91–100 of 111 posts
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I think product visionary falls under "UX guy". The name "product visionary" by definition means he has an excellent grasp of user-oriented design and focus.
In the industry we call the "Product Managers".
It is so rare that a technologist or two technologists, without a business person, build a killer company (read: not product), unless one of them is a strong business person, and then what makes them more one than the other?
Honestly, the first part of the post is true - if you're a good founder, you'll figure it out. But honestly, I just could not be more sick of posts acting like business founders are nothing but a thorn in the side of the technology world.
And the comments on these types of post are laughable. "Oh, at the beginning your job is to make sandwiches." I was selling partners on our product before it ever existed. If your business person is making sandwiches, it's no wonder they had to beg people to build their product.
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Because non-technical people lack the skill of implementing ideas in code, their experience in following through with ideas and learning from that process is extremely limited. Clearly, coming up with ideas and trying them out is not something you can only do in code, but when you do code you do that all the time . Every day, every hour, maybe even several times an hour. Ironically, a self-described non-technical "id…
They all think they are the rare exception.
Often the focus of their idea is the consequences of their new fangled web service once it already exists and have already succeeded. They tend to focus on how cool it will be when it exists, when their idea has already materialized, has made a dent in the world and has a great amount of users and a good reputation.
Rarely do they focus on the difficult part: how to get there from here. How to solve the chicken and egg problem. And because they don't focus on that journey, they tend to miss things, like they say the idea will attract people of type A, but when you ask them about a problem they introduce attribute X that clearly isn't attractive to type A, and yet they don't tweak the idea to fit the new circumstances. This is because they are bad at making mental models, unlike programmers they don't make or use mental models every hour of every day.
But it's the idea they think is great, they usually don't claim to be the next Steve Jobs.
Good post. Speaking as a technical guy, my default position is to be turned off by co-founding with a business guy unless they have an amazing track record. I like the advice of earning a technical co-founder. I just wish more business guys realized their ideas aren't that special, aren't a magic way of printing money and just coming up with the idea doesn't entitle you to 75% of a two-man venture. It doesn't even re…
You could flip it and it would be just as true (that is, not at all): Speaking as a business guy, my default position is to be turned off by co-founding with a technical guy unless they have an amazing track record. I like the advice of earning a business co-founder. I just wish more technical guys realized their code isn't that special, isn't a magic way of printing money and just coming up with the implementation d…
Good post. Speaking as a technical guy, my default position is to be turned off by co-founding with a business guy unless they have an amazing track record. I like the advice of earning a technical co-founder. I just wish more business guys realized their ideas aren't that special, aren't a magic way of printing money and just coming up with the idea doesn't entitle you to 75% of a two-man venture. It doesn't even re…
You could flip it and it would be just as true (that is, not at all): Speaking as a business guy, my default position is to be turned off by co-founding with a technical guy unless they have an amazing track record. I like the advice of earning a business co-founder. I just wish more technical guys realized their code isn't that special, isn't a magic way of printing money and just coming up with the implementation d…
I can name innumerable potentially groundbreaking startups whose ideas seemed to be (and their competing companies proved to be) great, yet the technical shortcomings in the product caused them to fail. They were soundly beat by more technical teams that could build and scale a product better, often even led by very technical people. I'm talking about some truly great companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and (arguably) Facebook.
Moreover, damoncali, if you have experience starting companies and building products and advising and observing others in doing so, then you also know that most products never ship. They never ship because the technical team can't build a product on a timeline. They can't figure out the problem, they don't code well enough to scale beyond 1000 lines of code, they don't know how to say NO to the business side clamoring for useless features, and so on.
Yes, a lot of products get built and are useless and never sell, but far more are ideas floating in minds that are never even built to completion.
A good technical team will execute, execute quickly, scale and be far ahead of most competition who doesn't value the technical side.
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So, you need a sales guy. I don't think I've ever met a self-described "business guy" who wasn't a student. If someone is a great salesman, they are a "sales guy". If they write ads, they are a "marketing guy". If they allocate capital, hire and fire, and lobby the CEO for more funds they are "managers". When people say "business", it means they don't know what they are able to do, but want to make money. Or that the…
What does that make the CEO?
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> It doesn't even really entitle you to an extra 10%. Depends on the capabilities of the business guy. The best idea in the world, with the best technical execution in the world, is worth precisely $0 without the capability to bring it to market: to build sales channels and drive growing revenues. This is a real skill, often over-looked by gung-ho coders with a neat idea. If you don't have the contacts and the experi…
So, you need a sales guy. I don't think I've ever met a self-described "business guy" who wasn't a student. If someone is a great salesman, they are a "sales guy". If they write ads, they are a "marketing guy". If they allocate capital, hire and fire, and lobby the CEO for more funds they are "managers". When people say "business", it means they don't know what they are able to do, but want to make money. Or that the…