
Why founders shouldn't be the developers - Swizec
http://www.zemanta.com/blog/why-founders-shouldnt-be-the-developers/
======
harryh
What it looks like to go from being the first real coder to being a full time
manager of a pretty large eng team over the course of 3 years in git commits
per month:

    
    
      37 2009-09
      99 2009-10
     177 2009-11
     104 2009-12
     136 2010-01
     115 2010-02
     126 2010-03
      72 2010-04
      37 2010-05
      43 2010-06
      30 2010-07
      39 2010-08
      53 2010-09
      43 2010-10
      59 2010-11
      66 2010-12
      13 2011-01
      23 2011-02
      67 2011-03
      66 2011-04
      13 2011-05
      20 2011-06
       0 2011-07
      29 2011-08
      25 2011-09
       3 2011-10
       2 2011-11
       3 2011-12
       3 2012-01
      35 2012-02
       6 2012-03
      10 2012-04
       2 2012-05
       0 2012-06
       0 2012-07
      38 2012-08
       0 2012-09
       0 2012-10
      32 2012-11
       0 2012-12
    

For whatever it's worth I miss coding an awful lot.

~~~
barce
I can understand missing coding, too, but your team will be able to sense that
in the same way children can sense the stress of their parents. As a manager,
it's important to get over that so you can take yourself and your team to the
next level.

~~~
ricardobeat
How is that bad? Knowing my manager missed coding would only make me happier.

------
xpose2000
I run my own start-up and I have to do everything. I am the sole employee.
Some days I wear my designer hat, others its server config, and others it's
customer service. Is it a bit crazy? Sure, but I really enjoy what I do.

I don't have meetings. I don't go to conferences. I don't pitch my company to
VCs. I don't try to raise money. I don't care what other companies are doing.
I don't try to use the latest tech because I'm expected to.

LAMP is fine.

I concentrate on building the product, satisfying my customers, and increasing
my revenue. Everything else is bullshit.

The founder should be able to do everything. Being a developer is one of those
things.

~~~
sojacques
While I totally understand your feeling, you should be aware that this
strategy wouldn't work if you wanted to start a company like Tesla or Intel.

No offense, but what you call a startup might be more considered like a
_business_ by the HN crowd, and this is why you can operate this way.

Not every type of company can stay out of the now traditional pitching/VC
game.

~~~
redguava
There is a lot of room between a 1-man show and Intel/Tesla. People really
think it's all or nothing and there is so much room in between.

It doesn't mean it's a lifestyle business either, you can have a business
earning over $10 million revenue p/year in this in between and with no
funding. Is that really just a lifestyle business?

~~~
sojacques
Of course there is a lot of room, but it doesn't invalidate my point.

~~~
soup10
Most people i've met seeking venture capital have zero chance of being capable
of building the next giant company. Yet many have succeeded in raising capital
regardless. VC's generally aren't willing to take on much risk, so you see
them spending lot's on low-capital requirement companies that are +EV. And
little on companies that need large amounts of capital to scale.

------
bdunn
I founded a product called Planscope (<https://planscope.io>). I'm the only
person involved. I develop, design, support, and handle all the marketing.

* I don't pitch 50% of the time (0% is more accurate)

* The lights are on. With more than 200 paying customers and 20% growth month-to-month, they should stay on for quite some time.

* I know most of my customers, and tailor the product around what I learn in talking with them. Thus, customer development.

* Me, myself, and I all agree about our company's vision.

* I keep tabs on my industry by asking my customer's about their business — and it helps that I eat my own dogfood.

* I do take all responsibility.

* And I handle all support

~~~
Quizzy
What happens when you get sick and need to take 10 days off? Family
emergencies? A company with a "team" can give you that margin of safety. A One
Man Band is great, but is not sustainable for long, because life happens.
Startups are built to scale so that founders can step back and enjoy the
fruits of their labor.

