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One thing I take issue with, as an entrepreneur, is that he explains a 'tell' for a mediocre management team is that he'll send a talented member to a team and
by smanek 16y ago
One thing I take issue with, as an entrepreneur, is that he explains a 'tell' for a mediocre management team is that he'll send a talented member to a team and they say to me, “we don’t really have a role for that person.”
Well, I'd often get people sent to me, that my VC claimed were amazing and that I should to hire (they usually held senior roles at big/successful companies before). But, without fail, every single one I talked to was a technical idiot. They could talk a good game, and had lots of thoughts about process and structure, but couldn't code their way out of a paper bag.
To be polite, I'd usually tell the VC that there wasn't a good fit, or we didn't have a role for someone so senior, or management focused, or X right now. Would you tell the VC who just wrote you an $N million dollar check that the candidate he thinks is Einstein is an idiot because he claims he's a programmer who 'loves to get his hands dirty' but doesn't understand the difference between a hash table and a linked list? In hindsight, maybe I should have. But I suspect a lot of people won't.
And this was when I was literally the only coder in the company. We didn't need an engineering manager, we needed an engineer. And non-technical VCs couldn't see the difference. (Of course, in an ideal world, you hire someone who is both).
- petervandijck 16y agoYou could tell the vc that "he can't code his way out of a paper bag". Much better than talk about hashtables they won't understand themselves. :)
- smanek 16y agoYeah, the issue was that tech VCs (even non-technical ones) pride themselves on being able to find and recognize technical talent. You're really cutting to the core of their perceived value by telling them they're actually terrible at it. More likely than not, they are going to doubt your ability to recognize talent instead of their own.
- stcredzero 16y agoYou're really cutting to the core of their perceived value by telling them they're actually terrible at it. Hah. I just met someone who has some money and an outsourced "team of 10, programmers plus support" in an eastern european country, yet he doesn't know enough about technology to describe things in terms other than web pages, and can't differentiate between what's a solved problem and what's still being researched at Google. He told me that the thing he called me to talk about, he had requested of his team, and they basically told him, "Well, if you can diagram it, we can build it." I asked him if he had someone who was technical, not an underling, who he had rapport with and could hash these things out like we just had. I suggested that if he didn't that he would benefit greatly if he could find such a person. (And that it wouldn't necessarily be me.) I hit him with this to see his reaction, which, sadly, was to puff himself up with his sales. Wrong. I guess continuous improvement is good enough for his employees, but not good enough for him.
- Dylanlacey 16y agoMaybe you need a metaphor for him, based in finance "At the moment, we're a credit union who only does banking in Japan. We'll expand to loans in English one day. You send us an English speaking loan dilligence expert. He's VERY talented, but at the moment we can't use his skills AND he'd have to learn a whole new language to be able to interact with the rest of our business, none of which he's familiar with."