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Well, I mean I don't want to judge all startups. In fact if you take any of this offhand advice as gospel, well I wouldn't. Maybe I should have scattered "pro

by urthor 5y ago

Well, I mean I don't want to judge all startups. In fact if you take any of this offhand advice as gospel, well I wouldn't. Maybe I should have scattered "probably" and "often" about the place. 1: ------------------------------------------------------------ When you read the book, ole Fred is not a fan of large engineering units. Forget two pizzas (Bezos is from New York, two pizzas for him is ~10 people). Fred's view is actually: 1x captain/tech lead, 1x co-pilot, 1x ops guy equivalent, 1x business analyst equivalent who can be sent to meetings (he worked for IBM). (And then two secretaries. And an copy editor for the documentation, because no internet. No internet! The documentation must be written! The lead developer needs to follow my favorite advice of all time: Can't write? Imitate Hemingway. And a full-time librarian for the punch cards. And a full-time employee just to maintain the minicomputer that was your debugger. Because hey, the book was written in 1975. The internet doesn't exist, email doesn't exist, the engineers almost certainly can't touch type. And anyone without an attractive female secretary was nobody. The pimply faced youth's job as config wunderkid and unofficial court jester fills most of those roles these days) 2: ------------------------------------------------------------ If you think of all the amazing software that has been made by one person... How many people do you need to make amazing software? What are you even making?

JonChesterfield 5y ago
Can you think of any amazing software written by one person who was working for another person who owned the company that owned said software? I sympathize with the argument that one engineer can be sufficient but am doubtful about them being an employee as opposed to founder.
- urthor 5y ago
  That's exactly what happened with Twitter. It was at a company named Odeo. But yes, I think you can have two high quality employees make good software? I mean they're employees, you're going to give them marching orders to do something presumably.
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    This is hard to achieve because generally good engineers are either working high pay tech jobs OR they work in a startup as founders / early employees with make-me-rich shares. Sure, there are exceptions who don't know their worth. In general it's hard to find mediocre technical cofounders and very very hard to find good technical cofounders.
    - urthor 5y ago
      I think the assumption here is that this is a Hackernews thread about someone asking how to make their startup succeed. Therefore, I wrote the post with some sort of assumption that OP is the technical founder. Hence OP is supplying the stuff like the vision, the outline of the tech stack, OP probably made a lot of stuff themselves. Hence, it was more a guide on how to find extremely dedicated and good engineers to work for you, the founder. And how to deploy them to take load off you as the technical founder. As a technical founder you rapidly become far more important as a store of technical knowledge. You're off to customers doing technical sales, networking with people you know for hints at how to solve your technical problems, etc etc. Hence,what OP needs is top quality execution while they go off and do all that stuff. And ye ole Ghanian FOSS committer is the tree I'd shake.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
Your comments are difficult for me to understand, although you do have a fun and whimsical style! I wasn't taking it as gospel and I agree some engineering outfits are (or at least appear to be) overstaffed or inefficient, and a small number of very driven and talented people can produce some incredible things. But when it comes to making a product it can take a radically larger amount of engineering effort than it would appear. PS Semi is an example of an ARM-beating company which was founded by a visionary engineer who almost certainly had the big ideas himself or within a small group of technical leadership. It still took a hundred engineers 4 years to bring out their first product.
- urthor 5y ago
  Oh well yes I agree. There are problems that genuinely take more people. That said, Palo Alto Semiconductor was hardware, which has a far higher barrier to entry than software engineering does/can.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    It was a fabless company so you basically write code and send it off to get built. There's more details to it, but a single person could write a very small CPU and put it on an FPGA (or ASIC if they have the tools) in a few months. That's just one example though. There's lots of software examples. Compilers, browsers, OS kernels, database servers, hypervisors. A single person can write any of those, but to make a competitive product it's often a very different story.
    - urthor 5y ago
      One of the most interesting things about hardware vs software is the barrier to entry. Hardware intellectual property has an insane number of working parts and "factors" (electrical resistance, photo-lithography, metal layers, silicon is amazing) all have to be solved. Software by contrast, follows the open source model. All those things you mentioned, are being done by people and academics in their space time on the internet. You're essentially assembling pre-configured tools Hardware is more difficult, because the laws of physics are FAR harder to account for, than tying together APIs. Because APIs are after all, designed for humans to be able to understand and configure. Software is also complex, but the good people in FOSS have already assembled their shit for free and are giving it to you. Additionally, basically no hardware IP and blueprints are open sourced. Because of the free flow of goods (and not services), someone in an IP disrespectful country will clone you and sell your goods internationally. You have basically no resource to pursue that individual. Launching an IP disrespecting internet business at scale however? That is almost impossible. As soon as your IP disrespecting competitor gets going, you can hamstring them. Hence for hardware, create a develop, release, iterate cycle, and keeping the money flowing, you essentially need to employ a LOT of people to get your startup going. Hence VS fund about 10 SaaS startups per hardware one. Mostly I was talking about SaaS with the "make your first two engineering hires like this" guide. Clearly for photo-lithography with silicon on leading edge nodes, you just cannot do that.

