

If Steve Jobs were starting out today he would struggle to get funding - azal
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/if-steve-jobs-were-starting-out-today-he-would-struggle-to-get-funding-hes-a-marketeer-not-an-engineer/2010

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flocial
This is absurd. Steve Jobs would definitely get funding. He's persistent,
persuasive, and full of ideas. He'll eventually convince an engineer to join
him by any means necessary. He'll shine when it comes time to present to VCs.
He made many of the initial inroads with Apple in the early days raising
money, getting manufacturing components, and employees as a shoeless, unbathed
hippie with long hair. He made initial investors believe in personal computing
when there was no such thing. I think that's much more difficult than
convincing venture capitalists looking for the next hot thing in an overheated
market.

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Shant
Steve Jobs had a technical partner (Woz). If he didn't, he probably wouldn't
have gotten funding (he wouldn't have had anything to necessitate funding).

What this article should have said is that there needs to be a better way to
connect creative non-technical visionaries (whose primary skillsets are having
an empathic understanding of the customer, product design, and an ability to
build passionate followings/movements behind those products) with engineers
from the start, rather than having startups/accelerators treat them like an
afterthought (ie, post Series A, let's hire a marketing intern to do some A/B
testing).

What Jobs proves is not that people like him should always run things, it's
that they need to have a better seat at the startup/accelerator table than
they currently do. Identifying them and plugging them in earlier in the
process would help the startup scene as a whole.

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amorphid
As a domain expert and non-engineer myself, I've found it incredibly hard to
get taken seriously by investors. Recruiting a credible technical co-founder
has been tough, too. I agree that there is no well beaten path to capital for
some like myself to follow. On the bright side I figured out how to just make
my own money, and that's probably a healthier path to follow anyway.

~~~
rphlx
As a technical founder - it's equally difficult to find a good sales/marketing
guy. How are you supposed to interview them? Take four to a bar and compare
how many friends they make?

~~~
Shant
Same things you'd do to find a developer:

1) Ask them what they've done before.

2) Test them. Ask them what they specifically would do for you/your product
now. Taken a step further if you have the resources: narrow down a few
candidates, pay each a nominal fee to write a marketing plan, upon which you
base your final decision.

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serge2k
Fortunately he had an engineering genius as his partner.

I think a team like that would be fine today. Marketing genius/perfectionist
and engineering genius.

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drcode
...especially if it's for a new computer with a 6502 CPU running at 1MHz :-P

