

Why the notion here that to be an entrepreneur, you have to be a hacker. - vintya

I'm a bit puzzled by the notion and expectation by Y Combinator &#38; folks on this forum that you absolutely need to be a "hacker" to have any shot at being a good entrepreneur. Even the application form for startup school asks you about what systems you've hacked in the past.<p>I am a fairly intelligent guy, if I can say so myself, who somehow ended up in computer science, ended up going to grad school but realized later on that my true interests and calling really lie somewhere else. I'm not a hacker so to say and I don't particularly enjoy programming - certainly not to the extent that I could have orgasms doing it and spend countless hours just doing it for fun. I look at it as a means to an end, do it to get my job done and happen to be decently good at it. I'm in the process of launching a site here and have already launched a beta version of it in India (our initial target audience). I learned RoR/AJAX/CSS and all else associated with deploying it in my spare time (my day job is a systems one with C coding). I truly enjoy the process of taking an idea from concept to launch and building a successful business around it. I spend much time thinking and working on it, learning about all aspects from the engineering to the business side. I've been working on my idea for over an year and half now, all in my spare time, riding many ups and downs and persevering through.<p>But please explain, why this ridiculous idea that to be an Internet entrepreneur, you should just absolutely be in love with programming &#38; hacking anything and everything to death!
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icey
It's not that you have to be a hacker, it's that you should be able to justify
yourself with contributions.

The "YC Way" rejects idea men in favor of people who get things done.

To paraphrase Linus, "Talk is cheap, show us results."

By the way, if you picked up a framework and built a business on it, you're
close enough to being a hacker.

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wmf
IMO this site is for hackers, hacker entrepreneurs and hackers who want to be
entrepreneurs, not for entrepreneurs in general. There are many paths and this
is just one of them.

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pg
_why this ridiculous idea that to be an Internet entrepreneur, you should love
programming_

Empirical evidence.

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vintya
Programmers or hackers don't build companies. Yes, they build a product or a
service - the best ones can create magic. But it stops there. You need smart
enterprising people who understand the bigger picture and the ecosystem, how
different pieces of the puzzle fit together, how to make money out of all that
stuff that's been built. You need the idea men, and the executioners. It's so
wrong I believe to make programming or hacking skills/smarts/history the most
important qualifying criteria for being accepted to YC, or the most important
indicator of potential success.

~~~
icey
_"Programmers or hackers don't build companies."_

You should drop a line to Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos,
Bill Joy, Dean Kamen, Ray Kurzweil, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates
to let them know about that. I don't think they've gotten the memo.

[For purposes of congruency in this thread, I had Woz in here as well as he
was a founder at Apple, but removed him from my list.]

~~~
vintya
Bezos & Gates are brilliant businessmen. Woz is a superb engineer, a genius of
an engineer, but Jobs truly built the Apple that is today. Brin & Page were
highly capable and smart researchers and scientists, not programmers or
"hackers" as the term goes here.

You're still not getting my point. Nevermind.

~~~
icey
I get your point, I'm just disagreeing with it.

If you want to startup in a lightweight / agile fashion, why have an "idea
guy" when you can have someone who can execute AND code?

Beyond that, I think that in high-tech it's far more common to have a company
founded by a hacker than it is an MBA. I don't have concrete numbers on that,
so it's purely my opinion.

~~~
vintya
I'm an idea guy, I'm also a coder. I can write code, that works. But I'm by no
means a hacker. I'm not an MBA type, will never be. Once you're done writing
some code, the prototype, something that works decently well - and to do that
you don't need to be a nerdy hacker - you need skills that go far beyond the
bits/bytes and if-else loopy world of programming.

It's really not that difficult to build a web product or service these days.

~~~
theoneill
That word executioner, I do not think it means what you think it means.

~~~
vintya
Yea, I realized that :D

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paul_houle
I like the term "software developer" because it's vague about what you
actually do: I mean, you could be doing software construction, project
management or you could be the owner of the company -- one can be a "web
developer" much like a "real estate developer."

Much of my extended family works in the construction business, where there are
career paths that go between being an employee and being an owner: you might
start out as a teenager putting in fenceposts and nailing shingles onto roofs,
then you're working for a big contractor doing roadwork, then you and your
brother buy a bulldozer and start digging foundations, putting in sidewalks
and curbs and clearing snow at the mall. At some point you might end up owning
a few rental properties, and if you make it big you might become the guy who
does $20M contracts for roadwork...

Of course there are different paths: I worked for a startup founder who was an
MBA -- we pitched an idea to venture capitalists, had it turned down, switched
to a plan b we could do on a shoestring. We executed that successfully. I
moved on to other things, but he sold the business at a profit a few years
later.

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tstegart
Part of the reason is because YC concentrates on web companies. From their
website: "Though we fund all types of computer startups, we're especially
interested in web-based applications. We've been thinking about that problem
longer than anyone else, and by now can visualize much of the space of
possibilities."

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plinkplonk
"I don't particularly enjoy programming - certainly not to the extent that I
could have orgasms doing it"

How many people do you know who get orgasms from programming? This kind of
subtle condescension ensures that no halfway decent hacker would want to work
with you.

As someone asked earlier, if we can have ideas _and_ execute, why do we need
(someone like) you, who (with due respect) have no credentials (in terms of
having built succesful businesses/ have non technical _demonstrated_ skills)
but do have "ideas"?

If you think non hackers (like you) can create a successful technical product
company, by all means do _show_ us - build such a company , and then tell us
how you did it so we can all learn from your experience and benefit from it.

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vintya
My point is this - the barrier to entry and delivering a decent web
product/service has come down a lot over the years. With frameworks such as
RoR, countless online articles that literally spoon feed ready made solutions
to common problems, stumbling blocks, and an above average intelligence, one
can build a good enough web service these days.

Sure, building something state of the art requires true "hacking" skills and
genuine creativity and intelligence - but how often do you really see such web
companies these days? Most ideas are simple, some downright silly, and only a
few that are products of intelligent hacking. Do you agree?

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gills
I suspect (ok, I know from current experience) that it helps, when you have
just a small team (or a lonely solo adventure, in my case) and you're living
on ramen, to have at least one founder who is enthusiastic enough about the
technology side to _actually make progress_ even in a perfect storm of morale-
killing events.

