

Want To Be A Startup CEO? Better Learn How To Code. - willobrien
http://willobrien.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/want-to-be-a-startup-ceo-better-learn-how-to-code/

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charlesju
What I don't understand is why every single startup has to be around some web
2.0 software idea. There are thousands of industries outside of software for
MBA students to pursue. If you're a good businessman, you shouldn't pigeonhole
yourself into a position where you have no expertise, that's just bad
judgment.

~~~
anateus
It's because the term "startup" has come to mean something specifically to do
with technology.

If you have a "startup" doing anything else, it's more common to just call it
a "small business".

~~~
tjmc
I think in general the distinction is that a startup can scale more readily
than a small business. That's easier to do if you're selling software than,
say, haircuts which is why I think the term "startup" is used so much around
here.

I think there's also an element of the entrepreneurial mindset on HN. The term
"small business" seems to be considered implicitly defeatist here, unless
you're (merely) building a "lifestyle business" which excuses your lack of
ambition!

~~~
cglee
Nice, so I can finally justify that book I've been working on as a "startup".

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Alex3917
This is terrible advice, even for people who want to do web startups. The job
of the entrepreneur is to pull everyone from their social network to make the
thing work. They're responsible for finding the web guys, the sales guys, the
marketing team, the science advisers, the customer support people, etc.

Learning to code for the CEO only makes sense if your ambitions are limited to
creating a two person startup in a garage. Don't get me wrong, plenty of great
products have been created that way. But most of the best businesses are just
slightly different versions of things that have already been done, and by
focusing on learning to code instead of building your social network you are
eliminating 95% of your business options before you even start.

~~~
moe
Spot-on. The whole premise of learning to code as a "preparation" to launch a
startup is just idiotic.

It takes years to become a half-decent programmer, so if you have this hot
internet-idea right now but no idea about programming then better go find
someone who can implement it for you instead of trying to learn it yourself...

~~~
rsheridan6
The problem with this is that non-technical people have no idea who can
implement their brilliant idea for them. They don't know how to tell good
programmers from bad ones, so they'll just hire somebody with an impressive
resume, with varying results.

I'm not saying that a 28 year old MBA who has never written a line of code
should spend 2 years becoming a semi-competent hacker instead of hiring
somebody, but they probably would have been better off spending some time on
it in high school instead of pursuing straight As or doing application-
polishing ECs.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
_The problem with this is that non-technical people have no idea who can
implement their brilliant idea for them_

That's why you need to build your network.

I'm an electrical engineer: I have no idea how to identify a brilliant
biochemist. But if I need to hire one for my new alternative energy startup,
hopefully I'll already know someone who has expertise in that field and can
either recommend one to me, or help in the hiring process.

~~~
Radix
Yes but the GPs point still stands. You're an EE, after you've found the
brilliant biochemist you have the knowlege framework to relate to her. A non-
technical MBA may very well be unable to relate and without someone
communicating properly to him, he'll be lost.

~~~
rsheridan6
See the movie startup.com for an example. A Harvard MBA hires his friend, who
brags that he's been programming since he was 6 IIRC, as his CTO. But this CTO
doesn't really appear to know anything, and the company ends up burning
through $60 million of other people's money without making a usable product.

------
jmtame
if you don't mind, i'd like to throw in a few desirable traits of a business
person.

i've rubbed shoulders with business students as a co-founder of a student
entrepreneur group. the problem usually starts when the business guy runs out
of money to pay people in india on elance for his project. so he poaches other
people's teams for programmers, exaggerates the heck out of his project (we
built this in 2 months! [read: this has been sitting inactive for 4+ years]),
treats the programmers like s __*, gives ridiculous deadlines, and yells a
lot.

but that's not to say the business guy is useless at all. here are a few
things they could help the coders with:

[1] term sheets, make sure they're good. [2] go do the fundraising (be really
good at presenting in front of a lot of people too) [3] talk to as many of the
users as possible and let me know what the top complaints and compliments are.
the rest i'll figure out from analytics. [4] get us partnerships that will
help everyone immensely, the user, the startup, and the partner.

~~~
martian
I'd add: help establish some basic decision-making structure (e.g., despotic
vs democratic) and simple accountability measures.

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omnivore
Knowing code has made it a lot easier to hire people to work for my company,
as they don't care that I don't know code as well as they do, they just care
that I understand their world enough not to place unreasonable demands on
them.

~~~
kennyroo
Totally agree. I'm a product manager, but I taught myself RoR and MySQL last
year mostly because I wanted to better understand how databases work with web
apps. In the process I also learned how to use CSS, SVN, nginx, and search
engine optimization techniques.

I don't ever expect to use these skills in a major web app (I'm nowhere near
good enough to do it for real), but they've helped me immeasurably in
communicating effectively with engineers. Wish I had done it years earlier.

~~~
DavidPP
I'm curious, how did you become a product manager ? (what is your background).

~~~
kennyroo
It was totally random. I was an English major / mass communication minor
planning to be a reporter until I started playing around with HTML while
editing my college newspaper (way back in 1995). I snagged a grunt job at
Cooking Light magazine putting their content online, and just went from there.
I don't know of anyone who set out to become a product manager, but it's a
great career for certain people. Having an engineering, UI design, or even
customer service background helps a lot. For consumer-facing web sites, just
being a very heavy web user is an absolute requirement. Some MBA's are good in
the role, but too often they see the role as a stepping stone to other
opportunities. Hope this helps.

~~~
DavidPP
Thank you for your answer. I'm 25 and considering what I should next in my
career. I've been reading about product management lately and it's seem to be
a good fit to my personnality and aspirations.