~~~
_delirium
The idea that the goal should be to work for a bit and then "step back and
enjoy" while other people take over is a bit of a weird aspect of silicon
valley. Successful small businessmen in most fields expect to continue
operating their businesses long-term, maybe with a few employees. One of my
uncles ran a shop for 45 years! I don't see what's wrong with being a tech
small business long-term, either. Past the bootstrapping phase you do need
some trusted people to cover while you're on vacation or sick, but it doesn't
have to be a huge operation to get to that.

~~~
soneill
This is also the case with many professional fields. There are plenty of
lawyers, accountants, marketers, etc. who start a small firm and then run it
the rest of their life without expanding much, if at all. There's nothing
wrong with a lifestyle business, it's just not a "startup".

------
byoung2
_An hour… well maybe you can fix a quick bug or two. But you won’t get
anything hard done._

I work full time at a startup, and I have a 6 week old daughter at home, and
I'm working solo on a proof-of-concept on nights and weekends. Since I've got
my hands full with the baby at home, I've learned to be very efficient with my
time. One decision that made things a lot easier was deciding to go with
node.js. Since the entire app is written in JavaScript, I can quickly test out
ideas on my phone or tablet browser using JSFiddle, and integrate it later
when I have a laptop handy. Sometimes I only have an hour of uninterrupted
time, but that's usually enough to write a function or two.

~~~
ferrouswheel
That approach might be fine for small projects/webapps, but I stuggle to see
that approach working for anything more complex/hard. Sometimes the only way
to make effective progress is a full day of uninterrupted progress where you
can hold the relevent parts of the system in your head at the same time...

Sometimes you need several weeks of working on the problem in this way to make
progress! (e.g. machine learning improvements, distributed system design).

------
jiggy2011
Isn't the whole point of startups that they are usually funded (at least
initially) on about enough money to buy ramen noodles for a year?

Sure, if you have enough funds to buy some rockstar programmers then go for
it.

Otherwise what are you going to do? Outsource it to the lowest bidder? Then
spend all that time worrying if they will produce something that matches your
vision and worrying about the quality.

~~~
soneill
No, you put in the time to find a good programmer who will work for a
reasonable price. Typically that means finding someone who graduated fairly
recently and is looking for additional work, or someone that doesn't have a
lengthy track record/portfolio. It's not easy (I've probably talked to a
hundred some odd programmers in the last year, and maybe three would fit the
bill), but you can find the right people if you put in the work.

It's no different than finding a good salesman, or a good PR person, or a good
anything. You can find great talent at a reasonable price if you're willing to
dig. Rockstars don't always come at rockstar prices, because a lot of the time
they don't even know they're a rockstar.

~~~
nostrademons
That's dangerous, because very often they'll figure out they're a rockstar as
soon as they accomplish something useful for you, and move on to firms that
will pay them rockstar money. Meanwhile you're left high-and-dry with a bunch
of code written by a talented-but-inexperienced coder, and you have to find a
replacement - often right as people start taking interest in your product.

I worked pretty cheaply for the first year or two of my career, as did several
of my friends. I'd like to think that my employers got quite a bargain. But I
only stayed with them a year or two, as my $32K/year job became a $66K/year
one became a six-figure income, or as my friend's $15/hour wage became
$75/hour became $72K/year employment became six-figures.

~~~
soneill
The expectation would be that our revenues will grow to the point that
retaining talent won't be a problem. We only just started the market entry
process at the start of the month, so it's too early to say, but if I'm losing
talent in a couple years because I can't afford to retain it, then our
problems go way beyond our talent growing too expensive.

~~~
jyu
There are other costs besides price. Someone who graduated recently, or
doesn't have a length track record etc may also need a lot of time for self
learning, mentoring, accumulate a ton of hidden technical debt, not write
maintainable code, have bad naming practices and code conventions, limited
experience coding in a team environment, low output, etc. And getting someone
to come in to clean up the mess will cost more time and money and effort. This
is on top of nostrademons' the market corrects itself eventually.

And I am someone who used to outsource many technical projects to Eastern
European developers, and wound up becoming a developer. You maybe getting good
talent at a good price, but there's always a cost.

------
ishbits
Maybe true for a sole founder.

I was the technical co-founder. My job was to code, work with a few other
people who code, and be the overall passionate guy about the quality of the
code. I find it helps to have a stake holder in this position, you end up with
better code, and someone who is going to take true ownership of the code.

My co-founder was a true marketing/selling machine. So it worked out for us I
think.

------
zatara
Well, not that I don't think you have a valid point but some very smart people
have done otherwise...

"When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another
trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am
every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I'd sleep till
about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called "business
stuff.""