by urthor 5y ago

JonChesterfield 5y ago

Can you think of any amazing software written by one person who was working for another person who owned the company that owned said software? I sympathize with the argument that one engineer can be sufficient but am doubtful about them being an employee as opposed to founder.

urthor 5y ago
That's exactly what happened with Twitter. It was at a company named Odeo. But yes, I think you can have two high quality employees make good software? I mean they're employees, you're going to give them marching orders to do something presumably.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  This is hard to achieve because generally good engineers are either working high pay tech jobs OR they work in a startup as founders / early employees with make-me-rich shares. Sure, there are exceptions who don't know their worth. In general it's hard to find mediocre technical cofounders and very very hard to find good technical cofounders.
  - urthor 5y ago
    I think the assumption here is that this is a Hackernews thread about someone asking how to make their startup succeed. Therefore, I wrote the post with some sort of assumption that OP is the technical founder. Hence OP is supplying the stuff like the vision, the outline of the tech stack, OP probably made a lot of stuff themselves. Hence, it was more a guide on how to find extremely dedicated and good engineers to work for you, the founder. And how to deploy them to take load off you as the technical founder. As a technical founder you rapidly become far more important as a store of technical knowledge. You're off to customers doing technical sales, networking with people you know for hints at how to solve your technical problems, etc etc. Hence,what OP needs is top quality execution while they go off and do all that stuff. And ye ole Ghanian FOSS committer is the tree I'd shake.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

Your comments are difficult for me to understand, although you do have a fun and whimsical style! I wasn't taking it as gospel and I agree some engineering outfits are (or at least appear to be) overstaffed or inefficient, and a small number of very driven and talented people can produce some incredible things. But when it comes to making a product it can take a radically larger amount of engineering effort than it would appear. PS Semi is an example of an ARM-beating company which was founded by a visionary engineer who almost certainly had the big ideas himself or within a small group of technical leadership. It still took a hundred engineers 4 years to bring out their first product.

urthor 5y ago
Oh well yes I agree. There are problems that genuinely take more people. That said, Palo Alto Semiconductor was hardware, which has a far higher barrier to entry than software engineering does/can.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  It was a fabless company so you basically write code and send it off to get built. There's more details to it, but a single person could write a very small CPU and put it on an FPGA (or ASIC if they have the tools) in a few months. That's just one example though. There's lots of software examples. Compilers, browsers, OS kernels, database servers, hypervisors. A single person can write any of those, but to make a competitive product it's often a very different story.
  - urthor 5y ago
    One of the most interesting things about hardware vs software is the barrier to entry. Hardware intellectual property has an insane number of working parts and "factors" (electrical resistance, photo-lithography, metal layers, silicon is amazing) all have to be solved. Software by contrast, follows the open source model. All those things you mentioned, are being done by people and academics in their space time on the internet. You're essentially assembling pre-configured tools Hardware is more difficult, because the laws of physics are FAR harder to account for, than tying together APIs. Because APIs are after all, designed for humans to be able to understand and configure. Software is also complex, but the good people in FOSS have already assembled their shit for free and are giving it to you. Additionally, basically no hardware IP and blueprints are open sourced. Because of the free flow of goods (and not services), someone in an IP disrespectful country will clone you and sell your goods internationally. You have basically no resource to pursue that individual. Launching an IP disrespecting internet business at scale however? That is almost impossible. As soon as your IP disrespecting competitor gets going, you can hamstring them. Hence for hardware, create a develop, release, iterate cycle, and keeping the money flowing, you essentially need to employ a LOT of people to get your startup going. Hence VS fund about 10 SaaS startups per hardware one. Mostly I was talking about SaaS with the "make your first two engineering hires like this" guide. Clearly for photo-lithography with silicon on leading edge nodes, you just cannot do that.