4 ms·
Great article, I'm happy to see that I have experience succeeding at many of these attributes, and am studying many others. I'm eagerly looking forward to the s
by il 16y ago
Great article, I'm happy to see that I have experience succeeding at many of these attributes, and am studying many others. I'm eagerly looking forward to the second half.
Aside from these, I can't emphasize enough how important it is for the business guy to have some technical knowledge/ability, at least enough to be able to make reasonable demands of developers and determine project scope, expense, etc. If they've at least managed a technical team before, they'll know better than to ask you to build the next Google in a week on shared hosting.
I was doing consulting recently for a B2C Web 2.0 tech startup where both cofounders were great at fundraising, talking to customers, etc but were completely nontechnical. Even making a small change to their site, like adding analytics code or uploading a new landing page involved an email to their outsourced dev team in India and 24 hours of waiting. Needless to say, the job was a nightmare.
- sabj 16y agoWow! That sounds crazy indeed. My feeling is that if you are reasonably smart, there is nothing to stop you from learning those kinds of skills. Plus, in that kind of situation, it's very important to make sure that you don't get ripped off, etc. Have to be able to understand what's going on. Honestly, making / maintaining / designing web sites is fairly easy, especially if you have something in place and are looking only for incremental change. While I don't expect everyone to be able to write beautiful CSS in their sleep, if you have a web startup you should be able to know what's going on there. I can handle all kinds of front-end / design problems, just never cared to develop the technical chops for serious back-end wizardry. Looks like I am having to try to pick up more of that these days.