
If You Don’t Think You Need It, You Haven’t Seen Greatness - comatose_kid
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/24/you-havent-seen-greatness/
======
mekoka
As a professional of the tech field for the better of the last 7 years, I've
had the opportunity to work with countless of these marketing, pr, bd people
and to be frank, that "Greatness", I've only heard of, never actually
witnessed it.

I am aware that the services are needed and can bring some tremendous results
when well executed, but at this point I've settled to learn some of this stuff
on my own, rather than investing too much time in finding someone to trust
with the responsibilities.

Don't get me wrong, it would be absolutely awesome to find the rare pearl that
the article mentions. But it's choosing between either continuously peruse for
some Master of her domain, or rather investing all that energy into learning
to do things myself.

Obviously, some things are more sensitive than others and I still gladly defer
to the experts (I won't touch the legal stuff without consult). For others
however, I've noted that there have been times when I sat with someone who was
supposed to advise me on marketing or BD, and they ended up learning more
about these than I did by the end of our meeting.

The whole thing reminds me of this post [http://thinkvitamin.com/user-
science/user-experience/ux-prof...](http://thinkvitamin.com/user-science/user-
experience/ux-professional-isnt-a-real-job/) where the author claimed that "UX
Professional" isn't a job title. Ensues a torrent of comments with basically
the same arguments that the present article emphasizes _it's because you
haven't seen a great one yet_.

I guess the question is then, _how to find greatness?_

~~~
krschultz
1) The 'great' marketing, pr, bd people make way way more money than 'great'
tech people. It's unlikely that a startup can afford a killer marketing guy at
$300k. They're probably hiring marketing people at $50k.

2) It appears you don't value those positions much. If you are the one doing
the recruiting, I would say that explains it.

3) Marketing, PR, and BD make a lot more sense in industries where tech isn't
the dominant factor. Just look at consumer packaged goods, movies, etc. Almost
no tech worth talking about in CPG, but some amazing marketing and biz dev
people. Those industries (and others) attract the best business people because
they have a lot of impact on the success or failure of the product. In
startups, if the developers suck there really is nothing the marketing guy can
do about it.

~~~
mindcrime
_3) Marketing, PR, and BD make a lot more sense in industries where tech isn't
the dominant factor._

I won't disagree, but I'd be wary of overstating the importance of that point.
Marketing definitely matters for technology (esp. when you take a broad,
holistic view of what 'marketing' is). There are more than a few stories in
the annals of the tech industry where a nominally superior tech lost out to an
inferior product that had better marketing around it.

On that note, the book _In Search of Stupidity_ [1] catalogs a pile of tech
marketing disasters from over the years. I'd recommend it to anyone who thinks
"marketing isn't that important" or anything along those lines.

[1]: <http://www.insearchofstupidity.com/>

------
gavanwoolery
Pseudo repost, just because I think it is worth saying:

Our company started as one engineer. Second employee was a "business guy" -
who stuck his foot in the door and kind of hired himself. Two years later, we
are roughly twenty employees large (half contractors) and seven digits of
revenue, largely thanks to employee #2. :) Engineers can sometimes be quick to
dismiss the value of other roles (I know I have), but without the
aforementioned employee, we would have no where near our current revenue (he
locks down the contracts and ensures good revenue from them, two things no one
else in our company is good at).

~~~
wilfra
"Second employee was a "business guy" - who stuck his foot in the door and
kind of hired himself."

Can you expand on this? How does a business person hire himself when he finds
an engineer with a good idea?

~~~
enjo
One case I'm familiar with: The "business guy" went out and sold a pretty
sizable contract for the startup...before he actually worked for them.

~~~
notJim
This sounds like a great story.

------
mmahemoff
I had my lightbulb moment about business development when working as a
developer advocate at Google. Some companies we partnered with had excellent
bizdevs - though not programmers, they were technically savvy, creative about
finding ways to work together, and willing to take on feedback - and their
companies gained as a result. At the other end of the spectrum, a disturbingly
high number of companies had zero mechanisms in place to even get in touch
about matters of business development (or even related items such as sales).
Not even a simple contact form or email address.

The comments about bizdev also remind me of an interview with Jason Cohen a
little while ago, where he was explaining the research he undertook before
launching WP Engine. The main point was how methodical and quantitative it all
was, and that this is the kind of thing a Business Guy should be doing in a
startup, not just randomly filing trademark applications and making sure
everything's in order.

------
jfb
It's a huge mistake to think that talent in any field is anything but normally
distributed. So while it's fantastic to experience greatness, holding out for
the 1% solution is often totally counterproductive. Given my druthers, _of
course_ I'd only hire the best of the best. But that's not how the universe
works.

~~~
bgilroy26
I think yours is a solid criticism to the article, it's completely true.

The article isn't written for the salty veterans who've learned life's lessons
on the mean highways and byways, however, it is for the thousands upon
thousands of cynical young people who clog the internet forums.

