The worst things startups do | Hacker News Reader

The worst things startups do

scobleizer.com

49 pointsfigured11 comments

It would be a better article without the rackspace plugs.

Most of the rest of it is good though, especially the 'spend the money on the wrong things' bit, that's one plenty of companies (start-ups or not) fall for.

And spending your money on rackspace would be a nice example of spending your money on the right thing (hosting) but in the wrong way (wasteful).

"I can smell programmers."

Scoble would be useful in tech interviews. Like a drug-sniffing dog you could just sic him onto prospective programming candidates and have him bark twice if he smelled the pungent musk of programming talent.

> "3. If I look around and don’t see programmers. I can smell programmers. A good company is full of them. Posterous, for instance, has ONLY programmers. FriendFeed had something like 13 programmers and one other person. Great ratio."

i wonder about this. currently my startup is me and my co-founder, and he's not a programmer (though he can handle version control, html, css and critical thinking). as we grow, should we plan for more outreach/sales/customer service type of folks with the same tech growth, or more programmers to explode on technology platforms and innovation?

i know it depends on our company. i've heard many different pieces of advice.

Having creative people that can think through good product and web design is very important. If the experience and product is not designed well, it doesn't matter how many programmers you have. Even the best programmers won't be able to program a good experience out of it.

Yeah, that definitely depends on your type of company. For example, some startups build stuff that they aim to sell to larger companies or corporations, then you might need to hire someone to help start the sales process, long before your product is "done". Or in contrast, you might not be able to sell/release until a certain point in time, and it might be better to hire programmers so you can reach that point sooner.

Probably obvious, but it also depends on funding. Some startups can afford to hire a lot of programmers and build stuff for a longer time before they have to make money. Others have less funding and need to make money as soon as they can.

> "I’ve been in more than one startup that had bad chairs and small screens for their engineers but they had an expensive coffee machine."

I'm more productive with good coffee and a small screen than I would be with bad coffee and a large screen.

Addict.

We prefer, 'enthusiasts'.

This article brought back haunting memories of Cuil. Pity, because I wouldn't mind more competition in the search market, particularly since Google has gotten less relevant for programming related queries.

It could be that startups which are mostly programmers, by necessity, are composed of well-rounded programmers with design/product/business sense.

(of course the standard disclaimer that you can't run enterprise software startups on programmers alone should be put out there)

the best part of the post for me, was the interview with Posterous. Amazing how much they have done, with a four man team.

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