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If the author of this article would try to persuade me to join his company as a techie, I would say no. The reason is simple: as experienced as he sounds (and h

If the author of this article would try to persuade me to join his company as a techie, I would say no. The reason is simple: as experienced as he sounds (and he sounds like a total badass, by the way), the overarching conclusion that a hacker may take away from this article is "startups are little more than a lot of clever marketing". Which is sad, in a way. We all read about how Woz was hacking logic boards during the early days of Apple, or how Sergey and Larry built their company on top of their groundbreaking PhD research. As a techie, you would dream that you can join a team where your contribution is crucial and consists of something that can't be outsourced to Ukraine. Yet, this mostly doesn't appear to be the case. Sad.

dtawfik1 9y ago
I am the author and I do agree with what you are saying. Our story was different. I mentioned that one of the original sins of our company was how we budgeted solely into product development. The other original sin was that the idea for the company was ill conceived. We had been working on tech at another company why not release as stand alone product. The idea frankly wasn't that differentiated enough from other products out there. When you don't have a truly differentiated idea like the companies you brought up, then marketing becomes more and more important to get peoples attention. Part of what made the examples you brought up special is that what they were working was so unique. That differentiation/uniqueness makes it a lot easier to market (the virality piece is more likely). In our case because we didn't have that. The way to survive was that we had to fight it out bidding for ads on Google. I would not recommend that path for anyone. It was just the environment we were in. I would say even for those companies to focus on marketing will not be a disservice, but focus on the initial conception of the idea even more. It makes a world of difference in determining what kind of head winds you'll face.
valuearb 9y ago
No one would ever have heard about Woz and his logic board hacking if Jobs hadn’t decided his target market was non technical people in the home and office, insisted the products contain features targeting their needs (no kit, a working computer packaged to connect to a TV, disk drives instead of tapes, etc, etc) and then created massive awareness of Apple using great PR, advertising, and a worldwide sales network of resellers.

dtawfik1 9y ago

I am the author and I do agree with what you are saying. Our story was different. I mentioned that one of the original sins of our company was how we budgeted solely into product development. The other original sin was that the idea for the company was ill conceived. We had been working on tech at another company why not release as stand alone product. The idea frankly wasn't that differentiated enough from other products out there. When you don't have a truly differentiated idea like the companies you brought up, then marketing becomes more and more important to get peoples attention. Part of what made the examples you brought up special is that what they were working was so unique. That differentiation/uniqueness makes it a lot easier to market (the virality piece is more likely). In our case because we didn't have that. The way to survive was that we had to fight it out bidding for ads on Google. I would not recommend that path for anyone. It was just the environment we were in. I would say even for those companies to focus on marketing will not be a disservice, but focus on the initial conception of the idea even more. It makes a world of difference in determining what kind of head winds you'll face.

valuearb 9y ago

No one would ever have heard about Woz and his logic board hacking if Jobs hadn’t decided his target market was non technical people in the home and office, insisted the products contain features targeting their needs (no kit, a working computer packaged to connect to a TV, disk drives instead of tapes, etc, etc) and then created massive awareness of Apple using great PR, advertising, and a worldwide sales network of resellers.