Comment by shortsightedsid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shortsightedsid | Hacker News Reader

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shortsightedsid

My startup failed last year. It wasn't the greatest feeling to be back searching for a job. I did find a good job and I'm at a good place now. I joined as a developer.

I was the CTO of my startup and was a senior architect looking across multiple domains in my previous job. Now, I'm more a specialist, looking at one single thing while it's expected that someone has the responsibility to solve a different problem.

To me, that's the biggest career impact. In our startup, everyone did everything. Need to hotfix something in production in the morning and then head off to a investor pitch in the afternoon? Come back and rework on our marketing message? Yes. Yes and Yes.

Now, I'm just a dev. Not the marketing guy. Not the finance guy. That's someone else's responsibility. Am I being paid less? Not really.. But am I having lesser responsibilities? Definitely. Is that a career downturn or not? I don't know, but I do see others who joined the same company from a more successful startup being "higher up" when it comes to responsibilities and job titles.

i think this is the reason most companies fail. people do too much, and aren't able to do a good job at any of it. people lie to themselves and think it's even remotely possible, when it's not. you're going to do a shit job at every one of those 4 jobs if they're all your responsibility.

i think companies that raise or make money quickly are able to actually dedicate people to very, very, very critical shit, and will have an astronomically higher chance of success for this reason alone.

It can be a big competitive advantage to do everything yourself, because you see inefficiencies that fall through the cracks between job descriptions. That's what's left after you've specialized and optimized: all the things about the product that suck because they are nobody's responsibility. Fix them and you not only are doing something that your competitors aren't, but you're doing things they can't do without re-organizing and losing all the accumulated domain knowledge that they have.

The flip side of this is that you need to pick a problem where this is actually an advantage. If you're solving the same problem that your competitors are but they have 100 highly-specialized employees but you have one generalist, you're going to lose. Big. But if you identify the problem that they're not solving because nobody in their organization has the relevant expertise or job description, you can get a solid foothold, then use that to hire the expertise that you were missing in the first place.

> It can be a big competitive advantage to do everything yourself, because you see inefficiencies that fall through the cracks between job descriptions

i agree, but this is begging the question of actually being able to do a good job at any of it. i'm not saying it's impossible, i'm saying most can't.

The point isn't to do a good job of it, the point is to do a better job than the people who are not doing it at all.

This is probably the most counterintuitive part of founding a startup that I've observed so far: if you're doing it right, you'll suck at everything you do. Why? Because if you don't suck at something, it's time to seek funding, hire people, and train them to do it. The founder's job is to seek out problems where everyone else sucks more and yet people still want it, which itself is quite a challenging task.

If a company is swimming in money, whether it's from investors or revenue, then yes, hiring people to handle specialized jobs is definitely the best thing to do.

But there's always a point at the beginning where a company doesn't have a ton of money laying around, and at that stage, I think your advice is bad. It's better to have those jobs getting done poorly than to have them not being done at all.

If you are going to be a CEO then it is important to wear many hats in the beginning. It is important to understand the basics of accounting, law, sales, etc so that you have some idea what is going on with those aspects of the business when you are able to delegate those jobs to experts.

yeah, a lot of entrepreneurs learn this stuff through a bunch of failed businesses where they do everything themselves. keyword: failed.

It is not that hard to do the business side in the early days. That isn't even in the top 10 reasons companies fail.

really? overspending and poor record keeping (accounting and control), terrible or non-existent sales and marketing, inability to recruit good people, etc.

these are 'business side' things, and are basically the most common reason companies fail.

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