4 ms·
I am in a startup with three other full-time engineers and a strong intern team. We all have advanced degrees, but more education and better ideas wouldn't help
by PennRobotics 1mo ago
I am in a startup with three other full-time engineers and a strong intern team. We all have advanced degrees, but more education and better ideas wouldn't help us at this point. So much of our time is spent on non-engineering tasks: quote requests, documentation, marketing, hosting visitors, packaging, CUSTOMS, coffee machine cleaning, assembling office furniture, ordering components, labeling components, asking vendors for part modifications, customer support. It's difficult finding the perfect office manager, so we do everything.
I also took an entrepreneurship sequence in grad school. In agreement with PG, we were taught not to hand off large chunks of the business to the MBAs. In contrast with PG: we learned that between team, funding, and product, product is least important while team is most important. If that wasn't true, why would large companies "acqui-hire"? (In fairness, PG didn't say product is the most important thing at a startup, just that it's "hard", and this is true.)
These few courses were also the first taste most students (esp. non-graduates) had of calling subject matter experts and potential customers, meeting real investors for a mock pitch, the various mechanisms/strategies finance professionals use to separate a founder from their profits and/or build an efficient revenue machine, determining actual pre-realized product demand so you can haggle for bulk discounts from suppliers, setting appropriate product margins. These are the tasks I find I'm often doing in between PCB layout and product assembly, so I'm quite glad I took an entrepreneurial curriculum in school rather than a few more ergonomics or RF courses.