171–180 of 381 posts
This is what I constantly tell my students: The hard part about doing a tech product for the most part isn't the what beginners think makes tech hard — the hard part is wrangling systemic complexity in a good, sustainable and reliable way. Many non-tech people e.g. look at programmers and think the hard part is knowing what this garble of weird text means. But this is the easy part. And if you are a person who would…
There have been multiple ads/posts recently from companies citing YC__ looking for a technical cofounder. So, is this post correlated?
Maybe. Those posts offer preposterously low equity, so I wonder whom it is supposed to attract. Suckers? Y Combinator sincerely wants people to succeed, I don’t think it’s reactionary or myopic like that. That said, to fill whatever hundreds of spots nowadays, they’ve exhausted Math 55, it graduates all of 12 people every year. They’re dipping into a far greater supply of nepo babies than ever before. Those jagoffs c…
There have been multiple ads/posts recently from companies citing YC__ looking for a technical cofounder. So, is this post correlated?
Do you mean the “founding engineer” jobs? It can be misleading, but those are not founder roles. They are regular employee roles where the “founding” part of the title is just an honorary indication that the person joined the company early. YC won’t count someone as a founder unless they have at least 10% equity in the company. Founding engineers are typically getting 2% or less (from what I understand).
Even this article IMO subtly demonstrates the mindset that leads nontechnical founders to not think they need a technical cofounder, by phrasing the search for one as “recruiting” as if they were a subordinate or code monkey. It should be a partner relationship, not a subordinate relationship. This mindset that technical cofounders are essentially “coders” (a term I hate) is very prevalent among inexperienced nontech…
> while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of. I considered it a bit, and you know what, I'd wager that four-fifths of tech business dynamics flow from this statement. Technical expertise is the money printer onto which all manners of value extraction anchor themselves, like barnacles. If not at the creation, then, for a time, it is good. And then it happens anyway 5-10 years down the li…
A common one, I think, is technical people thinking management or business expertise is easy (or even beneath them) because they're so smart in other areas--and any problems they might have can surely be solved with the same tools they use to solve engineering problems, right? Which is kind of the flip side of the attitude of the kind of nontechnical founders we're talking about.
Another thing I'm facing myself (as a technical person) is when I've successfully dipped a toe into a management role, I was lucky enough that the people I was leading were all also technical people whose personalities were mostly in line with mine. But I've had to remind myself that if I put myself in a leadership position again, it won't always be that simple...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> E.g. If you’re surrounded by yes men who will code whatever without question, product people greatly prefer that, and you end up sidelined. I'm amazed at how non-obvious this seems to most engineers and how often this angst gets repeated in online tech communities. I mean, when I was in academia there was a tension between publishing impactful results or cozying up with the right professors into the right conferenc…
I can see this in academia, because you're working on reputation as much as anything, if not more so, sorta prone to being like this in a way. Finance however, not once[0] have I either observed nor heard of someone working in finance being overruled by a product person. If finance says no go its no go , simple as that. People tend to listen to the money folks, even at a high-level. [0]: I work both in fintech and ha…
Totally, but finance people want to see the company succeed too, and even if finance says it's a no-go, product people will still keep trying to push around them. I just mean that this tension exists between different stakeholders in every organization. If we knew ways out of this, we'd revolutionize government bureaucracies, vastly increase firm efficiencies, sort out FOSS issues, the world would be our oyster! But human coordination problems are really hard. The hardest problems out there really. That's my general point. Too much airtime is given to tech people who seem to not understand this. It's a bit like complaining that when I jump I fall down. I also can't imagine spending 20 years bemoaning this aspect of human nature.
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Windows
Windows (especially v3.1, Windows 95 and Windows XP) was leaps and bounds better than its contemporaries when it came to normal desktop use. You can have the most technologically advanced OS in the world but if it is too difficult to use for 99% of potential users then it it not a good product. Microsoft was one of the first few companies to really get this right.
In fact, I think that behind the scenes of the ominous MS investment in Apple (with the whole big-brotheresque Bill Gates appearance) there was an explicit--business, not technical--agreement between Gates and Jobs that Apple would not venture out of their own hardware, specifically to allow Windows to continue its PC dominance.
This is what I constantly tell my students: The hard part about doing a tech product for the most part isn't the what beginners think makes tech hard — the hard part is wrangling systemic complexity in a good, sustainable and reliable way. Many non-tech people e.g. look at programmers and think the hard part is knowing what this garble of weird text means. But this is the easy part. And if you are a person who would…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can see this in academia, because you're working on reputation as much as anything, if not more so, sorta prone to being like this in a way. Finance however, not once[0] have I either observed nor heard of someone working in finance being overruled by a product person. If finance says no go its no go , simple as that. People tend to listen to the money folks, even at a high-level. [0]: I work both in fintech and ha…
> Finance however, not once[0] have I either observed nor heard of someone working in finance being overruled by a product person. If finance says no go its no go, simple as that. People tend to listen to the money folks, even at a high-level. Totally, but finance people want to see the company succeed too, and even if finance says it's a no-go, product people will still keep trying to push around them. I just mean t…
I think this is where the tension comes from in the lasting, I'm still complaining about 20 years later sorta thing. Once you realize the value you are delivering to the company, naturally, you start to want to have some more say over the value chain, I think this is innante to human behavior, but there is alot of gates between ENG and the rest of the org, most of the time, from what I've observed.
Look at, for example, how "Agile" is implemented at a company. It focuses on ENG having to address stakeholders, without really saying that ENG should be its own stakeholder too. With SCRUM and other systems, the emphasis tends to be on outside stakeholders and what they want, rather than bringing ENG to parity with other stakeholders so everyone has more equal input on the work streams - which ultimately, when this is actually done, prevents more problems than it creates, nearly every time - yet you can feel the resistance in most orgs to giving ENG a full table stake
Corollary: you do not need a non-technical co-founder. My advice to engineers is that it's nearly always easier to learn business/sales than to learn to like a co-founder, especially the type generally drawn to being a "business" founder. It is good to have a co-founder in general though, get one of those if you can. Just don't worry about finding complementary skills, bias entirely towards someone you can work with.
I generally agree but if you're developing a product for a niche industry and that non-technical co-founder has a shit ton of insight and connections, it will 1000% open doors. Then again, perhaps you can partner with those folks in other ways vs giving away 50% equity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of. I considered it a bit, and you know what, I'd wager that four-fifths of tech business dynamics flow from this statement. Technical expertise is the money printer onto which all manners of value extraction anchor themselves, like barnacles. If not at the creation, then, for a time, it is good. And then it happens anyway 5-10 years down the li…
> That said, there are different failure modes for purely technical people not understanding business. A common one, I think, is technical people thinking management or business expertise is easy (or even beneath them) because they're so smart in other areas--and any problems they might have can surely be solved with the same tools they use to solve engineering problems, right? Which is kind of the flip side of the a…
I assume most MBAs already know this.
Lots of technical people learn the hard way.