Ask HN: Which topics do I have to know just to run a company? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which topics do I have to know just to run a company?

11 pointsharunxxl7 comments

Dear Hackernews Community,

I'm a guy from Europe and I've finished recently my computer science degree. I'm very interested in startups and building products and companies. I love to write software, I love technology and my biggest goal is to work for my own startup and to develop a product which is useful for the world. What I dont understand is the business side of things. Its like black box for me. I dont know accounting, i don't know anything about finance, controlling and all this stuff. I can't understand how some computer science graduates mostly from USA can build companies with hundreds and thousands of employees. Getting funded with incredible amounts. Where do they learn the business side of things? Where do they learn how to scale the companies from 10 to 10'000 employees? What is the secret of silicon valley? Are there any books for the most important business fundamentals? Which topics do i have to know just to run a company? I could attend a second undergraduate degree on one of the top business schools in europe but in the valley it would be a negative sign. So what should i do instead?

Every answer, opinion and recommendation is welcome.

Thanks for your help!

Best Regards

The business side of things basically boils down to "Get hundreds of thousands of customers who are willing to pay you money, or hundreds of millions of users whose attention you can sell to hundreds of thousands of advertisers who are willing to pay you money."

There's more detail to that, of course, but the not-all-that-dirty secret about Silicon Valley is that the founders don't generally have to worry about that, because there's a liquid market of investors/executives/engineers/accountants/lawyers/marketers who are all searching for the next big thing and happy to hop aboard it. If you can show that you have a lot of people who want what you provide, and have a plausible path to build it, there will be people who are happy to help you, for a cut.

That's the big advantage that Silicon Valley has over the rest of the world, and something that was completely lost on me when I moved here. "Founder" is a job description here, and your job is to find a reason for the company to exist and communicate it to other stakeholders. If you're digging into the details of engineering (I have a bad habit of doing this, myself), legal, accounting, management, etc, beyond what's necessary to prove the viability of the company, you are probably not doing your job right. Your one job as a founder is innovation, which is a hard job, but it's much easier than trying to run a whole business as a one-man show.

My background is also CS and I'd recommend wholeheartedly "The personal MBA"[0]. It organizes the fundamentals of business in a clear and concise fashion that will be easy to understand and hard to forget. The book is not in depth of course but rather a comprehensive overview.

protip: skip the first self-promotional chapter, I was so put off by its poor taste that it made me delay reading the book by a few months. The rest is great though!

As others have mentioned, startup school[1] is also a goldmine. In my opinion it's less thorough on fundamentals and more focused on key lessons and understandings that only come with handling a successful startup. Many authors cover the same topics but the startup school presenters are actually authoritative on them, kudos!

The lean startup[2] is also a must, offering solid advice on how not to waste time, which equals runway, as a founder.

Another good one is Never Split the Difference[3], which teaches you a few tricks to fend for yourself while raising money in the world of VCs which, may I remind you, negotiate for a living.

0: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9512985-the-personal-mba 1: https://www.startupschool.org/ 2: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10127019-the-lean-startu... 3: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26156469-never-split-the...

I can't talk about all of Europe, but in Austria we have the Wirtschaftskammer ("chamber of commerce"), and they offer free consultation and workshops for people who want to start a business.

Many universities/schools also have their own incubators. They can help you get started with everything you need to know. If you want to get in contact with investors, that's the way to do it here. And you'll meet a lot of like minded people.

As for accounting etc, you usually don't do accounting yourself, you'll just pay an accountant to do it and they'll tell you everything you need to know.

If you want to consider another degree, make sure to look at the community around the program. It's not a coincidence that a lot of startups are founded by the alumni of a few schools. If you don't know any startups founded by alumni of your university, maybe look for something else.

In my mind, the biggest advantage of doing another degree is meeting potential cofounders.

> So what should i do instead?

Learn to sell anything, anywhere, for a profit.

MBA curriculum is geared for people who will be managing medium to large established companies, not so much about the stuff you need to know when founding a company. Founding teams of 2 or 3 should possess foresight that led to a visceral understanding of the problem, the insight that led to the discovery of the secret to solving it -- that rare and valuable perspective that lights the path that no one else sees -- the verbal fluency to communicate what they see, and the technical expertise to implement it. Rarely is this skillset possessed all by one person, and the workload will be great, so that's why teams of 2 or 3 are recommended.

Founder skill sets should complement each other, but that doesn't mean one needs to be an MBA. Unless it's a case where it's founder who has pondering the problem for years, is the source of the insight ,and they just happen to have an MBA too, investors tend to view MBA founders as a net negative [0] vs strong technical team.

Ideally you want a brilliant generalist who sees the big picture to communicate and lead, someone who can speak both languages (tech and business),Often it's someone with a strong tech background who has grown up in an entrepreneurial family or lived in an entrepreneurial environment long enough to absorb the language and a tacit understanding. Paired with a co-founder who has deep, specialized, world-class expertise and a world-class engineer who loves to code, that's a strong team.

Don't worry about scaling to 10,000 employees before you've even begun. That will be a great problem to have when the time comes, and by then you'll the funds to hire a team of MBAs. You outsource your legal and accounting to specialized firms. When you're ready to raise funds, find a good startup attorney to set up the corp, and they'll who the good accountants are -- ask them to recommend. Until then, focus on your team and the core problem you're trying to solve, understand it from every angle -- from the perspective of multiple domains -- until you see the way it all aligns.

Beyond that, read Paul Graham's essays, absorb the Startup School lectures, and read Zero to One:

* http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

* https://www.startupschool.org/

* http://zerotoonebook.com

[0] http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec03/

thanks very much for your answers. I appreciate it very much!

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(Submitted title was "F* MBA, Get a Computer Science Degree Instead". We changed it to a representative sentence from the text.)

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