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"1. Your College Degree is Meaningless (and sometimes a liability)" "6. No other Skill is as Important as Sales & Marketing" "7. Don’t Build Crap for the Sake
by davidjgraph 13y ago
"1. Your College Degree is Meaningless (and sometimes a liability)"
"6. No other Skill is as Important as Sales & Marketing"
"7. Don’t Build Crap for the Sake of Making a Buck."
These last two partly conflict with each other. Sales and marketing dominated businesses tend to view the engineering as a necessary evil. It's true that better sales will shift a shittier product better than a poorly marketed average product, but only up to a certain delta in technical quality.
Poorer quality engineering, certainly in the area of software, not only means more bugs in the short term, but the accumulation of piles of technical debt is virtually always ignored in such organisations, that's much more serious.
Yes, it's true that some of these companies grow so fast that they have enough money for a rewrite when the code become unmaintainable, but I still believe that distinctly higher quality code has a cumulative effect and can offset the need for large amounts of sales people (although this depends on the price point), and I've seen that strategy work.
Such companies will claim high levels of quality and as long as from the outside it looks OK, who cares. But I'll bet 98% of these organisations are fire-fighting from dawn till dusk, sapping the morale of the engineering with endless deadlines while the all-important sales staff work towards that 7 figure annual sales bonus.
I don't like points 1 or 6 at all. Engineering is more intellectually demanding academically than the vast majority of non science/engineering subjects, and many engineers are rightfully proud of their academic achievements. You wouldn't get away with being this dis-respectful to them in an engineering focused company, which his clearly isn't.
I don't believe the "I was too busy to do my course" line, either. Frankly, I think he just found it too hard.
- pavlov 13y agoI don't like points 1 or 6 at all. Engineering is more intellectually demanding academically than the vast majority of non science/engineering subjects, and many engineers are rightfully proud of their academic achievements. You wouldn't get away with being this dis-respectful to them in an engineering focused company, which his clearly isn't. I don't get the feeling he's being disrespectful to engineers. He's just listing qualities that are important for an entrepreneur in his opinion. Academic achievements are worth respecting, but they're not a necessity for becoming a founder, and can indeed be a liability.
- theGimp 13y agoHow? I don't see how academic achievement can be a liability. If everyone went around proclaiming real entrepreneurs quit school, sure, I see why it would be a liability. Otherwise, academic achievement can't really harm. (Coming from someone who does horribly in school.)
- pavlov 13y agoIf I were looking for a co-founder and met someone who is, say, 30 years old and has published several peer-reviewed papers yet has never worked outside academia, I would be wary of starting a business with this person. Startups are nothing like university research, so there would have to be something else to offset this liability. To be fair, the same suspicion would apply to someone who has spent her entire career climbing up the corporate ladder in a traditional big enterprise.
- riggins 13y ago*6. No other Skill is as Important as Sales & Marketing" these kind of blanket statements always bother me. Is it true for selling meditation apps for the iPhone? Yes. Is it true if you're building say a self-driving car? Probably not.
- taf2 13y agoIt is true to convince people self driving cars are viable - yes, you need sales and marketing. To this crowd mostly engineers I'd assume, proclaiming the importance of sales and marketing is valueable. How often do you encounter or do you remember feeling like - "if I build just one more feature it will sell itself". Don't get me wrong engineering is what we do its a given - so recognizing that what you can't survive without is marketing and sales will help a lot is what I take away from the others point...