I have been seeing the age old argument from all over the place lately.
Tech Start Ups: Business Men or Computer Scientists which are more important?
It seems to me there are many different arguments and I personally believe that you need both sides to hack it in the tech startup world. Two sides of the same coin.
Just a fact: If you want to do anything it requires resources, so having only hackers is no good for generating revenue, and having a sales heavy team with no understanding of how to create a quality product is shooting yourself in the foot.
All said, a Technical person can be a Business person also. I happen to be one of those. I started off a a programmer and inherited my business aptitude through trial and error. Of course i hire bean counters and CFO’s to crunch my companies revenue models out into pretty spreadsheets, but as Alyssa says it takes a special kind of individual that no orilley book nor Ivy College can teach you. I have several Ivy guys working for me and never attended any those schools myself. It takes Passion, courage, and guts.
It comes down to the Entrepreneur skills that cut the mustard. In the tech world it requires both biz and hack skillz.
As Napoleon Dynamite says ” Girls like guys with skills. Bowstaff skills, nunchuck skills, computer hacking skills…”
Truth says that tech businesses likes entrepreneur with the multiple qualities. If you can not drill down into the code to find a bug one minute, then walk into a VC presentation the next and close a funding round, well heaven help you.
I hope you have a great team who looks up to you like your the next messiah or something. Its tough out there and it takes a real Entrepreneur to challenge themselves. The competition is fierce and you do not have the luxury to claim in the tech startup industry that “I’m a biz guy and I leave the coding to the hackers” nor can you say “I write the best code in the world, and it is worth all the gold in Ft. Knox”. neither of these mind sets get you what you want in this industry.
Arrogance and denial will crush a company in 2 months flat. Competition is crazy, and your perfect little ideas can be nullified in days flat when companies like Google and Microsoft are willing to throw Billions to control the market place.
I have worked with thousands of companies in the space I will tell you, great ideas today are ghost town tomorrow, unless the leaders of the organization are the best of the best, and the top side of the tech start up company is equally balanced.
We startup entrepreneurs must learn that at a tech startup it requires vision, product genius, and technical chops to get the job done.
It is important to understand the threat of competition to a tech start up. As a Software Architect at heart, I can look at any (I mean any) business model online and decipher the software patterns used to build the application within minutes. I can put my 4 developers to the task of replicating the technology, while that is going on, I can put on my Marketers hat, and spin a better message, cold call sales pitch, and Power point in just a few hours. Put my sales team to work and we have just entered into a new tech start up venture.
You gotta understand, there are people out there like myself who can execute and copy a business model so fast you would be gasping for air. Many of these other people wouldn’t even bat an eye at stealing your concept and earning bigger cash and more traffic than you ever could. I personally have more honor and integrity than that. But you can never count on others having similar principals. I know this first hand having my business model ripped off by dozens of companies back in the pre-bubble days when ExitExchange had its business model copied and stolen by small, medium, and large companies alike.
Well, at least we were smart and filed for patents on our hard work, and now we will have our just rewards. 8 years later albeit, but those who steal will have the Karma come back around some day. There is no substitute for strong honest principals.
In my organization everyone on the dev team is involved in the product design, unfortunately, the biz team does not get involved in the code design (dev is a little out of their immediate scope). So in a tech start up, the important thing to do is to find the balance of the two that work for your individual biz model while keeping your competitive edge.
I personally happen to be the rare biz/tech combo that is deadly in this industry. I keep my skills honed sharp by coding daily and personally presenting and selling our service every week.
In the end knowing when you need help and when to delegate is critical. No entrepreneur is an island.
I look at my project statuses (both biz and dev) every day, so I know where I need help and where fall short on either side of the coin. And knowing is half the battle.
That my two cents. Heads or tails?
Ciao,
Dylan Rosario
adUup.com – Founder & President
1 Comment
June 3, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Those of us working in hi-tech and in Washington is reminisent of the grunge era. Entrepreneur’s are flocking here to be discovered. While the US economy is not doubt hurting, due to hi-tech, the WA real estate market is on the upswing and we are in the midst of technical advancements moving at light speed, laying platforms and a legacy of radical change which will gloablly impact every human. How fortunate we are to be a part of this time in history. Learning how adUup/Fleeq went from an ideathe speed to launching in weeks is mind boggling. It appears to be “the perfect storm”. I admire this as no doubt they have a passionate team of experts working 24×7. Good Luck, for creating a radical change from Google to so much more.