I know because I'm about 2 years older than myself at the very point when
despite anything I might claim to the contrary, in my heart of hearts I
believed "Sales and marketing departments chiefly lie to people".

------
notatoad
I can only imagine that the corrollary to this is "if you haven't seen
greatness, you don't need it". If you have the opportunity to hire a great
marketer you should take it, but your startup doesn't need a mediocre
marketer. Don't hire roles, hire people.

------
DanI-S
> _the exercise of ‘writing the ideal press release’ first, before you even
> write a line of code_

That's an interesting idea - Press Driven Development. Has anyone here tried
it?

~~~
gvb
Quite a few, actually. There was (is?) a rash of people who create a simple
teaser web site that collects contact information from interested parties as
their "MVP" to "validate" their idea. No code. No product.

~~~
regularfry
I know it predates him, but Tim Ferriss recommended something like this in the
Four Hour Work Week, which everyone seems to have read.

------
aidenn0
A few corollaries:

Don't hire someone for one of these rolls just because "everyone has an X"
hire someone because they are great at it.

The majority of people in these roles aren't great, otherwise they wouldn't be
as widely despised

------
azylman
I have to admit, I'd always sort of dismissed "bizdev" and the like, but this
summer I'm working for a small, three-person startup that's one developer and
two sales/bizdev and it's completely changed my mind - they're absolutely
fantastic.

------
pnachbaur
As a younger person, I'm already aware that I should be careful not to write
such positions off. This was a great post to help reinforce the right
thinking.

My question is: if you're about to write those roles off, what can you do to
make sure you find said 'greatness' and not get saddled with mediocrity?

------
staunch
These are the people that make you say: "It would have been hard or impossible
to do <thing> without <person>"

It turns out to be a decent test too. If you can't say that at least once
about someone it's a bad sign.

------
wtracy
I thought that this was going to be about products, and was all geared up to
tear it apart.

It's actually about organizational roles, and it makes a decent argument.

------
se85
Very interesting topic and I completely agree with the article...

I've been working in IT for many years now, and out of the hundreds of people
I've met in many different areas of many different companies, constantly
having to work with and under mediocrity, and I've only met a single person
who was the real deal.

Lots of people can talk the talk, but lets be serious now? How many people can
actually progress beyond that to achieve real tangible results that show a
clear display of excellence as opposed to mediocrity? The numbers are quite
small in comparison to the human population I'm sure.

When the majority of people in any given profession are mediocre, finding
excellence is more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack,
unfortunately this is a problem in every profession.

------
shard
What does BD stand for?

~~~
drhayes9
Business development: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_development>

------
snorkel
Greatness in this sense means you're able to provide value beyond the bounds
of your job description. Some people, especially engineers, tend to be heads-
down and focused on the specific tasks and responsibilities assigned to them,
and everything else is "not my job" ... in other words "good followers"

But the people who end up leading the team are the ones who not only do what
was assigned to them, but can also bring forward completely new ideas,
volunteer to lead that effort, and reach out to other teams to provide
guidance on how this new thing involves them ... other words "good leaders"

------
saraid216
He's not wrong, but this is a self-sealing argument. If the guy you hired just
isn't really rocking the boat, well... it must be because he's not a TRULY
GREAT <insert role>.

To give a tired example: lawyers, wherein yes, lawyers as a profession is
needed and useful and meaningful, but it's _also_ true that they obfuscate
unnecessarily and generate make work and so on and so forth. And it's entirely
possible that this can come from the same person.

You can make the same argument about virtually every single role ever.

------
dkhenry
I would alter the headline to say if you think you _won't_ need it, ......
There legitimately are times when you don't need a given subset of skilled
positions that are vital to a larger company. I would never file the paperwork
to start a company and immanently hire A PR guy, A HR guy, A Lawyer, A Office
Manager ,and A Sales Guy. There is something to prioritizing your hiring to
what is important given your existing strengths and weaknesses

------
richcollins
Maybe someone can list the great companies that have been started by "writing
the ideal press release first".

~~~
michaelpinto
Two examples worth thinking of:

IBM may not have been started with a press release, but Paul Rand's branding
and their advertising made them stand out from their competition.

Apple may not have been started with a press release, but Regis McKenna really
helped put them on the map.

------
greghinch
Translation: you need someone who thinks like an engineer but applies it to
these other tasks/positions

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Actually, hiring a marketing or BD guy who thinks like an engineer is a pretty
good way to hire a terrible person for that role. Implicit in the post is
respecting the heterogeneity of thought models.

------
archildress
Perhaps I'm missing the point here, but I started studying minimalism and the
art of less last year, and there's almost no product I look at and think that
I need immediately.

If you're interested in that same mindset, this site is a fantastic read:
<http://mnmlist.com/>

~~~
hansef
Commenting before RTFA: the minimalist Hacker News reader. ;)

