I did a start-up some years ago where we were four founders. It was a pretty good match, a technical guru, a marketing guy, a sales guy and me to bind it all together. The sales guy was employed at a fortune 500 company and was managing a sales budget of around 300 mill. $ at an age of thirty. An absolute hotshot. Unfortunately it turned out that he was used to managing large budgets and lots of people, and he simply dragged us down. He couldn't make the transition from a large corporation to a start-up where the rules are very different.
It all worked out well in the end - we bought him out and he went back to corporate. And we still have a beer together every now and then.
This is probably the first genuinely valuable article I've read on OnStartups. This is dead-on, and cuts across pretty much every aspect of running a software company:
* Engineering --- BigCo rockstars can be process-bound, require 30 page MRDs to start projects, and gummed up in the tar-pit dev platform choices of their previous project; your startup should not be using J2EE or ACE.
* Marketing --- You know you're fucked when you're pre-revenue and your marketing plan involves dropping 20k on vanity booth kits to take to conferences, or when your marcom person spends more money on mailing lists than on organizing meetups.
* Sales --- Just having an account manager backs you into a corner on pricing; now you have to make 50k off a customer to make them "worth having". BigCo sales rockstars need armies of sales engineers to be effective, and may spend more time selling you on why they should be promoted to Global All-Encompassing Executive VP Of Worldwide Sales.
A big difference between Microsoft and your company is that, for better or worse, everything inside of Microsoft is at least designed to help people do what Microsoft thinks will improve shareholder value. At a BigCo, you can work your MRDs and add $50MM to the year. Nothing at your company is designed to make people successful. If you sit back and do what you're supposed to do at a startup, you die.
I'd consider hiring people right out of highschool. I'm thinking of the kids who are obsessed about college admissions and are in that very intense competition to make into Harvard or MIT or what have you. From what I've seen, the kids who make it to these plaaces worked harder in high school than in college, and they work pretty hard in college. It's like, once they get in, they feel like they made it already.
A kid without a college degree is pretty undervalued nowadays, IMO.
a kid without a college degree that's been racking up job after job on his resume is way undervalued. hiring some kid that partied all the time but with a piece of paper is the safe bet. but startups aren't in it for the safe bet.
It all worked out well in the end - we bought him out and he went back to corporate. And we still have a beer together every now and then.