Competitive advantages of developer-run businesses

This may be the wrong venue (e.g. site for startups), but there is a reason the big companies have people that specialize in each of the areas he claims a founder/developer has an advantage in.

While early in the business you benefit mostly in saving money by doing it all yourself, eventually you will want to hire people do these things for you.

A ceo's job is not to be in the trenches answering tech support calls- while that sounds nice on paper, his job, especially when you hit some serious growth is to be looking 5/10 years down the line.

I work at a ~6mil/year revenue company that is <10 years old. I've been here for 3 of those years. In that time, the biggest hurdle I've observed is precisely that- watching the technical CEO relinquish some of his control in order to focus more on growth strategy and quality of the product.

I do share the observation of technical leaders with a quick observation very well and it has 2 sides of the coin. It can be crucial in the early stage for a company to survive. Some people see it as control, but on the other side it often carries a certain degree of success. The flip side is that kind of close relation of the founder/CEO to customer and not letting go the control can limit growth of a company. And if the company keeps increasing on revenue/employees and the situation has not much improved it sometimes turns to chaos within the organization.

There's a common perception that answering support inquires is a waste of time. I agree - it's a problem if you're spending a lot of time debugging issues that aren't incorporated back into the product. It's not an issue if it's good feedback that helps build a better product for everyone else. Most of our support inquires are the latter.

Hmmm---when you adopt this model you have to be careful you aren't running a consulting business if you think you're a startup (e.g. you'll be underpricing yourself.