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Comment by mattzito | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, so - I/we started GridApp when I was 23. I didn't have any grand dreams about being a 20-something entrepreneur, I just came to the (accurate, as it turns out) conclusion that it was never going to be easier to completely upend my personal and professional life than it was when I was 23 - no mortgage, no SO, no debt other than student loans, no kids, etc.

When we got acquired, I assumed that I would leave as soon as I could and do it all again - but yet, I'm still here. It's interesting work, and while I miss the ability to just get things done, I find that I've been getting a lot better at dealing with problems at scale. So, for example, how DO you launch a new product to a sales and support organization with hundreds of people?

I'm not saying I'll never start a company again, because I really want to, but I'm enjoying feeling like I'm learning how to do things better next time.

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I do like your titles; CEO, CTO, Chief Scientist, Director of Development, and Mr. Database.

A lot of that was an artifact of how we got started - it wasn't quite clear who would be doing what, and so other than CEO, everyone's responsibilities were pretty amorphous.

I got saddled with "chief scientist", but practically speaking it was "technical field operations and product management", which just ends up being a lot to put on a business card.

AFAIK "chief scientist" title assumes that you, or your team of scientists are doing academic research. And that you publish results of your research.

Taking a title like that, while actually not doing it is a borderline fraud. If I'll get a resume with "scientist" or "researcher" in the title, the first thing I would look at would be published academic papers. If there are none, I will not consider this resume.

Well, the origins were far more benign than "borderline fraud" - my original role was doing product research in distributed database design and performance. I gave a lot of talks and wrote a couple of (non-acaddemic) papers on how to build widely distributed database systems, focusing on Oracle RAC.

My job evolved to be more of a business-focused role, but my title did not. The intention was never to mislead, and indeed, when asked, I never claimed to be an academic.

> Taking a title like that, while actually not doing it is a borderline fraud

That seems like a strong conclusion to draw. My title now is "Product Architect", but I'm not an architect, nor do I exclusively design products.

A quick skim through Crunchbase yields:

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/jeff-hammerbacher (bright guy, not an academic)

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/bram-cohen (not an academic)

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/chris-slowe (not really an academic)

And that's in the first 10 results. "Fraud" seems strong.

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