
Non-technical founder? Learn to hack (2013) - NinjaX
http://blog.samaltman.com/non-technical-founder-learn-to-hack
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internetcitizen
"Although it takes many, many years to become a great hacker, you can learn to
be good enough to build your site or app in a few months."

Yeah, just don't run it in production.

~~~
coralreef
Running it in production is the point. An idea is pursued to validate the
market for it, not to accomplish building a scalable, secure solution for
which nobody wants.

~~~
internetcitizen
Respectfully disagree :)

90 percent of the users who reuse passwords for your app will end up on a list
and finding themselves on haveibeenpwned months too late, or never.

~~~
coralreef
This is an unfortunate consequence of having a free and openly distributed
internet. Unless you're auditing and compiling your own builds from open
source, you have no idea where your data is going.

I'm all for best practices and due diligence. But from the startup founder
perspective, you can't let yourself be paralyzed by the fear that everything
will go horribly wrong.

~~~
Ace17
> But from the startup founder perspective, you can't let yourself be
> paralyzed by the fear that everything will go horribly wrong.

Some middle ground here is definitely needed.

Even for startups, things going "horribly wrong" can kill people (medical
devices, biochemistry, robotics, transportation) or send people to jail
(accounting, banking).

And if you think your web startup doesn't deal with "dangerous" things, I
suggest googling for "life-threatening grindr security flaw".

There's never a good reason to ignore security.

------
dustinmoris
I'm not sure if this is genuinely good advice. I've tried to teach a few
people how to code and while they've had a great time and also managed to
solve a few "homework" tasks which I gave them, I doubt they would have
reached a level in only a few months time where they would have been able to
build a first version of a product.

Most software needs to do at least some basic data crud, integrating with some
third party APIs (auth, some social media platforms, other 3rd party services,
etc.) and also do some ops related work to get their first version shipped to
some cheap hosting. I doubt that someone without any technical background can
learn all these skills in only a few months time and then also build the first
version of their product.

It's likely going to be a time sink and one year later they know perhaps some
basic programming skill but will have no product at all. To me this would be a
sign of bad entrepreneurism, focusing on the wrong stuff at the wrong time.
Nowadays you can always hire someone or easily outsource the first version to
some company in India or elsewhere. It's not going to be perfect, but much
faster than learning and doing it yourself and probably still better.

I also doubt that you have to have some engineering skills in order to be a
successful business owner of a software company. Even the most talented
developer will not benefit much from his engineering skills, because they will
not get the time to make any low level decisions. Surround yourself with
people who you can trust and who you can delegate responsibility and you'll be
much better off IMHO.

~~~
petra
>> Nowadays you can always hire someone or easily outsource the first version
to some company in India or elsewhere.

True.

And the process of gathering requirements, managing a software engineer,
verifying quality all while working nights and having a full-time job - is
somewhat similar to the entrepreneurial life.

So it can be a good test.