------
gcheong
It's interesting how "start-up" has somehow become synonymous with software or
web start-up company, but I think it applies to all start-ups in the sense
that competency in the skills needed to create the core business are primary
when starting out.

~~~
skmurphy
Only on HN is startup synonymous with software startup. In other place startup
can apply to many different kinds of firms: biotech, cleantech, nanotech,
MEMS, semiconductor, medical device, to name a few technologies/markets that
get much less attention on HN.

~~~
vlad
This site was Startup News when I registered. It was about software startups.
Most every person who registered found this by googling for PG's name from
lisp books, slashdot, and ycombinator. When the discussion became about web
startup and business advice from blogs, pg increased the scope.

Nowadays, such articles about web startups are actually much rarer and do
appeal to many users.

~~~
skmurphy
I have no problem with Hacker News' focus. It's useful because it's narrower
than "all startups."

------
sachinag
Yes, this. (Says a startup CEO who can't code and can't even do SQL statements
correctly... yet.)

~~~
icey
If it makes you feel any better, most developers can't write SQL either.

~~~
whatusername
Cant write it at all? Or just can't write it well? (I assume this as most
developers should be able to understand select A from B where X=True

Any links / extra info you want to share? I'd be very interested in seeing my
own shortcomings here.

~~~
icey
Can't write it well.

People have a tough time thinking in sets. This applies to developers as well.
This is why people constantly fight the relational paradigm; you end up with
things like CouchDB or OODBs because they make more sense to developers. It's
easier to reason about an object than it is about a set of data.

I've been working on writing a bunch of "SQL from the ground up" postings, but
I keep getting side-tracked with another project I'm working on and I haven't
had a blog in years to post it on. Besides that, 99% of all the SQL work I've
done has been in Sybase, MS-SQL and Oracle; so I'm not sure how relevant T-SQL
& PL/SQL are to MySQL or Postgres. I'm assuming the basics are all the same
though (which is to say ANSI compliant).

~~~
anthonyrubin
[http://database-
programmer.blogspot.com/2008/09/comprehensiv...](http://database-
programmer.blogspot.com/2008/09/comprehensive-table-of-contents.html)

~~~
icey
What an amazing resource. I've been working with some developers on their SQL
recently, and I'll be sure to send this on to them.

------
trapper
I have seen terrible ceos who can code and great ceos who can't. The only
common factor amongst the great ones is that they are smart and interested in
learning.

------
kailashbadu
When you are just starting out with a shoestring budget, developing the
product is the most important thing on the to-do list. Business skills are
certainly desirable. But since the company is operating on limited budget,
those skills cannot be procured at the expense of actual product development.
However, when a company has grown beyond a certain level, the ability to
manage, market, and sell the products becomes a crucial requirement for
growth.

------
wheels
Executive summary: Free money is harder to come by now. You'll probably have
to focus on building your product before you can raise money.

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dunk010
This is really just so true. I've seen so many would be "CEOs" getting
distanced from the code far too early, they just want to run a business and
make a bunch of cash. All the great companies have coders at their heart for
the longest time, listen to their users, build a dedicated community and most
importantly create a _great_ product.

------
swombat
Of course, this depends on the stage of the start-up. If you want to start a
start-up, yeah, for the first 9 months or so, all that matters is product
development, so if you can't help with that you're no good.

After the product gets to a sufficient state, though, there are other things
than coding to do for the company. Sales, marketing, deals, etc... Those can
use a business CEO.

~~~
sanjayparekh
Actually, I disagree. If you have a CEO that does not fully understand the
company's product to a sufficient technical degree, then you have someone who
is leading the company with no idea of what is possible. What nearly always
happens in companies when this is the case is the development group starts
making outlandish claims ("that feature will take 30 man-years and $9m to
develop", etc.) with no one to call BS on them.

Personally being able to code (even if I'm not the sharpest at it) has led me
to be able to drive teams a lot faster because I can say "well, if I can
develop this in a week and I suck at programming, then you should be able to
get it done in a day - come back tomorrow and let me know how it went".

That said, you're right - after a product is on its way it's all about sales
and doing deals. But you still have to be able to whip the parts of the
organization that need whipping (mind you, that's not always the development
team either).

~~~
swombat
Surely that's the job of the CTO rather than the CEO? If the CTO is supporting
those 30-man-year estimates, the problem is not with the "development group" -
and by that stage it's very reasonable for the CTO and the CEO to be two
different people.

------
gustaf
just met with one of the most successful startup ceos. he is an amazing
programmer who haven't touched code for almost 2 years.

~~~
potatolicious
The key is that he knows code. Depending on the size of the organization you
run you don't have to be a regular coder, but a coder you must be.

I've seen far too many CEOs and managers who are technically inept, and as
such completely gloss over great technologies and business opportunities,
while at the same time pursuing impossible goals with no understanding of the
technical underpinnings of their business.

~~~
sak84
I'm not so sure that a CEO/Founder needs to know code, but I do think that a
Founder of a startup company in the software realm should understand where
programmers are coming from.

This post seems to be written from the perspective that if you are developing
a product that utilizes code, and you have no money to spend, then clearly,
you must write the code. However, some of the comments about this article
aren't talking about this aspect, but rather that people who aren't coders,
don't understand coders.

This, I don't think, is necessarily true. I believe that by keeping up with
what coding/technology can provide, while also understand a programmer's
philosophy, a noncoder can facilitate an environment that supports
constructive collaboration between both the coder and the noncoder.

In short: I don't think you necessarily need to have deep coding skills to
start a tech company utilizing programmers. I do think you need to have a
great idea, an open mind, and a willingness to step inside the shoes and take
the perspective of the coder.

------
Jschwa
Lets say that you agree with this advice. What language would you recommend
learning to code in?

