
Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent - joeemison
I have been struck recently over many conversations with different VC-funded startup CEOs (series A or B money, all at least $5M) at how strong the CTO&#x2F;tech team rockstar&#x2F;ninja kool-aid seems to be.  &quot;Our tech guys are smarter than everyone else in the world&quot; seems to be a pervasive sentiment.  Generally speaking, the CTO&#x2F;tech team also seems to believe that about themselves, and usually the CEO is personally self-effacing and does not have that kind of personal arrogance.<p>I know that there are dark days and uncertainty within a startup, and that you do have to &quot;fake it until you make it&quot;, but there&#x27;s a real danger in drinking that kool-aid and missing out on the fact that everything reverts to the mean, and not everyone can even be &quot;above average&quot;, let alone the smartest people in the world.  The reality is that your startup that&#x27;s survived to series A likely has pretty decent tech talent, but it&#x27;s unlikely that they&#x27;re significantly better than the tech talent at other startups that have survived similarly.<p>In particular, it is a big mistake to assume that your tech team is going to be able to solve problems that were really hard for other tech teams, unless you&#x27;re willing to make solving those problems one of your core competencies (and the other tech teams were not willing to do so).<p>As a tech co-founder, I am extremely appreciative of the support that I get from my CEO, but I would never want her to (nor does she) assume that I will be able to solve problems that other talented teams have failed to solve for way less money and&#x2F;or in way less time and&#x2F;or with way less organizational focus than they have.<p>So if you&#x27;re a tech CEO who believes that your CTO and tech teams are far superior to everyone else out there, I would say: the confidence is good, and probably necessary, but you have to make sure that you spend some of your time sober enough to acknowledge reality.
======
drewcrawford
Personally I think we (engineers) made this bed ourselves. I mean there are a
few possibilities: one is that a CEO says their tech team is not so great. And
of course behind that door lies Dilbert.

Another is that the CEO says nothing about the engineering team itself at all,
and it's all product, product, product. On that path lies Apple, and I have
heard many say (myself included) that we would not work somewhere where
engineers are rarely seen and never heard. Although, obviously some smart
people do.

And when CEOs give praise to the teams, they get flack like this.

So I mean, what do you want them to say? This is hacker culture; don't whine,
submit a patch. If you think they are better ideas, go work at DilbertCorp, or
for Apple. Or, if you think there is some other path, describe for us what it
is. Or better yet, go start a company that behaves that way.

But the way I see it, CEOs like this are just following principles that we
ourselves have asked for: we want to be taken seriously, we want to make
decisions, we want to sit at the executive table, we want to be perceived as
an integral role that uniquely contributes to the success of the venture.
Saying "our tech team is really great" is a direct consequence of those
principles.

~~~
jtbigwoo
Good point. On top of that, pretty much every CEO in every industry says some
variation of the following:

"Our true strength is our team. They're the best and most talented group of
programmers/butchers/bakers/candlestick makers ever assembled by mankind."

There's really no downside for the CEO to saying this. If he doesn't say those
things it seems like he's trying to steal all the credit.

~~~
ArekDymalski
Your interpretation is really nice, but I'm afraid it isn't true for many
companies. IMHO "we've got top talent" is nowadays just another form of
marketing bullshit that replaced "we are the leader" or "we are number 1"
phrases which were mindlessly repeated by everybody for last 30 yrs. And in
fact "we've got the smartest people" is even much worse because companies
don't (and never will) have any metric to support this claim. It's just like
yelling "we are the best". Pointless and kind of pathetic.

------
fleitz
OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team.

Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or
Twitter, or Facebook solving?

I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not
work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is
5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the
points*timedecay system than HN uses for ranking works.

Fuck, even Google was a 20 year old algorithm.

