Let's not forget that the twins made at least 60 million dollars from NOTHING but an idea and very little effort. That seems like an incredible business model.
/s
A Simple Filter to Weed Out Non-technical Co-founders
21–30 of 37 posts
Re: A Simple Filter to Weed Out Non-technical Co-founders
#22Based on the movie, Zuckerberg didn't have the decency to inform the people he was working with that he'd moved on. The moment he stopped communicating with them, a red flag should have gone up and they should have parted ways and hired someone else. Both sides contributed to the end result. The Winkelvii should have been more closely involved with the execution of the project. They should have also formalized the relationship legally before allowing him to work on it.
Re: A Simple Filter to Weed Out Non-technical Co-founders
#23Hang on, there are people who watched that movie and sympathized with the Winkelvii? They were a cartoon character playing up every negative stereotype of old money that exists. That's like someone sympathizing with the villain from Die Hard or something.
Or the Monopoly guy.
Re: A Simple Filter to Weed Out Non-technical Co-founders
#24You want to qualify your relationship with a founder based solely on the answer to a single question about a popular Hollywood flick?
It's the same as weeding out programmers by starting with the FizzBuzz question. For it to be worthwhile, you need to be interviewing a lot of potential candidates.
I don't think it's the same, FizzBuzz is so trivial that it's ludicrous not to be able to write it if you're even slightly technical.
Re: A Simple Filter to Weed Out Non-technical Co-founders
#25Let's not forget that the twins made at least 60 million dollars from NOTHING but an idea and very little effort. That seems like an incredible business model. /s
Hmmm, I wonder if there's already people out there working this angle? Maybe I should get a team of shuckster-nontech-cofounder-wannabes together, create a big list of relatively obvious ideas, propose the ideas to every up and coming programmer/founder I can swindle a meeting with (and very carefully document the meeting), then just sit back and wait for one of them to get wildly successful with their variation on one of the obvious ideas and point some no-win-no-fee lawyer at them...
Re: A Simple Filter to Weed Out Non-technical Co-founders
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the same as weeding out programmers by starting with the FizzBuzz question. For it to be worthwhile, you need to be interviewing a lot of potential candidates.
I don't think it's the same, FizzBuzz is so trivial that it's ludicrous not to be able to write it if you're even slightly technical.
FizzBuzz = objective
ZuckWink = subjective
Re: A Simple Filter to Weed Out Non-technical Co-founders
#27I think he undercuts his own argument.
If the idea only takes four hours to build, and the result is a commercially value product, then how can he argue the idea isn't the uniquely valuable component, and his labor is really the commodity? Does he really believe that _nobody_else_ can build it in 4 hours or so?
Obviously, execution is important. But if someone has an idea that's great and doesn't require a lot of execution, then the majority of the value of the end product should probably be assigned to the idea.
Re: A Simple Filter to Weed Out Non-technical Co-founders
#28I think he undercuts his own argument. If the idea only takes four hours to build, and the result is a commercially value product, then how can he argue the idea isn't the uniquely valuable component, and his labor is really the commodity? Does he really believe that _nobody_else_ can build it in 4 hours or so? Obviously, execution is important. But if someone has an idea that's great and doesn't require a lot of exe…
Maybe he has the experience of 1000 hackers and 1000 project managers!
Or maybe hes just 21.
Re: A Simple Filter to Weed Out Non-technical Co-founders
#29I think he undercuts his own argument. If the idea only takes four hours to build, and the result is a commercially value product, then how can he argue the idea isn't the uniquely valuable component, and his labor is really the commodity? Does he really believe that _nobody_else_ can build it in 4 hours or so? Obviously, execution is important. But if someone has an idea that's great and doesn't require a lot of exe…
seems like in this case coming up with the idea is easy, building a prototype is easy, and building a solid, profitable company with stable management and growth prospects is hard and time consuming. So it's the same as every other business scenario ever.
Re: A Simple Filter to Weed Out Non-technical Co-founders
#30I think he undercuts his own argument. If the idea only takes four hours to build, and the result is a commercially value product, then how can he argue the idea isn't the uniquely valuable component, and his labor is really the commodity? Does he really believe that _nobody_else_ can build it in 4 hours or so? Obviously, execution is important. But if someone has an idea that's great and doesn't require a lot of exe…
seems like in this case coming up with the idea is easy, building a prototype is easy, and building a solid, profitable company with stable management and growth prospects is hard and time consuming. So it's the same as every other business scenario ever.
Well, as far as I can tell, he has no idea if coming up with the idea was easy. And anyway, I'm not sure ideas are valued based on how hard they are to come up with. Work can be based on replacement value, but I don't think you can do that with ideas.