[bhldev]

Well capitalism is about arbitrage, so yeah you can buy low and sell high somewhere else. Problem with that is everyone does it and there's no market differentiation.

I absolutely think you need craftsmanship. If you don't have it you have to pay for it or find someone who does. If you open a restaurant you need a chef if you release music you need a singer if you write code you need some developer to give you an edge.

You can be some generalist who's good at raising money and coding at the same time to save some pennies or you can be really good at raising money and hire someone to deal with the coding. The second is way more likely to succeed. Not to mention you can usually tell what startups will succeed by one simple test. Walk around their shop after hours and on the weekend, the ones that will succeed have people (persons) working after hours. At least, that's one way of telling.

So there is no avoiding your craft if you build a product. Yes you can be generalist in your approach and solve general problems but to build a big enough box to catch everyone you have to be very, very good at building boxes.

The alternative is to constantly raise as much money as possible and hire everyone under the sun but eventually you will run up against a wall. If you can raise Series A B C D E F H ad infinitum rounds and become the next Uber sure you can hire "generalist" programmers who only know algorithms and nothing domain specific or technology specific but then you are just shifting the problem... Instead of guy who has 30 years of C++ you hire guy (or girl) who can raise so many money bags your company takes over the world.

So you always need craftsmanship of some kind and the less you have the more money you need (which is a craft itself).