We're building CRUD apps on what 20 years ago were $75 million dollar
computers, not putting men on the moon with pocket calculators.

~~~
zwass
Among many serious engineering projects at Facebook:

* HHVM (open source) - A PHP runtime and JIT compiler ([http://www.hhvm.com/blog/](http://www.hhvm.com/blog/))

* Presto (open source) - A distributed SQL query engine working on hundreds of petabytes of data ([https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/presto-i...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/presto-interacting-with-petabytes-of-data-at-facebook/10151786197628920))

* Running graph algorithms on a graph with a trillion edges ([https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scaling-...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scaling-apache-giraph-to-a-trillion-edges/10151617006153920))

* Open Compute (open source) - Custom designed data centers down to the motherboard ([http://opencompute.org/](http://opencompute.org/))

~~~
lazyjones
Are (were) any of these essential for Facebook's success? I doubt it. They are
by-products of Facebook hiring talented people after they already had a
leading product.

~~~
zwass
Given that Facebook is motivated by profits, one must assume that these
projects are, in fact, essential to the continued success of the product.

~~~
lazyjones
> _one must assume that these projects are, in fact, essential to the
> continued success of the product._

In the same way that Google Reader, Google Wave, Google Base and dozens of
other products were essential to continued success of Google for a while
(before they were discontinued), just because they were developed at Google?

------
mahyarm
I thought everyone knows that it isn't true, it's like a BS marketing talking
point. The things most of us in startups work on isn't technically difficult
or pushing the envelope, and that alone should point to not having the best
people or teams. Because these places will never gain the interest of or the
pay the price for the for the very best, which can easily reach $400k/yr
starting. The only technically challenging item is scaling a large software
service doing relatively simple things, and that happens once you've gotten
traction. Once you have traction you can pay for those people.

Is text chat hard? No. Facebook? Nope. Video Chat? Yes that is a bit harder,
but still relatively solved. Social _____? Probably not. Any casual video
game? No. Salesforce.com? Nope. Zoho? No. Airbnb? Nope. Dropbox? Nope.

The more interesting things are the google self driving car, machine learning
and the occulus rift to a point. But those things are few and far between.

~~~
DevX101
Dropbox wasn't a trivial engineering problem. While making facebook for a
couple thousand users isn't too hard, scaling it to hundreds of millions was
no trivial feat either.

~~~
aryastark
I was under the impression Dropbox is a UI to Amazon S3. I use them and don't
mean to deny it's a slick package. But I could duplicate the entire thing in
about a day with inotify and rsync. The scaling is mostly on Amazon.

That said, I must point out that the scaling issues all of these super modern
"change the world" companies, such as Twitter and Facebook, have are purely
for the purpose of centralizing power. It's a self-inflicted headache. It's
great business to be in control of millions of users. But it's a sad state of
affairs for the internet in general. We've gone from open, decentralized, and
peer-to-peer protocols to one company controlling everything.

There are interesting scaling problems. But Facebook isn't one of them.

~~~
staunch
> _But I could duplicate the entire thing in about a day with inotify and
> rsync. The scaling is mostly on Amazon._

No, you could duplicate a narrow piece of Dropbox's functionality in a day.
You could not even get anywhere near duplicating the product and the service
in anything less than months.

~~~
aryastark
Dropbox pretty much uses librsync and, I believe, inotify on Linux. With
Amazon S3. That _is_ Dropbox. Literally.

