

Is experience or skill more important when creating a web startup? - babul

Hi,<p>I am interested to know what the people here think about this topic. I have added some context below to frame the discussion around something. It is a long. Apologies if you fall asleep before getting to the end ;)<p>I have been having a debate with some grad-students/MBAs at Oxford regarding a web startup they want to do and about the need for experience vs skill in the developer(s).<p>About them:
"We are a group of postgrad students (Oxford) and we're currently loking into setting up a web 2.0 startup. It will be a social networking portal, focusing on a user base of about 20million in the EU plus about 20million in the USA, which has not been covered yet. The portal will also include a number of novel features and will be unique in its composition. We are about to finish the business plan and already acquired high-profile consultants for the board and established first VC/BA contacts.<p>Due to the central importance of the role (CTO) we require something along the lines of 3-5 years of experience in PHP/MySQL and scalable architectures."<p>I can't talk about what it is they will do or the novel features etc. so please don't ask :)<p>I thought I would play a counter argument just to see thier stand on this position with the experience!=skill approach stating for my $0.02 I'd go with someone who is passionate and interested in what they do and is able to learn fast and deliver rather than the fact they have a few years experience. Although experience is important in many respects (essentially because you know people will have "practised" what they preach and learnt from past mistakes and teachings), in the startup tech world it does not matter as much. Making things people want and having rapid develop cycles where you can prototype, learn, test, and implement features on a fast (day-build) basis and based on an easy to use architecture are more important. The top tech companies in the world have been started by people how had little experience (and were actually working with the latest tech at the time with which no-one had much experience over) and in many cases still are.<p>They replied:
"
I agree on your point w.r.t. experiencs!=skill, but I have to add that in an time-critical development process experience just adds thats extra advantage that might lead to your product reaching the market just before the competitors' does. Experience in a relevant field just means you can actually employ the knowledge gained from previous mistakes - particularily in the fast growing web 2.0 environment no project is like the other so there are many mistakes to be made.<p>Also, especially the understading (and subsequent realisation) of scalability is key in our project - we just can allow for our service to break down because of an inflexible and limited initial architecture...when it grows, it will grow exponentially! In the beginning you might be fine to run an immature architecture till, say 100k users, but as soon as the viral growth aspect of SNS kicks in you will have garanteed downtime and most likely you'll have to redesign your system and shut down your service for a limited time - giving your competitors a lead... 
"<p>I agreed with this as time-critcaly kinda changed things and replied:<p>"
Experience is advantageous but not a neccessity.
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Absolutely. If you do not learn from history you will repeat its mistakes. But... thankfully we are in 2nd/3rd cycle of internet app development and hence have many a case study, best-practice guide, design pattern, tried and tested toolkits and more to help us. We can now stand on the shoulders of giants.<p>But, just a thought, interestingly enough many a leading tech company still do not weigh experience too heavily when hiring/building. This seems especially true in recent high profile tech startups that are doing very well. The simplest solution (in those cases) seems to be to blend experience with inexperience to bring fresh thinking to problems and challenge assumptions. This seems to be a pattern to making disruptive technology?<p>Scalable Architecture = it goes without saying.
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Everyone has faced the same problem at one point or another, and whether you go with a .NET or J2EE or LAMP stack (or other) , there are common patterns that resolve many of these issues and are tried and tested by many a startup/company that went from 0-millions and beyond very fast. Only when you are doing something truly new, will you not find a comparable. 
"<p>Although I was being devils advocate to an extent I have been thinking about this more deeply this morning and thought I would post here (albeit in a long-winnded way but-accurate-to-the-conversation way) to see what others in the same boat have to say.<p>Thanks,<p>Babul.
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sharpshoot
Sounds like these guys have no experience in growing a social networking
site/hiring programmers

1) A social networking site doesn't just grow on its own. Ask them how they
intend to seed the userbase and what metrics they intend to monitor to
optimize viral growth

2) You'll probably rewrite the thing anyway, so being fast and knowing what
you are doing and why is more important.

3) What will these guys do when the product is being built. Ie how will they
acquire users and what incentives do people have to invite more users.

