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tl;dr i'm a technical guy and what i do is the hardest thing there is so what you do is easy and hence not needed. oh please. bus dev is hard. making sales is

by jgamman 15y ago

tl;dr i'm a technical guy and what i do is the hardest thing there is so what you do is easy and hence not needed. oh please. bus dev is hard. making sales is hard. figuring out why your cool technical hack is pointless and will make no money is hard. convincing your brilliant co-founder that a simple trivial feature is going to bring a smile to your customer's face is hard. bringing different _expert_ skillsets together so they complement each other is hard. there are bad biz guys out there just the same as there are flub coders. note: i'm not justifying the 'i need a hacker' submissions - that's probably just an indicator that you're not dealing with the top 1%

b14ck 15y ago
There are definitely lots of difficult things other than technical challenges that come up in business. Like you said: making sales, deciding which features to build, etc. I'm not saying that they are "easy", however they pale in comparison to spending years building technical skillskets that allow you to build solutions to problems. The main point I'm trying to make in the article is that "business guys", particularly the sort looking for technical co-founders, really need to teach themselves technical skills. In early stage companies (I probably should have made this more clean in my article), the business guys just aren't necessary. Any engineer can talk with his potential customers and get feedback. Any decent engineer can run A/B tests and improve their conversion rate. Any good engineer can make smart decisions based on their customer data and feedback, and become successful. If you're a "business guy" and teach yourself technical skills, you're immediately more valuable. You can prototype basic features and get feedback. You have the technical understanding of your product to make informed customer decisions. You'll have the ability to spot problems early on, and make adjustments as needed to your product. Even if you're not necessarily a "good" programmer, you can still have much more of an impact with technical skills.

by jgamman 15y ago

b14ck 15y ago

There are definitely lots of difficult things other than technical challenges that come up in business. Like you said: making sales, deciding which features to build, etc. I'm not saying that they are "easy", however they pale in comparison to spending years building technical skillskets that allow you to build solutions to problems. The main point I'm trying to make in the article is that "business guys", particularly the sort looking for technical co-founders, really need to teach themselves technical skills. In early stage companies (I probably should have made this more clean in my article), the business guys just aren't necessary. Any engineer can talk with his potential customers and get feedback. Any decent engineer can run A/B tests and improve their conversion rate. Any good engineer can make smart decisions based on their customer data and feedback, and become successful. If you're a "business guy" and teach yourself technical skills, you're immediately more valuable. You can prototype basic features and get feedback. You have the technical understanding of your product to make informed customer decisions. You'll have the ability to spot problems early on, and make adjustments as needed to your product. Even if you're not necessarily a "good" programmer, you can still have much more of an impact with technical skills.