Polishing any product takes time. But that's universal and has nothing to do
with engineering. What exactly is non-trivial about Dropbox?

~~~
brianchu
Some of the technical challenges I can think of:

1\. Version control.

2\. LAN sync.

3\. Dropbox probably also does a lot to try and minimize their S3 costs - so
probably a good deal of compression/duplication-detection on the backend.

4\. Any and all networking issues. Even if using OSS gets you 98% of the way,
Dropbox probably gets you 100% of the way.

5\. Performance. I don't know what Dropbox is doing, but about a year ago I
tested out Google Drive, SkyDrive, Dropbox, and SugarSync. I didn't want to
use Dropbox because it gives you the least free storage, but Dropbox was
consistently 2x faster than the competition (without using LAN sync). That
makes a huge difference so I switched to it, and if Dropbox engineers are
beating out Google and Microsoft engineers, they're clearly doing something
special.

------
forgottenpaswrd
Well, in my experience managing my own software company(I guess I am CEO but I
did code a lot in the early days so I know what it is) it is not so much about
the quality of the people.

The quality is something very important when your company is made by two
developers. When you go up from this, you have lots of interactions and
complexity.

You have love, hatred, you have admiration and envies, you have people that
need money or need time to see their family. You have people that is afraid of
their own mediocrity that try to protect their knowledge or "own" part of the
company(fiefdoms).

You have people in some areas fight against others(marketing or sales vs it),
you have different personality types that don't understand each other.

If you get all this right, life becomes easier and you have time for writing
in HN, or kissing your kids, because it is a fantastic machine that works
alone, and yes your tech people will kick ass.

Get this wrong, and most people do it not wrong, terribly wrong, and life is
hell(I know because as a geek I did terribly wrong in the past).

If the best engineer does not sleep, you have a sh*t engineer(Chernobyl).

~~~
lifeisstillgood
so how do you get it right?

what is right - focus on technical excellence and product fit or are you
meaning trust and honesty levels in the company?

------
theboss
My question is this:

Startups I see here are usually looking for the same kinds of people to help
build their products (Rails, iOS, UI/UX, etc.).

They look to really only hire people who are really good at things like this
to build their product. Are these people the best people to have around later?
Once your company has bigger problems than just getting something out the door
are these people a hinderance?

I don't want to sound like these people are not smart but being REALLY good at
one thing generally means you are lacking in other domains (only so many hours
in the day right?)

I ask because I'm honestly curious. I'm not involved in the startup world at
all but this was always a question I had when reading job postings here.

~~~
skrebbel
I've wondered about exactly the same. Are generalists appreciated at all in
the startup world?

~~~
meowface
I've never founded or worked for a startup, but I would imagine that
especially at the early stages, all your engineers will need to be pretty good
generalists. You're (probably) going to need a website, a product frontend, a
product backend, an infrastructure, etc... And if that work's being split
between 3 - 8 people, most of them are going to have be generalists.

~~~
theboss
Maybe in 2004 but this is 2013. Rails, iOS, Digitalocean, heroku, aws, with a
front-end designer. You no longer need to know anything about infrastructure.

~~~
czbond
Until you scale. I've met too many developers who say this until they're in a
high growth environment.

~~~
theboss
My original point exactly. They get all these rails cloud heroku iOS guys and
then how aren't the startups trapped? Ive never seen a job posting for an
infrastructure all-around-guy

~~~
czbond
Fair. I've seen a lot of 'full stack' or 'back end' engineer postings - which
i think is 'their version' of an infrastructure guy. If you think about it,
how would a designer who has mainly pushed pixels describe that type of
offering besides 'back end'?

------
Sakes
I don't know. If you have a team that is able to consistently ship products
that work and are well received by your existing client base, you probably do
have some badass tech guys.

You don't necessarily have to claim that you are better than all other
startups, you just have to claim to have a tech team that is magnitudes better
than average teams at other companies.

It is crazy to me how many failed projects are floating out there. And once
you are tasked with trying create a solution that requires coordinating with
another tech team from another company, you will realize just how badass your
team really is, and how many terrible tech teams are out there eating as if
they create value.

~~~
hangonhn
"I don't know. If you have a team that is able to consistently ship products
that work and are well received by your existing client base, you probably do
have some badass tech guys."

From my experience, a good manager can ship with bad enginners but good
engineers cannot ship with a bad manager. This is from the perspective from an
engineer.

We engineers need to stop kidding ourselves. We are good at certain problems
but getting something out the door and running a company requires much more
than what we are expected to be good at. This is why blogs like PG's and Joel
Spolsky have such a following. They explain difficult concepts to engineers in
a way engineers will understand. Not everything they write about are
revelations to the whole world but they are to many engineers. Human-centric
design? Other industries have done it for decades, etc. We need to know our
own limitations if we want to go beyond them or make the conscious decision to
not get better at it and let someone else handle it.

