Ask HN: Do "average" programmers build "extra ordinary" companies?

16 points·rushabh··4 comments

We all know about how selective are large companies like Google, Apple, Amazon etc about recruiting.

A startup on the other hand, has to fight hard to get top talent. I want to know are there any examples of startups that have worked around this problem and implemented ideas so that by recruiting "average" talent, they are able to be successful?

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Companies built mainly on getting to a market first or best, rather than on a technology edge, seem to often have fairly run-of-the-mill tech.

Craigslist is perhaps the most extreme example, a highly successful company with very average tech even by the standards of the time (and now almost comically obsolete, but still highly profitable).

eBay, unlike most web startups, has long had a really enterprisey stack and dev team, all J2EE and SOAP and whatnot.

My impression is that a lot of startups start at "average" and work their way up through the learning curve very fast as they build the business. That may or may not mean a lot of tech know-how - take Twitter vs. Groupon, for a relatively extreme example.

If you or your CTO/co-founder are not "gurus", I would focus your efforts on the commercial realities of the space you are going to be competing in.

I spend a majority of my time in the ip-video sector corp dev and can tell you that no matter how sexy your admin UI or what stack the software was written in, a sales verticalized approached and good service go a long way to make the company generate revenue.

An average dev specialzing narrowly in the startups area would be a lot more valuable that a "rock star" generalist.

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