In the Future the Business Founder Will Not Be Ignored | Hacker News Reader

In the Future the Business Founder Will Not Be Ignored

techcrunch.com

10 pointsearbitscom7 comments

The title seems like bait. I think far more often (perhaps not as true in the valley, I don't really know) that business founders are the ones who's value is overemphasized. It's so bad that I regularly see "idea" people trying to justify majority (if not total) ownership while bringing almost nothing (often not even business sense) to the table.

I completely agree with balance, but the truth is that in the majority of businesses the preferred approach is to make the "do-ers" employees. The fact that the pendulum has swung the other way a bit seems ok to me if only to highlight the fact that motivated engineers can start and manage very successful businesses without the typical "business" guys.

However, just like I feel that organizations that only value people in business and sales roles for executive positions and partnerships are crippling themselves by their own arrogance and limited vision, I also can see how a bunch of CS grads playing business in their spare time while hacking with the rest of it, may also be limiting their organizations in a similar way. The goal should simply be to find valuable talented people that can fill all of your organizations needs and then treat them like you actually value their contribution to the business. You know, by letting them own a piece of that value.

I don't think the change the author writes about will come. He thinks the barriers to development will be eased through better and easier to use tools, and he's right about that. But even today, we have Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Xcode, but to produce anything REALLY good, you have to go deeper than what you see, and it will always be like that. The reason is because entire bar for quality shifts up when everybody gets better tools; the game changes and evolves. For example, today it isn't impressive enough to be static, we want the power to build databases and interactivity. And when we achieve that, we'll want to link them up to APIs and libraries without having know how. And even with these magical tools, a hacker could still outproduce a non-technical by X factor, because they have access to tools AND depth of knowledge as well.

That said, I think the distinction between technical and business founder is paid too much attention. In the context of entrepreneurship, programming is a skill, a means to an end. That end is a product/business that makes money.

I consider myself a business founder, yet I have an M.S. in computer science. Much of it really depends on the skills you choose to develop during your career. For me, I leveraged volunteer time with non-profits to fill in holes (including marketing, accounting, fundraising, and relationship building) which were difficult to develop in a technical role.

This is also the reason why my co-founder has the role of CTO. I let him take the lead on the technical side and support whenever I'm not working on the business side. The current system is very supportive of generalists with a strong technical background. Just my observations...

There should be a place in any startup for a business founder. You need to have people who come from different backgrounds and experiences to make sure your product can appeal to and be used by everyone. Not to mention a business founder will probably know a bit more about how to actually make a business, marketing, sales, accounting, raising capital, etc.

I'm curious about the "knack" vs "background" comparisons between business guys and engineers.

Assuming they one has a "knack" for both coding and business, in which direction is it easier to cross over? Is it easier for a MBA to crack the codebase (with no prior experience) or for a CS guy to run the business (with no prior experience)?

You've probably heard something similar to the adage that it take minutes to become a bad businessman and years to become a bad engineer. In other words, one can be bad at business but there is nothing physically stopping someone from making bad decisions, pitches, purchase, contracts, hires, or whatever else a "businessman" does. The CS guy might get lucky if the economics are in a forgiving phase or everybody wants what he is trying to sell.

On the engineering side, there is a hard barrier where quality simply can't be traded for time. Yes, anyone can pick up a book and put together a simple application, but a simple application isn't going to be valuable. Each new feature is likely to take weeks and there would be little improvement as each challenge would be its own technical journey. Need to use a database to do something complex? that's a month of trial and error learning. Need to integrate? another month of learning web services and networking basics. Need to think about security? another month, and on and on. If the MBA turned developer doesn't put in the time, it simply won't work. There is no duct taping together some code snippets to get something of value. Granted, anyone can put together something simple, but they will quickly hit a point where further progress is not possible without lots and lots of time.

Oh, the "advancing technology will allow non-technical people to create software and make programmers obsolete" argument.

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