~~~
nostrademons
Good engineers can ship with a bad manager, but it basically requires one of
the engineers "managing up" and taking on the role of manager without pissing
off his actual manager. That's a delicate balance to strike, but there are
some folks (usually experienced engineers who have been around the block a few
times, or folks who have previously held manager/executive positions but
"downshifted" because they really like to code) that can pull it off.

~~~
collyw
That sound like my situation where my team leader is not very experienced (or
good in my opinion). As such I often refuse to do things the way he suggests.
"Just do it like this". When the word "just" is part of the phrase, it means
that he probably hasn't thought it out very thoroughly.

~~~
nostrademons
When I've seen this done effectively, the engineer never outright refuses to
do things the way their manager says. Instead, they take responsibility for
educating their manager, in a way that the manager can understand and without
threatening their ego. So if the manager says "Just do it like this", your
response should be "That won't work because X, Y, and Z. However, I could do
it like this, and it will have these costs and benefits and take me this long,
and that's why I believe this is a superior course of action." At all points
the decision is still up to the manager, but the senior engineer has brought
enough data and experience to bear that they can convince their manager that
it was a good idea to begin with.

------
zacharycohn
On the upside, most problems startups are working on aren't necessarily
extremely technically difficult.

~~~
zwieback
Definitely true for software. Compared to other engineering disciplines
software development isn't necessarily easier but there's a tendency of
software developers to overestimate their achievement. I know from my own
experience that the ease with which complex SW systems can be created out of
nothing is very satisfying and can lead to a positive feedback loop with a
runaway effect.

When I work on EE or mechanical projects the physical elements involved have
the opposite effect and create a negative feedback loop and (perhaps) lead to
more deliberate development and more realistic views of the relative
difficulty of the development effort. Anyone who has studied controls knows
that negative feedback is generally what is wanted to reach the point you're
aiming for.

~~~
zacharycohn
Good clarification: Software startups.

------
mathattack
Let's start by accepting that 50% of CTOs can't be above average. What can you
do about this as a CEO? I see variations of two themes:

1) Find some benchmark, and reset internal expectations if they're wrong.
Replace the technical talent if they're not great.

2) Claim that they're the best, and set high expectations.

My belief is that once you've chosen your team, you're better off going with
#2. This isn't to say putting your head in the sand is good, but setting a
high bar can be better than second guessing folks in an area you're not
knowledgable about.

Perhaps it's ok to make a good judgment over time, but I think there's a lot
to be gained from saying, "You're the top team, I believe you can do it." If
over time they struggle to make the grade, then you have to recalibrate.

This is very tough, because studies have shown that most people of all fields
do believe they are better than average.

Much more on this phenomenon here ->
[http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57568186/](http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57568186/)

Thank you for starting this discussion.

~~~
tensor
And of course, this applies to CEOs too. What is a CEO to do when they realize
that they are worse than average? What can you do about this as CTO or another
part of the team? Sadly, the only option appears to be to quit.

~~~
mathattack
If your boss is a weak performer, your options are to transfer, quit, or
organize a coup. The third option is very risky, and doesn't work often
outside of investment banks. If your boss is a weak performing CEO, then
transfering is taken away.

I'll add a question though... "What makes you think you know your boss's job
enough to judge their performance?" This isn't aimed at you, but people in
general. As a manager of managers, I've seen people 2 levels below think that
their failing manager was outstanding. The reality is they didn't see the
things that were important in that manager's job. (This goes for the CEO
valuing the CTO)

Understanding other people's performance is very difficult.

------
balls187
It's not necessarily the CEO's fault here. If investors, and press would stop
asking questions like "Why is your team better than everyone else" the CEO's
wouldn't have to make up ridiculous statements.

