[woutr_be]

One of my colleagues (a backend engineer) was a CTO of a failed startup, he always talks about it. So one day I decided to talk to him about his experience, and it quickly became clear, that he as a CTO, was only focussed on technical work, complaining about how engineers build solutions that weren't scalable. How he fired people because they didn't write the code he wanted.

When I talked about a startup I worked at, and how most of our backend was written in Node.js, and about how we tried to improve our UI to make it more customer friendly. He quickly dismissed all of it, blamed Node.js for failing our startup, and told me customers don't care about a pretty UI.

It was then when I realised why his startup failed, at no point in time did he ever talk about the actual product they were building, or what problems he was trying to solve. He only talked about technical work, and about how that was his main focus. He even thought making our UI customer friendly equalled in just making it pretty.