> The kids are incharge of the nursery over at Uber and they are in desperate need of a good, adult CTO...
That's a proper description of most startups I've had contact with recently, namely (well) funded startups.
It's a consequence of having inexperienced (and, sometimes, untalented) people running functions at a company.
It also applies to other areas like sales ("my inside sales script is killer, even though I haven't done professional sales anywhere before and just found out what inside sales is") or hiring ("I'll just hire my equally inexperienced buddies from college, they were great there").
But when it comes to kids building technology with "college playground" quality, it's too evident not to notice. The product ran fine when their buddies were testing, but it's unstable, unmaintainable and in need of a complete redesign when real world traffic comes along. All things that could have been prevented with a little bit of competence and experience.
It's a kind of mantra for people that take VC blogs as gospel and engineering blogs as the 10 commandments. Don't go to college, don't get any real world experience: start a company and, if it actually survives more than a couple of years, someone will inherit your technical debt.
This investor speak will quickly change when you get funded and have to attend board meetings to tell investors that your product is still not working, or you need twice the team that would be required for your goals, or you need months to produce basic business data...
That's a proper description of most startups I've had contact with recently, namely (well) funded startups.
It's a consequence of having inexperienced (and, sometimes, untalented) people running functions at a company.
It also applies to other areas like sales ("my inside sales script is killer, even though I haven't done professional sales anywhere before and just found out what inside sales is") or hiring ("I'll just hire my equally inexperienced buddies from college, they were great there").
But when it comes to kids building technology with "college playground" quality, it's too evident not to notice. The product ran fine when their buddies were testing, but it's unstable, unmaintainable and in need of a complete redesign when real world traffic comes along. All things that could have been prevented with a little bit of competence and experience.
It's a kind of mantra for people that take VC blogs as gospel and engineering blogs as the 10 commandments. Don't go to college, don't get any real world experience: start a company and, if it actually survives more than a couple of years, someone will inherit your technical debt.
This investor speak will quickly change when you get funded and have to attend board meetings to tell investors that your product is still not working, or you need twice the team that would be required for your goals, or you need months to produce basic business data...