4 ms·

"the wisdom to know what to build in the mind of a single person is much stronger than having 'business people" I completely agree. Infact I am a single person

"the wisdom to know what to build in the mind of a single person is much stronger than having 'business people" I completely agree. Infact I am a single person and can deal with both parts. But this idea is in conflict with what YC has said: "We're reluctant to accept one-person companies, though we have funded a couple." my comment was from my perspective not a vc. Of course when I put efforts on the business side of things I feel I am as effective as doing the development. But as someone looking at a VC as an option instead of self funding, I think that I could reduce my efforts on the business side and do more on development. The original comment was "we worry if we had a lot of money..." my question/comment was if more money is bad then offer more expertise.

DaniFong 19y ago
PG explicitly gave justification for this: "Ideally you want between two and four founders. It would be hard to start with just one. One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear. Even Bill Gates, who seems to be able to bear a good deal of moral weight, had to have a co-founder." That does seem to be true. But I wouldn't think that implies a need for specialization, nor that it would help. For further comments on the subject, Philip Greenspun has written substantially about how small teams of two or three consultants handling everything associated with a project would outperform, in terms of time, money, quality, and customer and consultant satisfaction, more specialized, supported teams. That's contingent upon picking the right people, and training them the right way: communicating the right values, building up a well rounded skill set, getting people thinking about the customer and how to them to pay for stuff. When VC's took over and the structure was rearranged to encompass business specialists, and hr experts and so on, the company rapidly collapsed. There were other factors too: Joel Spolsky writes that the consulting market collapsed in general, but ArsDigita had big customers, which actually didn't go away, they just started doing things in house because ArsDigita got worse. He explains some of this in the following link: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail94.html http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail94.html
- ubudesign 19y ago
  Agreed. I've worked in a startup that grow too fast and a new VC brought in "experts" and everything just collapsed. Of course it was also during startup bubbles. I would probably apply design-by-contract methods. HR, finance and others do play a good role in a company but as long as they are contained :) I guess startups would eventually want to become a real company and there are costs in that as well. you can minimized that but you can not completely avoid them
  - DaniFong 19y ago
    I dislike working in 'real companies' so much that I've hedged my bets, in case we're successful: we plan on basically growing by mitosis, spawning little, autonomous exclaves of our company (of which we have partial ownership, non-controlling ownership). I bet other hackers dislike working in 'real companies' too, so it might even be a magnet for more independently minded hackers. The most independently minded hackers are likely to go off and start their own, though.

DaniFong 19y ago

PG explicitly gave justification for this: "Ideally you want between two and four founders. It would be hard to start with just one. One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear. Even Bill Gates, who seems to be able to bear a good deal of moral weight, had to have a co-founder." That does seem to be true. But I wouldn't think that implies a need for specialization, nor that it would help. For further comments on the subject, Philip Greenspun has written substantially about how small teams of two or three consultants handling everything associated with a project would outperform, in terms of time, money, quality, and customer and consultant satisfaction, more specialized, supported teams. That's contingent upon picking the right people, and training them the right way: communicating the right values, building up a well rounded skill set, getting people thinking about the customer and how to them to pay for stuff. When VC's took over and the structure was rearranged to encompass business specialists, and hr experts and so on, the company rapidly collapsed. There were other factors too: Joel Spolsky writes that the consulting market collapsed in general, but ArsDigita had big customers, which actually didn't go away, they just started doing things in house because ArsDigita got worse. He explains some of this in the following link: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail94.html http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail94.html

ubudesign 19y ago
Agreed. I've worked in a startup that grow too fast and a new VC brought in "experts" and everything just collapsed. Of course it was also during startup bubbles. I would probably apply design-by-contract methods. HR, finance and others do play a good role in a company but as long as they are contained :) I guess startups would eventually want to become a real company and there are costs in that as well. you can minimized that but you can not completely avoid them
- DaniFong 19y ago
  I dislike working in 'real companies' so much that I've hedged my bets, in case we're successful: we plan on basically growing by mitosis, spawning little, autonomous exclaves of our company (of which we have partial ownership, non-controlling ownership). I bet other hackers dislike working in 'real companies' too, so it might even be a magnet for more independently minded hackers. The most independently minded hackers are likely to go off and start their own, though.