Can non-technical founders succeed -in hiring good programmers- and overall?
1 comments
You can't.
You may get lucky, but that's just not the way to bet.
If you have no talent for programming, or not enough desire, you can't learn it yourself ... and then it really takes years to get good. Years and years if that's not the only thing you're doing.
Maybe you're approaching it from the wrong direction. Arrange things so that one or more technical founders will choose you for non-technical stuff. Humans have been doing the latter for a long time (heck, double-entry bookkeeping was invented in the 15th Century), in terms of talent it should be easier to find someone like you.
The biggest set of problems technical founders seem to have with the non-technical is that the latter don't mesh well with the former. Lack of respect, greed, all too often simply flakiness, something that just doesn't cut it when you have to convince a computer to do something. You can't BS your way past that....
You may get lucky, but that's just not the way to bet.
If you have no talent for programming, or not enough desire, you can't learn it yourself ... and then it really takes years to get good. Years and years if that's not the only thing you're doing.
Maybe you're approaching it from the wrong direction. Arrange things so that one or more technical founders will choose you for non-technical stuff. Humans have been doing the latter for a long time (heck, double-entry bookkeeping was invented in the 15th Century), in terms of talent it should be easier to find someone like you.
The biggest set of problems technical founders seem to have with the non-technical is that the latter don't mesh well with the former. Lack of respect, greed, all too often simply flakiness, something that just doesn't cut it when you have to convince a computer to do something. You can't BS your way past that....
I am sure his warning is on the money - but does anyone have any experience / wisdom that has (or would) help mitigate this risk? As a non-tech who is hoping to found soon, I'd appreciate hearing any lessons leaned on this subject - good or ill. Thank you.
Lesson 6 by PG "I forgot to include this in the early versions of the list, because nearly all the founders I know are programmers. This is not a serious problem for them. They might accidentally hire someone bad, but it's not going to kill the company. In a pinch they can do whatever's required themselves.
But when I think about what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it. That's actually much harder than it sounds—almost impossibly hard in fact—because business guys can't tell which are the good programmers. They don't even get a shot at the best ones, because no one really good wants a job implementing the vision of a business guy.
In practice what happens is that the business guys choose people they think are good programmers (it says here on his resume that he's a Microsoft Certified Developer) but who aren't. Then they're mystified to find that their startup lumbers along like a World War II bomber while their competitors scream past like jet fighters. This kind of startup is in the same position as a big company, but without the advantages.
So how do you pick good programmers if you're not a programmer? I don't think there's an answer. I was about to say you'd have to find a good programmer to help you hire people. But if you can't recognize good programmers, how would you even do that?"(http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html#f10n)