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Comment by Jgrubb | Hacker News Reader

I'll go one further - operations, marketing, sales, and culture _are_ what makes a successful business. Superior technology is a bonus on top of that.

Superior technology in a company that hasn't figured out how to operate, or market and sell may as well not even exist.

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You missed Finance. There is lot of financial engineering going on to keep orgs alive and quickly adapt to ever changing needs. Dealing with cross border diff in taxes, subsidies, tariffs, regs, forex, interest rates, real estate/rent, labor costs and their constant changes is no joke.

Each of these specializations (just like tech) are evolving at their own rates and are all equally capable of outpacing each other depending on the environment.

And, god forbid, meta-issues like long-term cashflow planning when you're making big changes to your internal organizations and processes, which lets you worry less about funding. And/but investing in complex thinking about operations is part of the book's thesis.

I didn't. In my worldview, I put Finance as the majority stakeholder in "operating" the company even though there are plenty of teams and roles with somethingOps in their titles that might disagree.

The tech part of tech companies is the easy part in my opinion. Step out into these other domains where you have to deal with _people_ and a company's skill or lack thereof gets really obvious really quick.

You mean, like… Intel these past few years?

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