starting a startup

[rainonacongadrum]

This is a quote from Paul Grahams's essay "How to Start a Startup" ( http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html )

"In a technology startup, which most startups are, the founders should include technical people. During the Internet Bubble there were a number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for hackers to create their product for them. This doesn't work well. Business people are bad at deciding what to do with technology, because they don't know what the options are, or which kinds of problems are hard and which are easy. And when business people try to hire hackers, they can't tell which ones are good. Even other hackers have a hard time doing that. For business people it's roulette."

This quote seems a bit discouraging for those of us who aren't experienced programmers. How much weight do you attach to this quote (especially the bit about business type people not being able to hire qualified hackers because they don't know who is good)? How hard would it be to familiarize oneself with programming enough so you're able to at least speak/understand their language, if only generally? Does it mean that all people wanting to create a startup need to be hackers? (Surely it would help but it seems like Graham is saying it's a must.)

[eastbay]

You'd really have to give more information about what specifically you're trying to start up before anyone can make a coherent comment.

Often 95% of the work of a startup is implementation, so non-programmers are usually serious deadweight in that case.

eastbay

[robinmbuk]

Ok, first a disclaimer. I'm yet to start my first business (hopefully in a years time this will no longer be true [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]). I am however a programmer developer, so I can give you my perspective.

1. 'And when business people try to hire hackers, they can't tell which ones are good'. I'd have to say this is true. You ger plenty of programmers who know all the latest buzz words and can produce javascript snippets that produce really cool effects on a website, but they may well not be clever enough to quickly and effectively solve the problems which you want them to solve. Since you are not a programmer, you may struggle to recognize a good coder because you wouldn't be able to tell what is difficult to achieve programmatically and what isn't. You have no yardstick for comparision.

Try visiting: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ . He has a blog dedicated to programming / technoloy based business, and he has written a book about software development which is highly regarded. You should look at thearchive section there, he has articles on how to hire good programmers. The basic thrust of it is that "How do you connect to a mysql database and send a query to is in PHP 4" is probably a bad interview question, whereas "How many piano tuners are there in Seattle" is probably a good one.

2. "Business people are bad at deciding what to do with technology, because they don't know what the options are, or which kinds of problems are hard and which are easy.". I don't really agree with this too much. Non technical bosses usually have a good idea of what will make them money, and it is up to the programmers to code tools / products to achive the bosses goals. Good programmers will tell you what is easy / hard to do. Non technical bosses do sometimes miss opportunities to improve their product because they don't know what is technically possible. To help solve this you should prompt your programmers to give you options. For example if you had a website, you could say 'How can we keep our regulars informed of updates to the site so they keep coming back', and your programmer would say something like, 'Set up RSS feeds and / or a mailing list'.

Hope this helps.

Robin

[Preem]

I've been involved in a number of startups, some successful, some not. I also have friends who've started up companies.

If the company is a technology-driven company, then one or more of the founders MUST be a technologist. It's okay to have one or more founders who are business people, but you must have a founder who is the chief technologist.

You have virtually zero chance of starting up a high-tech company with only business people and hiring technologists.

Aside from the obvious reason of providing technological vision for the company, another reason is that you'll never get any venture funding without a pre-eminent technologist as a founder. When you meet with venture capitalists, they want to talk to the technologist(s), not to the business people.

[DesertCat]

How good are you at recruiting and managing top engineers?

I once cofounded a startup with a guy who understood our target market extremely well, he'd come up with great ideas that our customers loved. It was my job to make sure they were implemented properly. I went from personally implementing those features to recruiting and managing development teams to implemented them. We grew from 2 guys in an office together to a 140 person company over five years.

I had no clue or care what our customers wanted, so the founder was irreplacable. He had no clue how to hire or manage engineers, so my job was just as important.

Eventually we had different ideas of what we wanted to accomplish with the company, so we parted ways. I started another company, that failed because our target market collapsed with the internet boom and with the RIAA attack on internet radio. But our engineering was top notch

He sold the original company and started a series of other companies where he used egomaniac engineers who were lousy managers and lousy implementers, because they were devoted personal friends of his who tell him what he wants to hear. And all of the new companies have been failures, mostly because of his over aggressive selection of bad target markets, but bad engineering contributed to each failure.

You need to have both strong marketing and engineering to succeed in tech. Together we were a great team because we never bs'd each other, and were total realists about what trade offs we'd have to make for each product.

But most marketing guys who have great ideas, don't have a clue how to build them. This leads them to the mercy of incredibly expensive and lousy consultants, or hiring smooth sounding engineering managers who are almost as clueless as their bosses. I once helped start a company called "Now Software" that was a leading Mac developer a long, long, time ago. It created a product "Now Up To Date" that was one of the first networked calendars. It had some great engineers, but never any good engineering management. It was never able to capitalize on it's technology and take it to Windows or the Internet. Every "porting" project failed due to overpriced consultants, bad management, etc. And eventually the company died.

If you really want to succeed you need to find a strong partner who will run engineering well, tell you honestly what is happening, what is possible and what isn't, and will constantly strive to improve their department. One book I can heartily recommend is "Managing Software Maniacs" by Ken Whitaker. I hope to god I never have to manage an engineering group again (or program at all) but if I do, that book will provide many of the principles I will use.

[BradleyT]

Seth Godin speaking to Google

He discusses why marketing > technology.

[Mr. Now]

It is possible to do this without being technical when most big startup opps are in tech. However you have new specific challenges the technical-expert startup leader does not face.

Namely:

1. You can review everyone's work, maintaining tight control of your vision;

2. You can talk tech to investors or their delegates;

3. You can see tech innovations that effect your product sooner than the average non-tech guy;

4. You can turn on a dime without needing to seek the counsel of your delegates.

That said, it is possible to do it. But not probable.

But if you have willingness to do whatever it takes, you can do it. For example many successful traders, realizing they need to write their own non-discretionary models, take programming classes to achieve this.

These traders are taking 100% responsibility for all of their results, very similiar to any successful startup entreprenuer.

See also:
Search for the 'Ask Mr. Now' thread.

[DesertCat]

[ QUOTE ]
Seth Godin speaking to Google

He discusses why marketing > technology.

[/ QUOTE ]

Marketing > Technology

Technology > 0

If you can't build it

Marketing = 0

[SanONeill]

[ QUOTE ]
Seth Godin speaking to Google

He discusses why marketing > technology.

[/ QUOTE ]

A marketer saying marketing is more important than tech? Who'd a thunk it!

As for the original part I totally agree that the founders should include someone technical. You're talking about starting a business with no one that knows the root of your business otherwise. Not a very healthy place to be. Should this scare the non-technical people? No, because we need you just as much.

Programming is surprisingly very little about just hacking out code. I could teach anyone to code in a week. Being a good programmer is very different and your technical people will know you're not one of them and use that against you.

Someone else pointed out a book about managing programmers/technical people. I would like to add "Herding Cats" to that list. I've not completed it but from what I'd read so far the author hits the nail on the head.

[Evan]

The answer here is "it depends" obviously.

Anyone who's interested in this field should check out Founders at Work.