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I used to work in a web agency in France. By chance, all my projects were e-commerce startups that outsourced their development and ops to us. One may argue tha
by ovi256 14y ago
I used to work in a web agency in France. By chance, all my projects were e-commerce startups that outsourced their development and ops to us. One may argue that dev was not a core competency for them, but I personally doubt it. Even with our best effort, we were not as invested as an in-house tech co-founder would have been, not by far.
Of course, other reasons prevailed, and anyone who knows French business pecularities would see some more reasons for this state of affairs. For one, most French startups, especially e-commerce, are founded by business school graduates, ex managemant consultants, basically the MBA crowd. They mostly don't want to have a tech co-founder, as tech work is seen as low-status. Some of their failure modes are directly related to this. So is their focus on b2b partnerships and bizdev even for e-commerce.
There are, of course, French startups run by tech people, and I know plenty who do well and run circles around direct competitors that fit the above patterns.
- maxcameron 14y agoI think you proved the point. The startups that focus on technical leadership run circles around those that don't. Why do you think that's the case? Faster iteration?
- ovi256 14y agoI don't have enough information to say, but faster iteration is a solid bet. Plus better visibility into technical feasibility and cost, which leads to doing technical daring things as soon as they become possible. This becomes an unfair advantage fast for the tech startups, as the MBA crowd gets their tech bearings mostly from monthly magazines which are years beyond the state of the art. This means they only do tech things once they are common practice, so they'll never have a tech advantage. As an engineer, I'm biased, of course, but this looks to me like: tech founders have to learn some biz, marketing and management skills, which is feasible, to be able to judge business opportunities and execute on them. The MBA crowd already knows how to do this, but they need to learn tech skills, in order to judge tech opportunities and execute on them, which is harder for them. Edited for spelling.