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Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

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Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#81

Post by mathattack »

tensor wrote: post #80
mathattack wrote: post #71

Let's start by accepting that 50% of CTOs can't be above average. What can you do about this as a CEO? I see variations of two themes: 1) Find some benchmark, and reset internal expectations if they're wrong. Replace the technical talent if they're not great. 2) Claim that they're the best, and set high expectations. My belief is that once you've chosen your team, you're better off going with #2. This isn't to say pu…

And of course, this applies to CEOs too. What is a CEO to do when they realize that they are worse than average? What can you do about this as CTO or another part of the team? Sadly, the only option appears to be to quit.

If your boss is a weak performer, your options are to transfer, quit, or organize a coup. The third option is very risky, and doesn't work often outside of investment banks. If your boss is a weak performing CEO, then transfering is taken away.

I'll add a question though... "What makes you think you know your boss's job enough to judge their performance?" This isn't aimed at you, but people in general. As a manager of managers, I've seen people 2 levels below think that their failing manager was outstanding. The reality is they didn't see the things that were important in that manager's job. (This goes for the CEO valuing the CTO)

Understanding other people's performance is very difficult.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#82

Post by fat0wl »

Silhouette wrote: post #72
fat0wl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I don't want to get too venty because I'm too cynical/pessimistic as it is but..... I'm a professional web engineer now & especially as the cloud hosting universe stabilizes, most stuff seems so trivial. Can still be interesting, but yeah most startup level stuff is solved. Previously I completed a master's thesis on audio signal processing / machine learning. Trust me, the work I was doing in that world was 100…

Can still be interesting, but yeah most startup level stuff is solved. If you'd said that the challenges facing most start-ups don't involve solving a particularly interesting technical challenge on day one, I'd agree that this was likely. However, if most start-up level stuff more generally were solved, everyone would be running successful start-ups, which clearly most people aren't.

My personal (albeit naive) belief is that the limiting factors on most startups is a good idea. Start-ups only work when they are based on real consumer desires.

"Necessity is the mother of invention" but what is the mother of a start-up....? There are few who understand this realistically.

The talent is there but where is the business plan? It's not very often you hear a start-up idea that rattles you. If I heard one I'd hop on board just for some stake in the company. Also founder/managers are a pain... I imagine it must suck to be the engineer-slave of an ivy leaguer who is going out to another bar for a fund-raising meeting that will affect your future salary working on their hair-brained idea.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#83

Post by lifeisstillgood »

forgottenpaswrd wrote: post #57

Well, in my experience managing my own software company(I guess I am CEO but I did code a lot in the early days so I know what it is) it is not so much about the quality of the people. The quality is something very important when your company is made by two developers. When you go up from this, you have lots of interactions and complexity. You have love, hatred, you have admiration and envies, you have people that ne…

so how do you get it right?

what is right - focus on technical excellence and product fit or are you meaning trust and honesty levels in the company?

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#84

Post by nolite »

rfnslyr wrote: post #58
mahyarm wrote: post #33

I thought everyone knows that it isn't true, it's like a BS marketing talking point. The things most of us in startups work on isn't technically difficult or pushing the envelope, and that alone should point to not having the best people or teams. Because these places will never gain the interest of or the pay the price for the for the very best, which can easily reach $400k/yr starting. The only technically challeng…

Who are these mystical dev-fairies pulling in such salaries? Which sectors? Positions? Companies? I've had my fair share of jobs and I've never run into anyone who made that much as a developer. I'm talking strictly developer, not a PM, not a director. What kind of people make this money?

I know a guy: several knuth checks, hardcore systems programmer, extraordinarily well read, does advanced math (talking topology), nuclear physics, taught at a respected engineering school. He's being fought over at that level.. Which companies? Theres only the usual suspects who could play on that field

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#85

Post by aryastark »

georgemcbay wrote: post #4
Sakes wrote: post #2

I don't know. If you have a team that is able to consistently ship products that work and are well received by your existing client base, you probably do have some badass tech guys. You don't necessarily have to claim that you are better than all other startups, you just have to claim to have a tech team that is magnitudes better than average teams at other companies. It is crazy to me how many failed projects are fl…

In my experience tech and market success aren't nearly as related as your post suggests. As a 40 year old developer I've worked at a good number of companies (including startups and established ones) over the years including some that were, on average, technically very weak and yet very financially successful and some that were technically extremely strong and failed miserably. All the tech talent in the world won't…

Yep. If technical merit was all the mattered, we would all be using Xerox or Symbolics computers today. Those were some really smart guys. But you can't sell things no one can afford or needs.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#86

Post by [deleted] »

rfnslyr wrote: post #58
mahyarm wrote: post #33

I thought everyone knows that it isn't true, it's like a BS marketing talking point. The things most of us in startups work on isn't technically difficult or pushing the envelope, and that alone should point to not having the best people or teams. Because these places will never gain the interest of or the pay the price for the for the very best, which can easily reach $400k/yr starting. The only technically challeng…

Who are these mystical dev-fairies pulling in such salaries? Which sectors? Positions? Companies? I've had my fair share of jobs and I've never run into anyone who made that much as a developer. I'm talking strictly developer, not a PM, not a director. What kind of people make this money?

[deleted]

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#87

Post by mahyarm »

brianpgordon wrote: post #67
rfnslyr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are these mystical dev-fairies pulling in such salaries? Which sectors? Positions? Companies? I've had my fair share of jobs and I've never run into anyone who made that much as a developer. I'm talking strictly developer, not a PM, not a director. What kind of people make this money?

HFTs. This story hit HN a couple of months ago: > A year into his new job he had a job offer from UBS, the Swiss bank, and a promise to bump up his salary to $400,000 a year. Serge didn’t particularly want to leave Goldman Sachs just to go and work at another big Wall Street firm, and so when Goldman offered to match the offer, he stayed. http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-gol... But yeah, reali…

Also finance machine learning guys making $500k/yr (so I've heard). That also might be HFT.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#88

Post by fleitz »

OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team.

Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or Twitter, or Facebook solving?

I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is 5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the points*timedecay system than HN uses for ranking works.

Fuck, even Google was a 20 year old algorithm.

We're building CRUD apps on what 20 years ago were $75 million dollar computers, not putting men on the moon with pocket calculators.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#89

Post by mahyarm »

soneca wrote: post #56

I think this behavior is created by the fundraising process as we know it. From angels to VCs to YC everybody focus on the team to decide wheter to invest or not. The CEO is supposed to be inspiring leader and a good teamworker, if he praises the CTO as a genius he is perceived as both, with the plus that, if he is a good salesman, the investors believe that the CTO is a genius. So there it is, the startup dream team…

I agree, the 'we have the best team ever' marketing is for investors. Or there is a big implicit disclaimer of 'for the level of difficulty we are working on'.
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