Comment by oz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oz | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you. However:

>author of this post refers to himself as a developer.

It doesn't matter what he calls himself. If you can pass FizzBUzz, you're a developer. Maybe not a John Carmack, but a developer nonetheless.

There is no sacred law written on tablets of stone and handed down from volcanic mountains that states "Developers who found startups must code or face eternal damnation." Rather, there is a holy precept that does state "The founder (whether a dev, UX guy or bizev guy) shall find the most efficient path to profitability, or be condemned to the lake of failure."

So if a founder is from a UX background, but in his particular context, it is more efficient (faster to profitability) for him to outsource the UX and read 'MBA for Dummies', I would argue that that is the rational course of action.

Again: Your priorities as a founder are not whatever background you are from. Your priority (and you must accept it :)) is to become profitable. When that is achieved, THEN you can go up the Maslow Heirarchy of business-actualization.

Again, you are repeating this idea that all these other non-coding skills can be mastered on a whim. If you truly need an MBA type doing MBA things for your company, then you should go get one. Lord knows there's a zillion of them out there, almost all of which have a better resume than "I read MBA for dummies".

Or to put this differently. If I was working for some larger company as a developer, and I went to management and said "I have decided that I want to quit development and work in marketing", they would turn me down. And rightly so, because A) it would be bad for the company to lose my development skills, and B) there is no reason to hire me as a marketing person when there's many more out there far more qualified and experienced in marketing.

So...if this would be quite clearly the correct course of action if I worked for someone else, why would I not follow the same thought process for my own company?

I disagree. IMHO, there is no better person than the founder to market your startup passionately.

I am not saying MBA skills are not valuable. But what is more important is ability to write pithy blogs, write tons of emails to your potential customers, investors and do lot of other routine activities to keep your startup afloat. None of this requires MBA as such in the initial days.

Your passion, reading some of the best blogs out there on specific topics is more than enough provided you take all the advice as just that 'advice' and tweak it to apply as per your situation & needs.

> IMHO, there is no better person than the founder to market your startup passionately.

Exactly my feelings.

Others have put this differently. But my experience working at a startup before and watching both the founder and marketing manager tells me there's a difference in startups. Atleast the one i was at. The founder had a vision that was pretty impossible to transfer to someone with all the nuances and subtle differences. And when someone(experienced too) else was marketing, he missed out/dropped out all those subtle differences, and was just practicing his Always Be closing principle. Maybe all startups don't have the same quality/problem. Maybe some startups are very fine calculated risks, that can and do manage to transfer/communicate their vision easily.

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