(<http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>)

------
DigitalSea
I somewhat agree to an extent, my take on things is that a successful startup
needs two founders; a technical founder to do the programming and a business
development founder who possess's high amounts of confidence and a vision to
push both the development and end goal of the startup.

Having said that, I'm currently a solo entrepreneur trying to balance work,
life and startup all by my lonesome self because I don't know who or where to
ask for help with my startup ideas with spending a lot of money.

~~~
jimbokun
"I somewhat agree to an extent, my take on things is that a successful startup
needs two founders; a technical founder to do the programming and a business
development founder who possess's high amounts of confidence and a vision to
push both the development and end goal of the startup."

A Jobs and a Woz.

------
zgohr
The biggest problem I see startups having (at least the ones I have insight
into, consulting and whatnot,) is their founders are too far from the
technical. I agree founding and coding is hard to manage, but without a
developer on the same level with the same goals, you're shooting your business
in the foot.

------
arbuge
Hence the classic combination of a tech cofounder and a business cofounder.
Or, the more usual in real life combination of two tech cofounders, one of
whom actually does mostly "business stuff".

------
spectre256
I have to disagree here. Having just come out of a failed startup, one of the
(many) things that hurt us was having the primary product direction and
technical expertise belong to different people.

We were racing against time and lost. A lot of time was spent transferring
ideas between people, and implementing something that wasn't quite right. I
can't imagine any startup in the same situation not having at least SOME
similar overhead. For a small startup without funding, this can't be optimal.

------
elomarns
I think it's more than possible to start a company as a developer, or even as
the only developer. On the beginning, you probably don't have a lot of skype
calls to make, or meetings to participate. On this phase, the thing that
probably require most of your time is build your product.

And when you finally launch it, if you're lucky, you'll be more busy, but
probably you'll also have more money, which will allow you to hire someone to
help you. So you'll won't code so much as before, but if you want, you'll
still have some time to do it.

The main argument against the article are the fact there's companies managed
by developers who still code doing a good service to their customers:
Instapaper (as far I know, Marco Arment is the only developer), 37signals
(they have a lot of developers, but Jason Fried still codes), RubyMotion,
among others.

Maybe this is not the easiest way, but it's definitely possible.

------
cientifico
I disagree since a few years ago. Before i was a developer, or better said, a
hacker. I wanted to solve problems. Right now, I more or less know hot to
solve problems, so develop a product is kind of boring. From time to time
something new comes, but is not usual.

Problem => Analyze => Solve (if makes sense to solve the problem).

After years, that is kind of repetitive.

So move up one level is thinking on products, and hacking in a more social
level. Learn about usuability, psychology... how the people behave and what
the people want. That are things that we the developers should know to be...
Better developers.

Hacking is about understanding. Understand how the things in live work.
Understanding why a product A success, and a product B fails.

So I will say that founders should be hackers.

------
lnanek2
What's even worse is when one of the founders can't spend time coding any more
due to investor meetings and other concerns about running the business, but
still thinks they know what's going on in the codebase, and demands to be able
to micromanage it. I know one CTO who fought tooth and nail with multiple
meetings to keep AAC compressed audio out of a codebase after agreeing to a
plan to improve overall app size, not understanding that the AAC+
compatibility problems in some versions of Android didn't apply. He just
didn't understand audio encoding, didn't have time to research it, but he be
damned if he didn't get to decide what's used.

------
jackbravo
Just change the title to "Why CEOs shouldn't be developers". As soon as your
startup has a team of people instead of just you and your buddy you can start
applying this rule.

------
wyck
Balance is the key to any startup, the opposite side of the coin are founders
who have never been in the developer's chair, which is both common and worse.

~~~
dagw
_the opposite side of the coin are founders who have never been in the
developer's chair, which is both common and worse._

I disagree. I've worked at a couple of startups founded or co-founded by a guy
with no hands on technical experience and he was great. He came up with the
ideas, found the right people (or sometimes the other way around) and then let
them do what they did best, with only gentle prodding to keep everything going
in the right direction.