When dealing with externals, winning isn't important. It's the appearance that
you're winning, and having the CEO brag about tech talent is just part of the
game.

Just like when CEO's brag about having former MSFT, GOOG, FB, engineers on
staff, or having someone who went to MIT, Caltech, and yada yada yada.

In the end, what really matters is building a great product that helps your
customers scratch an itch.

------
300bps
If startup technology people didn't believe they were superior to everyone
else they probably wouldn't be in a startup.

I am under no illusions of my superiority; I am a developer at an investment
bank.

~~~
hangonhn
I've done tech at a hedge fund. I'm an engineer at big tech company. I'm
friends with many startup engineers. The whole lot is a mixed bag. You can't
imply anything from their place of employment. Some really brilliant engineers
stay in finance because they like the problems they work on and they get paid
a ton. At some point, it's really a life style and values question.

The best engineers I know are usually quite humble. They don't lose their
sense of wonder and are always hungry. Everything they see is shit, including
work they've done. They have a relentless drive to improve.

------
Kiro
This is spot on and my company is exactly like this. We get the rockstar team
label slapped on us all the time when we're really just a bunch of mediocre
programmers.

I don't think there are that many truly talented teams out there even though
you get impression every other hip startup has one.

------
soneca
I think this behavior is created by the fundraising process as we know it.
From angels to VCs to YC everybody focus on the team to decide wheter to
invest or not.

The CEO is supposed to be inspiring leader and a good teamworker, if he
praises the CTO as a genius he is perceived as both, with the plus that, if he
is a good salesman, the investors believe that the CTO is a genius. So there
it is, the startup dream team, a inspiring leader and a tech genius, the next
Jobs+Woz.

And the best performances are usually of those who actually believe in it, so
no surprise that after a few years successfully saying that, they start to
believe in it.

~~~
mahyarm
I agree, the 'we have the best team ever' marketing is for investors. Or there
is a big implicit disclaimer of 'for the level of difficulty we are working
on'.

------
dmourati
I was recently on a college recruiting trip for my startup and I said
something similar to a candidate and I meant it.

I've worked in four startups in the valley and while each team had a large
number of really smart engineers, all but my current one had some real
lackluster ones as well. Maybe it just takes time to figure out who those
folks are. I've been here less than a year.

This company has extremely high hiring standards and will turn away viable
candidates who fail to impress. We spend a ton of time in recruiting, but I'd
like to think the result is worth it.

Reminds me of a talk about 10x engineers I watched recently:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI)

That was from the Eng VP at joyent.

Since then, I've had a really bad experience working with one or more joyent
engineers who were anything but 10x. More like x/10.

------
avifreedman
Consider the domain and the comparable.

For a limited subdomain (data anlytics, content distribution, Internet
routing), I think it can be true that startups that are focusing on those
areas are started by, or attract, world experts in those areas. Not because
their brains are bigger than the random startup geek but because they have
experienced frustrations in the space, have seen the history and evolution,
and wake up thinking about solving problems in a particular space.

Also, the comparable. An environment where people can protoype, implement,
test on customers, and then flesh it out will be > 10 x cheaper and 10 x
faster than a 9-5 environment where you have 10 engineering and ops groups to
convince and add headcount to to do anything, and often non-technical product
managers in the way who need to be educated and can block or at least
massively slow down GSD.

------
poissonpie
The trouble is less that CEOs believe they have a superior tech team, because
any set of reasonably smart people working on a problem domain day in, day out
will eventually gain a level of expertise in that domain beyond what most
people have. The problem is, to believe you have more innate talent than
others, rather than accepting that hard work is what makes people good at what
they do. Arrogance is an easy trap to fall into though. Creating a truly
humble team is the real challenge.

------
wslh
It depends of your market sector. In my main market (Application
Virtualization) my tech team is critical. I have few developers who are the
famous 10X (or 50X?) ones. Without them it would be impossible to ship the
kind of products we are doing. It's not about being faster.

