Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The most successful founders in this industry are/were people that could do the job themselves, with very few exceptions.

Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Steve Wozniak, Steven Jobs, Paul Graham, John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Michael Cowpland, Michael Morhaime and the list can go on.

These people also found awesome help, that's true, but you can't be a leader unless you have the capability of fixing other people's screwups.

     unless you have a ninja that dreams in Scala,
     craps Redis and eats node.js for breakfast

Personally, I am ambivalent about people like that. Curiosity and experimentation defines a smart individual, however crapping Scala, Redis and Node.js all over a project that doesn't need these newer technologies is simply bad engineering that can sink a product faster than a "glorified oDesk coder" could.

Actually the contrary is true. Each of those successful technical founders you just named did not "do the job themselves". In fact, you just named 3 pairs of co-founders(Google, Apple, Adobe) but for some reason excluded other key co-founders such as Allen(Microsoft) and the FB guys(https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?founderbios).

Three variables that determine a start-up's success are its 1)product 2)market and 3)the team. Of these, the team is the most important. With a talented team, you can build, get feedback, and reiterate faster on your product. A team that can reiterate every week has a competitive advantage over the team can only reiterate every month because it can push a product out 52 times/year as opposed to only 12 times/year. A team with multiple A-players is always better than a team with just 1 A-player, and their products will be too.

You missed my point - you cannot blame the B-engineers if the founder cannot recognize B-grade work and/or doesn't do anything about it - like firing the B-grade engineers, hiring at least one A-player, fixing it by themselves, etc...

Blame is easy to pass like that, but it seems to me like this startup is bound to die because of a lack of action, more than anything else.

And regarding your opinion, there have been many individuals able to move mountains by themselves when starting out. And there have been many teams of A-players that failed because of irreconcilable differences between them (i.e. too much testosterone, lack of leadership, lack of vision, etc...) - a book I loved reading on this subject is "Dreaming in Code": http://www.dreamingincode.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com