What he had was a good high level understanding of the relevant fields, plenty
of experience starting and running companies, a vast contact network, an
amazing knack for raising money and was very good at getting out there and
selling our product.

~~~
Deestan
Same situation here.

Am I correct in assuming the following characteristics? The guy you are
talking about:

* Trusts you to _do_ your job, and assumes you are pulling your weight in whatever way you see fit. (contrast: "We need your ass in the chair 08:00-16:00 so we know you're working.")

* Trusts _you_ to do _your_ job, and accepts your technical decisions even if he doesn't fully understand them. (contrast: "I just don't see exactly why GitHub would be better than our existing Team Foundation license, so we won't switch.")

------
alexjarvis
As a founder and programmer, I found this post really interesting and well
written, but rather than lamenting about how it must be impossible to do both
roles where eventually you will have to give up programming - why not just
accept that it is just much harder? Also, I certainly hope that I will never
spend 50% of my time pitching..

------
oboizt
How about finding a co-founder to handle those things, while you handle
development and architecture?

------
ferrouswheel
I can relate to this from working as the CTO of a company that grew too fast,
and then burnt out. I like building things, and I found myself less focussed
due to management and business concerns. I'm now working on other projects,
with fewer management concerns, and much happier (and being paid more).

However, I think the inverse of the post's title is also true. Your founder
(at least one of them), if you are doing a tech startup, should be technically
competent and understand the aspects of software development that are
important... including not changing design specifications every week, and
knowing how to interact with clients to prevent them from growing a project's
scope beyond what your small team can achieve in a reasonable time.

------
eranation
What I picked from it besides the main subject is this:

> "A while back it was PHP in favour of static HTML, then Python in favour of
> PHP. Lately it’s been Ruby on Rails or node.js in favour of Python … in the
> future, who knows. I hear Scala is becoming very popular"

As a Scala fan I could't be happier if it's indeed going to pick up for web
dev the way Ruby and Python did (in a myriad of frameworks), but is this
indeed the general sentiment nowadays? I'll be more than happy if Play
framework gets some of the Rails and Django community to help it grow the way
the latter two have in recent years.

------
nchuhoai
I'd like to comment that the title should probably be "Why founders shouldn't
be developing/programming". This title makes it seem like being a developer
excludes you from being a founder/CEO

------
utopkara
This is true for another reason. Programmers make horrible designers, and they
should stick to programming when the product is user facing. They can forge
perfect tools, and sometimes just the tool is valuable enough to make a
profitable product. Many times though, the product needs to work for people,
and giving the executive decision powers in the hands of most of the
developers is a recipe for a disastrous product.

~~~
sojacques
\- _Programmers make horrible designers_

Please don't generalize, this is not always true. Being a programmer (with a
formal CS background) who used to make a living as a professional designer, I
have met a lot of people like me. Good design is about solving problems, good
programmers usually solve problems. When it comes to aesthetics, it's
something that people do learn, and programmers can learn, too.

\- _giving the executive decision powers in the hands of most of the
developers is a recipe for a disastrous product_

I respectfully disagree here too, for the sole reason that developers can
learn the ability of making decisions in a relatively rational way. I would
even wager to say they might be more inclined to trust in data.

~~~
utopkara
I should have started with "Most programmers make horrible designers"; my
apologies for that. The point is, even making a not-so-bad design, takes a lot
of thought; more importantly, it takes courage to push a design concern that
will make implementation harder and take longer to finish. I certainly believe
that people are amazing, and they are capable of doing amazing things. But
also there is the issue of possible vs probable. And, I don't take it lightly
when I see a good programmer and designer in the same person.

------
salimmadjd
I pretty much agree. Although I think it's important to have the tech
background and have the ability to code (the same ways CEOs need to understand
basic accounting) it's hard not to get immersed in the rat race and lose sight
of the big picture. As the OP said, you need to spend a big part of your time
pitching. Both to investors and as importantly to potential recuits.

------
killermonkeys
Comment bait title aside... That's why you do it in steps: you build the bulk
of your product first before you have customers and need investment and then
you shift your time to other things. Nobody is going to hire an engineer to
free themselves up to pitch for money to pay for the engineers until that is a
sound decision.

~~~
andrewflnr
That's sort of the obvious thing, but on the other side you have people that
you can't do any really meaningful product development without customers, or
you're likely to build something nobody wants. Is there a good balance there?

------
jacques_chester
Consider the halfway house of paying freelancers to pick up bits of work for
you.

For example: I suck at the whole CSS/HTML/JS merry-go-round. Ironic that I
mostly work on web apps and that these days that _is_ basically where the app
lives. But still.

