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Thank you. I agree 100%, that is why I wrote the post. I didn't reveal it too much in there, but as a non-technical founder, there are ways to make it work.

by sthomps 17y ago

mixmax 17y ago
Absolutely. The way I see it is that there are a number of ingredients involved in successfully doing a startup: Marketing, sales, finance, people, luck, ambition, domain knowledge, etc. You can be weak in one area but then you'll have to compensate in other areas to make it up. I know a very successful founder of a tech company (yearly turnover 8 figures), and he has no idea how to hack. But he does have acute people skills, and he's brilliant at sales. He was also lucky that he got into a domain that had a lot of possibility. I also know a guy that's a brilliant programmer, but his projects never go anywhere. He doesn't know how to sell his product, and he's afraid of giving up control. The inevitable result is that noone has ever heard of him or his company.
- sthomps 17y ago
  Those are great examples. There are a multitude of things to do in a company, and everything has to work in unison. I also think you write a very good blog, the posts are great.
  - mixmax 17y ago
    Hey thanks :-) It's not updated as as often as I'd like though...
- hga 17y ago
  In the '80s I read one of the Digital Press books on the history of minicomputers (from the DEC perspective, e.g. Gordon Bell was one of the authors as I recall), and one of the observations was that the successful ones did an adequate job of everything that was essential. No one ever bought DEC because they offered great mass storage solutions (and let's not even go into the early RA81; CPUs, on the other hand...). But they did at least an adequate job of every essential thing (documentation, build quality, then the softer stuff) that they succeeded when the vast majority of their peers failed.

Thank you. I agree 100%, that is why I wrote the post. I didn't reveal it too much in there, but as a non-technical founder, there are ways to make it work.

by sthomps 17y ago

Thank you. I agree 100%, that is why I wrote the post. I didn't reveal it too much in there, but as a non-technical founder, there are ways to make it work.

mixmax 17y ago

Absolutely. The way I see it is that there are a number of ingredients involved in successfully doing a startup: Marketing, sales, finance, people, luck, ambition, domain knowledge, etc. You can be weak in one area but then you'll have to compensate in other areas to make it up. I know a very successful founder of a tech company (yearly turnover 8 figures), and he has no idea how to hack. But he does have acute people skills, and he's brilliant at sales. He was also lucky that he got into a domain that had a lot of possibility. I also know a guy that's a brilliant programmer, but his projects never go anywhere. He doesn't know how to sell his product, and he's afraid of giving up control. The inevitable result is that noone has ever heard of him or his company.

sthomps 17y ago
Those are great examples. There are a multitude of things to do in a company, and everything has to work in unison. I also think you write a very good blog, the posts are great.
- mixmax 17y ago
  Hey thanks :-) It's not updated as as often as I'd like though...
hga 17y ago
In the '80s I read one of the Digital Press books on the history of minicomputers (from the DEC perspective, e.g. Gordon Bell was one of the authors as I recall), and one of the observations was that the successful ones did an adequate job of everything that was essential. No one ever bought DEC because they offered great mass storage solutions (and let's not even go into the early RA81; CPUs, on the other hand...). But they did at least an adequate job of every essential thing (documentation, build quality, then the softer stuff) that they succeeded when the vast majority of their peers failed.