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This advice that a successful founder has domain knowledge runs contrary to what's said of PayPal though.

From a recent thread in HN: http://primitus.com/blog/why-did-so-many-successful-entrepre...

PayPal had a strong bias toward hiring (and promoting / encouraging, as Keith mentions) smart, driven problem solvers, rather than subject matter experts

I doubt there's a hard and fast rule.

"This hacker culture of thinking everything can be solved with guru developer skills needs to stop."

Why? I don't see a downside to self-assuredness, even downright arrogance, when it comes to tackling problems. Sure, maybe every problem can't be solved by every person who tries, but why should you or anyone else care if they are willing to give it a shot?

He isn't saying that hackers shouldn't try to solve problems. He's just saying that they should go about solving them with more understanding and in a more intelligent manner.

No, but (s)he does seem to be of the opinion that they shouldn't be trying to solve this one:

"I just wish people stop thinking that journalism is a technology problem.It doesn't matter how good your platform is."

Maybe that's true. Maybe the Newslab guys were doomed to fail from the beginning. However, who's to say they shouldn't have tried? There's nothing wrong with trying out an idea no matter how slim its chance of success might seem to be.

I didn't mean to imply that they shouldn't have tried.

I'm just concerned about some VCs think that one of the main criteria is having technical founders.

Historically, this hasn't worked in journalism.

TechCrunch, HuffPo, Drudge, Business Insider...none of these were started by technical founders.

I don't feel like you're comparing like with like here. TC, HuffPo, Drudge, etc are all content providers/aggregators. Newstilt on the other hand were going to provide services and software to journalists of which it seems aggregation was only a part.

From this outsider's perspective at least they seemed to be in a good position starting out. They had seemingly recruited established journalists and other people from the industry who were able to tell them what they needed.

I don't think it's far fetched to think that a startup like this that marries software and journalism could form the basis of a successful startup. I do think this could be done with mostly if not entirely technical founders. I think others are betting on that too: http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/admissions/page.aspx?id=5...

"Lets look at domain knowledge first. This is not about having studied or otherwise artificially gotten to “know” the industry. This is about coming from that industry, having lived it, knowing the players and knowing the pain firsthand. There is no substitute for this. You can’t fake it. You either come from the space or you don’t."

And yet there are plenty of successful stories of founders who excelled because they had no prior experience in the industry and saw things differently than all the other experienced industry joes.

> None had a media background.

With utter honesty; this was my biggest concern with the whole thing. I believe that the guys actually had a different idea when pitching to YC and they were "redirected" onto this idea.

I believe that the guys actually had a different idea when pitching to YC and they were "redirected" onto this idea.

Interesting you say that, given how well the idea matched the first RFS. [1]

For better or for worse, I got the same impression about NowMov.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html

It's a high risk, high reward game(duh). If these guys would have come out with some super crazy thing that took off, we'd be using it as an example of how it helps to be ignorant.

Most successful entrepreneurs in their 20s don't have domain knowledge. Ones that succeed usually do a kickass job of turning the industry upside down.

This.

I see many, many developers going to battle about the technical merits of X versus Y. Platform A can't scale, but platform B takes too long to produce code.

You've got to understand the problem that you solve for your customers if you're going to write something that they need. You need to understand your customers if you're going to write something that they want.

I guarantee that your customers don't give a shit whether or not your product is written in Ruby, or Python, or PHP, or Java, or Clojure, or Scala, or even Brainfuck. Write it in Malebodge if that's what you're happiest working in.

But whatever you do, write something that solves a problem.

World Cup-related allusion: Which is why I'm not surprised at all that Argentina's team is playing its heart out for Maradona. The man may be a lunatic and borderline incompetent as an organizer, but he has the domain knowledge and knows the pain points of winning a World Cup as an Argentinian side better than anyone.