But that team is not enough for being successful and you are overestimating it
if you think it's enough. Marketing and Selling capabilities are the other
side of the coin.

------
rhizome
My thought is that so many are using "fake it 'til you make it" as a marker
for their ambition. So, if they want to make it big, they are going to fake it
big. This leads to, among other things, all of the job ads we have all seen
that say, "Join CompanyX and help us _change the world of shopping_." Of
course, how that world is going to change ("do I still have to use money?") is
left unsaid.

------
andrewljohnson
Maybe it's less important to have the best developers than it is to have the
best developers in your market. That means you want better devs than the
competition, and potentially domain knowledge that matters.

I wonder if that's a good explanation to give a VC - "Our guys are pretty
decent, but it's not the quality of developer you are investing in. Our idea
does not require rocket science right now."

------
staunch
High motivation + high specialization. Any _competent_ team that dives really
hard into a specialization can very often become the best in the world at it.
That's not because other people couldn't do better, it's just that they
haven't put in the effort to do so.

------
conductr
A symptom of the acqui-hire culture? If the CEO sells the team, he could sell
the company

------
LouisSayers
CEO's make shit up all the time. They have to convince the world that they're
the next best thing, so they say stuff like that to give others confidence in
their, and their team's ability.

Don't underestimate the power of confidence.

------
trustfundbaby
I think its like being married, everybody has to claim their wife is the most
beautiful woman in the world, even though its not true :)

As long as you don't believe your own hype, I think its okay.

~~~
normloman
That's different. Beauty is subjective, so she may be the most beautiful woman
in the world (to you).

------
fragmede
> unless you're willing to make solving those problems one of your core
> competencies...

"Unless you're willing to solve hard problems, don't try solving hard
problems"?

------
endlessvoid94
You're absolutely the victim of selection bias. Most of this does not reflect
what I've seen in _successful_ startups.

------
sieva
We're looking for an awesome web developer (oh the irony). Let me know if
you're interested :) StudySoup.com

~~~
sblawrie
It took me about 30 seconds to figure out what your product does. You might
want to move the bit about your partners to the bottom of the homepage and the
stuff about the product and its features to the top of the page. I don't
really care about your partners if I don't even know what you do in the first
place. Good luck.

~~~
sieva
That's quality feedback! I really appreciate you taking the time to write that
out.

We figured since we're so small and unknown at this point, it would make sense
to wear the partner badge high on our chest...but your msg makes complete
sense.

In case the website didn't make it clear, we provide course creation tools so
any educator can create or curate a textbook replacement.

------
asdasf
>usually the CEO is personally self-effacing and does not have that kind of
personal arrogance.

I haven't seen that. Usually I see the whole "my tech team are all the best
awesomest rock ninjas" tripe from the CEO, and entirely because it is an
extension of their personal arrogance and massive ego. You talk to the CEO and
they have the best tech team in the world solving impossible problems nobody
else can do, and you talk to that tech team and they are like "We're making a
website, there's nothing special about it". The CEO believes the quality of
their tech team reflects their ability as a CEO, thus they must have the best
team since they are the greatest CEO.

A sidenote you can ignore but I just need to vent: these massive ego CEOs then
insist on making their tech team do this:
[http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell)
because they "know people", so they know what people want.

~~~
joeemison
In my experience, those who have made it to Series A have had enough humbling
experiences to have learned how to hide obvious arrogance. I would agree with
your assessment of brand-new CEOs, though.

------
seivan
Problems with incompetent leaders in Software/Startups.

1) Throwing engineers at something without asking the engineers

a) Twitter b) Spotify c) Soundcloud

Tweetie.app Lorens vs current twitter application.

2) Not allowing remote work.

3) Shitty domain knowledge that isn't worth crap.

~~~
nostromo
Twitter and Spotify and Soundcloud have incompetent leaders?

Where can I learn to be so incompetent!?