So I get help. I know some good people; I pay them to fill in my gaps.

------
JoelMarsh
What I get from this article and from the Git-commit list (upvoted!) is that
founders shouldn't REMAIN developers. Having a coder-founder seems almost
fundamental to a tech start-up, no?

------
thomasrambaud
Yeah, sure, say that to Facebook & Twitter founders (to name the most known).
People can sometimes have sufficient genius to handle creating then founding
if the product is valuable.

------
startupstella
this seems like it assumes that there is only one founder. this is one of the
magical moments where you realize how amazing a cofounder can be. at my new
startup (<http://matchist.com>) im the "nontechnical" cofounder and handle all
of the stuff this post mentions founders should do so my cofounder can code.
and code. and code.

having a cofounder (especially one with a complementary skillset) makes it so
much less frustrating in the beginning phases of a startup

------
namank
Well, true.

But hence the notion of _not_ being a founder CEO. Let someone else take the
reigns and you do whatever you want to do.

Though there exists a lot of potential of messiness in this.

------
barce
I stopped reading after this, "A while back it was PHP in favour of static
HTML." Actually it was PHP in favor of either Perl or C used in CGI, or VB in
ASP.

~~~
happyshadows
One of the tangental points you raised was wrong so you are wrong!

------
soneill
As a non-developer solo founder, this article resonates with me more to the
point of "as a founder, you can't expect to devote all your energies to any
one thing". My responsibilities with my startup have varied pretty much by
month.

First it was working with potential customers to figure out what kind of
product they wanted. Then it was time to find the technologies that would
allow me to create that product. Then it was finding a technical staff that
could build our product using those technologies. Then it was preparing our
sales strategy, materials, and sales staff to sell the product. Now it's
primarily marketing, pitching to writers, blogs, and doing what I can to get
the word out to consumers. If I had to forecast the next month or two, I'd say
that preparing investor pitches and materials will start to absorb an
increasing amount of my time, and I will probably end up finding a marketer to
take over my marketing responsibilities so I can focus on the funding side.

Each of those stages basically involved devoting myself overwhelmingly to that
particular issue that was most crucial to the business at that time (product
development, sales, marketing, etc) then finding someone to delegate that work
to once I needed to move on to the next step. Frankly, I'd never want to do it
any other way, because it means I know every aspect of my business, my
product, and my customers, and I know exactly what I need to delegate to make
sure things get done right.

Moreover, by knowing every aspect of my business, no one is indispensable to
me. When my original programmer decided he had to take a full time/weekly
paycheck job for financial reasons, I knew my product and technologies well
enough that I was able to seamlessly bring in a replacement to finish the work
because even though it wasn't my code, it was my product so I could specify
exactly what had to be finished, and what he'd be working on after it was
done.

Last point, because it seems to be a widespread misconception here:
Programming is only a part of the technical side. My startup uses multiple
pieces of technology that my programmers weren't aware existed until I showed
the APIs to them. Now, I couldn't have used those technologies without those
programmers, because I lack the ability to actually take the APIs and plug
them into our code, but I can find the technology that does what I need done,
and then have them integrate it. If on the other hand I'd brought one of those
developers on as a "technical co-founder", and relied on them to handle the
technical side, we would have been dead in the water or would have ended up
with an inferior product.

None of this is intended to be antagonistic, or to diminish the importance of
programming to a tech startup. I simply state it to show there is more than
one way to bake a pie, and that a non-programmer can still handle all the
technical aspects of a company needed to create a successful startup. Food for
thought!

------
DoubleMalt
That's why I'm so happy I have found a great cofounder so I can concentrate on
development.

------
conductr
Awesome. Great description of being a developer and of being a founder.

------
nsxwolf
This seems to imply side projects should never become startups.

------
lucian303
Amen. Thank you for putting it in such a concise clear manner. Those who think
they can do both will end up insane. I've seen it too much and so has everyone
who has been in this industry long enough.

Insane. I'd say this goes for VP of Engineering and CTO's as well, whether
founders or not. Really any management.

You chose it, but can you do it? Most can't and thus abuse those under them.
Sad but true.

EDIT: I will add, that if you're trying to use the latest, coolest
technologies as a founder you should just stop now and choose a different
career. If you didn't "get it" (proper development) by now, you never will.

------
kevinyun
Enjoyed this post :D

