151–160 of 253 posts
Very pro-labor/anti-capitalist take. Not that it's wrong! > In reality, it should flipped! The technical person is the one who breathes life into an idea and should get the lion’s share.... The riches are in the execution. The work done. Labor is what makes capital useful. Otherwise it's just a pile of money sitting there.
I've bootstrapped and sold two startups, first time with 5 (!) equal cofounders and second time with 3. I've learned a lot along the way, obviously some of that through mistakes of my own. Have my cofounders been perfect? Heck no -- one lacks the same level of drive, the other is less trustworthy (always multiple irons in the fire kinda guy). But we all have strengths, are all generally better off together, and have the combined skill set to run super lean. Even if you think you can do some things better alone, you can never do it all, and that grind will take quite a toll.
Related: over the years the topic of going into business with some of my best friends has come up, and I always say I would never do that. Running a fast-moving, high stakes business with multiple founders involves a lot of tough conversations and occasional relationship strain. My business partners are business partners first, friends second, and I think that's important to consider if you really value a friendship.
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> Which is dumb, because sometimes I'm legitimately better at the strategy half too A semi-related thought I've had recently: I've run into a number of non-technical product people that say that they're primary skill is that they have a great "product sensibility" that engineers lack so they need to step in and provide guidance. It's true that many engineer-designed products are terrible, but I'd argue that most engi…
> But an engineer can't help but also factor in "i'm the one that has to build this, so how much extra work am i giving myself? I wonder how many startups have failed because the tech has been too much of a pain in the ass to maintain and the technical staff burns out and leaves, with more and more expensive developers postponing leaving till as late as possible and doing as little as possible
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What is needed in your opinion? EDIT: I say this as an engineer who is putting his notice in tomorrow to found a startup EDIT EDIT: Thanks guy, this is along the lines I'm thinking. I'll be competing with companies like Asana, Monday.com, and ClickUp. I worked in a consulting environment for two years and these tools could never be adopted despite the org size growing to 1000+ people in my larger team. It was a big p…
Demonstrate traction. The idea person should have at least an audience for the problem space. If not, they are Field of Dreams - build it and they will come. That doesn't work.
This movie probably caused double or triple digit millions of wasted investments by small business owners when it put the wrong idea in to their head.
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What is needed in your opinion? EDIT: I say this as an engineer who is putting his notice in tomorrow to found a startup EDIT EDIT: Thanks guy, this is along the lines I'm thinking. I'll be competing with companies like Asana, Monday.com, and ClickUp. I worked in a consulting environment for two years and these tools could never be adopted despite the org size growing to 1000+ people in my larger team. It was a big p…
Demonstrate traction. The idea person should have at least an audience for the problem space. If not, they are Field of Dreams - build it and they will come. That doesn't work.
I recently walked away from a potential startup because my non-technical partner (MBA ideas guy) wanted an 80/20 equity split in his favor. I was the first to broach the discussion and proposed 50/50. It was a severe misalignment in expectations, and this was after 3 months of meeting regularly to refine the idea and build out prototypes (read: I was building the prototypes). My advice is to have this conversation wi…
I’m running a business that’s currently doing around 32k a month at ~85% margin after 2 years in operations, no funds raised to far. I have a friend who is an MBA and only held corporate roles up until now. I’ve been running companies my entire life, and had one exit that was 42.5M US. We discussed partnering up, and when i mentioned a buy in or 10% equity split (with no buy in) or some combo of the two, he backed of…
The opening image incorrectly refers to Erlich Bachman from Silicon Valley as "Erik."
OP goes on to claim:
>Paul Graham wrote in 2008 that Sam Altman was the best fundraiser he’s ever seen in his 30+ years in the valley. Sam was just 23 years old at that time!
That's not what the linked article says. That post has a single paragraph about Sam Altman that says he's good at fundraising but never says he's the best pg has ever seen[0]:
>Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them. (He wasn't, and he did.) Not everyone has Sam's deal-making ability. I myself don't. But if you don't, you can let the numbers speak for you.
Also, Graham was 43 when he wrote that essay, so he hadn't spent 30 years in Silicon Valley. Viaweb was based in Cambridge and Graham lived in Cambridge at the start of YC. I don't think Graham even moved to Silicon Valley until 2009, five months after the post OP claimed was based on his 30 year tenure there.[1]
These errors are either due to AI hallucinations or lazy writing.
I think the better article on this topic is Jeff Atwood's "Cultivate Teams Not Ideas."[2]
[0] https://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170306095108/http://old.ycombi...
[2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/cultivate-teams-not-ideas/
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> But an engineer can't help but also factor in "i'm the one that has to build this, so how much extra work am i giving myself? I wonder how many startups have failed because the tech has been too much of a pain in the ass to maintain and the technical staff burns out and leaves, with more and more expensive developers postponing leaving till as late as possible and doing as little as possible
Start ups that choose things like Azure are a red flag for me. Churn is really problematic. Learning a code base by having to poke and grok takes a lot longer than being able to fire off a few questions.
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I’m running a business that’s currently doing around 32k a month at ~85% margin after 2 years in operations, no funds raised to far. I have a friend who is an MBA and only held corporate roles up until now. I’ve been running companies my entire life, and had one exit that was 42.5M US. We discussed partnering up, and when i mentioned a buy in or 10% equity split (with no buy in) or some combo of the two, he backed of…
MBA doesn't mean that much by itself.
Finding a good niche and refining a concept to find market fit isn't easy. As a tech guy, it's often not clear where the business value is.
I recently implemented a feature for which I didn't see the full value initially. Once it was done, my co-founder said something like "This feature will make our target audience's eyes pop out of their heads." I can actually see it now but it wasn't clear to me before, yet it was always crystal clear to him as he himself fits within the target market.
Anyway we'll see where this goes, there are a lot of factors at play but in any case, it's nice to have that degree of certainty that yes, we're addressing a genuine need.
If your co-founder isn't within the target market then you're basically just guessing what users want and that's a bad approach.
Sometimes it's more complicated than that though, and that's when you need social networks. For exampls, I've built solutions in pure tech (dev tools) but it's very different. Dev tools is a weird market because it's heavily monopolized by big tech and the target audience (developers) have little say over what tools they get to use on the job. So the fact that I'm in the target market doesn't actually add much value there. Even if the target audience loves something, it doesn't necessarily translate to sales. You have to have experience with developer tools from both a corporate and non-corporate perspective to understand that.