Sound like these guys have no experience whatsoever.

~~~
babul
I have already asked them all those questions and more explaining that the
evolution of the product should be guided by its usage/userbase and will
almost certainly involve _at least one_ complete/major rewrite (due to change
of direction/platform) as it develops as it is hard/impossible to get it right
straight away and _their_ perception of what people want and what people
_actually_ do want may not be the same.

I have also suggested the stack/path to follow in alignment with thier goals
and which scales well yet allows rapid dev. but honestly think until they
start building seriously they won't appreciate these issues. This advice has
been from my own experiences and that of others, many of whom have failed as
well as succeeded, but is contrary to what some consultant friends are saying.

I am not an _expert_ in building large scale web apps by any means, but have
worked on enough to know good practice/paths from bad, atleast at the early
stages.

They do have software dev experience themselves (e.g. CEO, who is doing PhD at
Oxford, has ~2yrs commercial software exp in electronics company) and have
done some research into those areas (the MBA guy did most of it).

Anyway Sumon I will try and get them to attend the talk on Tuesday and ask
you/panel questions during the Q&A as I am sure talking to more people who are
_doing_ this will help them no end.

------
sayhello
It depends on what you define as skill. Some skills can only be obtained
through experience. However, experience alone is meaningless.

These guys do sound like they don't know what they are doing, and them looking
for someone with skills in specific technologies only might be a bad idea.

Instead of those specific skills only, for a CTO, they should perhaps look for
someone with broad knowledge (or willingness to learn) of their
problem/solution domain (web application development for instance), as well as
solid technical ability.

~~~
swombat
_Instead of those specific skills only, for a CTO, they should perhaps look
for someone with broad knowledge (or willingness to learn) of their
problem/solution domain (web application development for instance), as well as
solid technical ability._

Indeed... at the moment it seems like a case of the blind leading the blind.
The fact is, all their VC links and grand plans will come to nothing at all
unless they have execution ability. And they have no execution ability until
they have a technology director - the kind whose back you can build a company
on. Those are rare enough. The technology of choice or even the level of
experience should be of no consequence. They need a 1 or 2 in this taxonomy:
[http://www.devtopics.com/programmer-productivity-the-
tenfini...](http://www.devtopics.com/programmer-productivity-the-tenfinity-
factor/)

Daniel

------
m0nty
False dichotomy. Ask yourself a slightly different question: can we hire
someone with skill _and_ experience? And the answer to that is not "I know
someone with wild skillz who does all these kewl demos but he hasn't worked on
a big project yet." Learning to program for a big project is a skill in
itself, so I think you need to get an excellent programmer who is also good at
building large apps _and_ can prove it.

~~~
babul
Yes, I absolutely agree. It goes without saying, but in this case I was
curious to see thoughts on the _vs_ issue i.e. if you had to go for one or the
other what you would base it on.

~~~
m0nty
Well, there are plenty of people with experience but no talent, and you'd want
to avoid those at all costs. But talent with no experience _might_ work.

------
Hexstream
"Experience in a relevant field just means you can _actually employ the
knowledge gained from previous mistakes_ \- particularily in the fast growing
web 2.0 environment _no project is like the other_ so there are many mistakes
to be made."

That seems nonsensical, saying experience is important and no project is like
the other in the same sentence.

~~~
babul
I agree and pointed out this and other contradictions during our
conversations.

But, I think the general idea is you can derive patterns and rules from
experience that can be applied to other fields to help prevent repeating
mistakes.

------
swombat
Send your friends to [http://www.inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-
recognise-a-...](http://www.inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-
good-programmer/)

Also, Tip 11 might be of interest: [http://www.inter-
sections.net/2008/05/07/13-tips-for-creatin...](http://www.inter-
sections.net/2008/05/07/13-tips-for-creating-a-successful-new-online-product/)

Daniel

PS: However, to be honest, from the sound of it, your friends are pretty much
doomed. I'd advise you not to invest your money in that startup, it's almost
guaranteed to fail. See: <http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html>

~~~
babul
Thanks for the links.I saw the latter on hacker news a few days ago but missed
the former (made me smile because that sounds like me, er, yay!).

Anyway, I am not investing money but have been approached to (help) build it.
I have declined the offer as although the guys are super smart etc. etc., we
are not a good fit (atleast from my perspective) and I think their approach is
wrong. I am a believer in organic growth strategies and agile dev practices.

I just want to help them out as I hate to see people fail for such reasons.

------
diego
_"we just can allow for our service to break down because of an inflexible and
limited initial architecture...when it grows, it will grow exponentially!"_

It's not when, but if. The vast majority of startups never have that problem.
Start out with something capable of handling the traffic from a Techcrunch
article (maybe one or two visitors per second for a few hours). Spend a couple
of hours thinking about how you would scale up and have a plan, but no more
than that. Scalability can be very expensive so investing on it without
knowing that you will need it is a case of premature optimization.

~~~
babul
True, but they do have some networks they can use to gain good intial traction
and a decent user base. Some stacks allow you to scale fairly easily but the
focus shoudl be really on the core product value/service initially.

