes code or spends money and never makes it anywhere, is based in big part on which one knows what he or she can and can’t do, and which one is able to trust his or her partners to do those things.
I’ve been a developer for a while, and a common theme I’ve seen in clients is the ability to–for some totally unexpected reason–just not seem to trust that I knew more about coding than they did. I don’t take it personally, I don’t think they don’t trust me, I think they’ve just trusted themselves way too much. That leads to overwhelmingly frustrating situations in which they ask me every day for detailed statuses, and I wind up spending as much explaining a bug to them as I could have spent fixing it.
So anyway, that could all have been described as somewhat tangential. But my point, again, is that it depends. I don’t think there’s a definitive answer to whether a highly skilled founder or a more generally aware one is better, because I think they’re both perfectly workable situations. The key is for that founder to know which end of the spectrum he or she falls on, and be able to account for it. If you tend to spread your knowledge thinly out, well then you’re probably going to need some help and your best bet is to trust a really awesome developer to handle some of the details, but you can help manage it all. If you’re a really awesome developer, you might want to find someone to ask about marketing.
And yes, to address your first question at the bottom, I do think a good startup needs some guiding and all-knowing forces to keep business matters connected. I don’t think that has to be the founder, but I do think the founder has to recognize that need.
And to your second one, I think the issue is that there are so many developers. Now, I know from other posts, speaking to you @jdero personally, that you’re a developer relatively recently out of school, so I promise that some of those “highly skilled” programmers will seem a lot less so in a couple years, that’s not to say great programmers always yield great business decisions, but I just wanted to throw that in there. There are so many developers, and so few really good ones, and even fewer really good ones with really good brains for business.
Really, it’s just a matter of statistics. Great developers are few and far between, great business people are few and far between, you can imagine the Venn diagram I’m too lazy to put next.
I honestly believe some of those not-so-great ideas could benefit from business minds, because I think in a lot of cases, people will pay for anything, especially when it’s “free.” The trick is to understand the user-base and understand your product, then find some way to make it interesting to people. Companies like Facebook and Google have somehow found this brilliant niche in which they ask people for personal information, and people tell them it. Nobody saw that coming thirty years ago. There’s a market for many things. Not everything, but many things. It just takes someone who gets that to make it work.
Finally, since this is getting a little lengthy even by my standards, I’ll just mention a news story from a couple days ago. I can’t find a link to it now, but in essence a well-known, successful entrepreneur went to some Venture Capitalists with a professionally prepared speech (that is, he hired someone to write a humorous presentation for him), and said basically “Nobody knows what the next big idea will be, so I want to collect a team of previously-successful entrepreneurs and brainstorm about what it might be.” They gave him two million dollars. Obviously, they wouldn’t just have given him that money. And sure, the people he wants to hire on are known to be good at this stuff. But there’s a probably pretty knowledgeable guy, and a lot of knowledgeable funders, who all recognize the worth of collecting on other knowledgeable people to help out.
I read an article just a few days ago covering this exact issue, I'll see if I can pull it from my twitter feed:
Entrepreneur.com – Why a Jack-of-All-Trades Is Just the Masterful Talent a Startup Needs
An attempt to summarize the reading here:
Whether you were curious about new hires or your personal path direction, I hoped this helped!
For me personally, I have realized that while I may benefit from working for a larger corporation, I may also want to focus on smaller companies in need, as they could benefit the most from my wild skill-set. I also get to observe and learn more about general-business skills, accounting, etc.
I think “it depends”. Are you entering an area with a lot of competition? Are there some unique technical twiddles from new areas of maths or optimisation, that means you can outcompete? Then you’d better be pretty expert in the area. Breadth won’t help. Focus and depth of knowledge, mostly, will.
If you’re entering new areas (and the internet/web/apps are still pretty new - we don’t know all that we can about how to make these technologies work well, Internet protocols are still evolving and offering opportunities, for example), then generalists do well. High liquid intelligence, broad spectrum. Because you don’t have a specific problem to solve. You have to find the problem you will be solving, first.
To be practical, would I start up a banking business? No. It’s very complex, I’m not part of that world, I don’t have the network and connections or the knowledge. But I have an otherwise amazing breadth - low energy housing, computer modelling, info sec, CPU design, office automation, educational software, travel, new and used cars, mortgages - I’ve co-founded (small, money making) businesses based on operating systems, high performance graphics, and web marketing, and I’ve been on the board of peer to peer directory services, business services and other stuff. But banking? I don’t think I can go there. Or high energy physics, or self driving cars. Not without several years of study time. :)
It depends. No simple general rule.
A tech founder needs both. They have to have some amazing specialty that they understand more than most of people within the specific section. More than this, they need to have a broad range of skills to tell the world, whether its B2B or B2C, why their product is the best choice. They need a legal, financial, sales, and management experience before they can really plan a tech company, but first of all they need the idea which has to be technical. Its very rare to have an individual with this mix of skills due to the typical layout of most companies where programmers are siloed and managers with MBAs make senior decisions only after quiet input from the programmers.
This is why teamwork is very important and startups are usually a group of people. If you can find backing from a VC company, they usually provide the management/sales/financial.
With all of that said, I am in the process of launching a startup and am doing it solo. I’m going very slow and reaching each aspect mentioned above and finding partners to work with, but as contracts, not equity owners. Good luck!
I will say that if you had to choose one or the other, it would have to be well-rounded. If you are highly skilled, yes you can make a great product but you also need others involved to help with management and administrative work. If you are talking about a startup that does not get bigger, than having a highly skilled tech founder may work out however it is extremely painful once the product becomes a business. There will be a painful change and those who are not prepared will get screwed over. (ex facebook, twitter, almost any major tech startup in the valley in some way) It takes a lot of maturity to start a company and if one is not well-rounded, it is best for the founder to not become the president or CEO.
+1 for the question.
I have to agree with your advantages and disadvantages of founders/developers. I employ some amazing developers but they suck at knowing what the consumer want or what will increase the ROI.
We ask ourselves “if we had to release tomorrow, what would we work on today?”, which reminds them to focus on the end goal, rather than sweating over the small stuff.
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