[paulsutter]

From Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html):

> The good news is, choosing problems is something that can be learned. I know that from experience. Hackers can learn to make things customers want. [6]

>This is a controversial view. One expert on "entrepreneurship" told me that any startup had to include business people, because only they could focus on what customers wanted. I'll probably alienate this guy forever by quoting him, but I have to risk it, because his email was such a perfect example of this view:

    80% of MIT spinoffs succeed provided they have at least one management person in the team at the start. The business person represents the "voice of the customer" and that's what keeps the engineers and product development on track. 

> This is, in my opinion, a crock. Hackers are perfectly capable of hearing the voice of the customer without a business person to amplify the signal for them. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them "engineers." Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted? It seems to me the business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who obligingly flew Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started.

[neilv]

You can understand the customer backwards and forwards, but I think you still need a business person who both knows how to court funding, and is willing to spend all their time doing that.

One example, from my past, abandoned self-funded startup: my co-founder (customer domain expert) and I (all-in-one engineering) didn't want to be the ones courting VC, but we were also too slow to seek out a startup business person. For maybe two reasons:

1. We had a couple outside-the-box approaches, which would only really resonate with users because we weren't doing something in the way every other CEO in that space did it.

2. We were busy, and didn't know offhand where to look for the kind of CEO we needed -- who we'd trust to embrace the approach, not twist it before launch, nor (ethically worse) bait&switch our users afterwards.

Maybe some kind of incubator would've helped us launch and get far enough for the right CEO to come to us. But we didn't have time to jump through the hoops of something like YC, for a small chance at a small amount of funding. And the process still seems oriented towards founders who want to be doing all the business stuff.

PG might've sought to mold technical founders into business people -- but some technical people already have some idea what business is about, and know they'd rather someone else (trustworthy!) do the business parts they don't want to do much of.

[muzani]

As a technical CEO, I was good at sales and getting deals. I didn't have the focus to close deals though. I had a non-tech co-founder, but he wasn't CEO and he couldn't close things like funding all on his own.

Putting the best tech person as CEO effectively makes it a solo founder effort. The ideal is the business person as CEO, or perhaps some multi-talented person where product development is fully delegated to a CTO.

[tinco]

If you need a business person on your team, it's because you need business and you need to be a business, and that's what the business person should be doing. Marketing, closing deals, arranging funding, talking to the lawyers, talking to the accountants, doing HR. If they're really good they're also managing the business process, making sure everyone's happy, communicating and performing and on target.

It's not actually multiple persons that you need on your team, it's different roles. The technical person, the product person, the management person, the visionary, the organized person, there's probably a dozen more personality traits that are helpful if not essential. They could all be in the same person, but it's more likely it's 2 or 3. They don't all need to be founders, but the more committed they are to the company, the better that aspect is reflected in the company, and the more succesful it might be.

Google didn't need any marketing, they just needed engineers, so they hired engineers, and people who could hire engineers, and people who could manage engineers. By the time they needed something else they were already making so much money they could afford to motivate excellence by monetary compensation alone, not every start up has that luxury.

[Judgmentality]

> Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them "engineers." Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally wanted Google to be a pay-to-use service and were against ads. I don't know how they came to their change in business model, but I suspect it was after they hired people that weren't engineers to help.

[adventured]

It occurred after Eric Schmidt took over operational control of Google. He focused in on a rational business model (swiped from GoTo.com [1]), it's specifically why the venture capitalists installed him. Schmidt had both an engineering background and management experience. The story I recall from back then was about John Doerr telling Schmidt to not fuck it up (recounted in a nicer way by Schmidt, below [2]); the advertising runway was pretty simple for Google, given the product they were building under the hood.

Schmidt joined Google in March 2001. For all of 1999 Google only had $220,000 in revenue (founded Sept 1998). Their early, primitive experiments in advertising worked well enough, they brought in $19m in revenue for 2000 (which would increase 300% in 2001, and then 400% in 2002).

[1] 2013: https://slate.com/business/2013/10/googles-big-break-how-bil...

[2] 2005: https://www.gq.com/story/google-larry-sergey

> Schmidt met all of Larry and Sergey's stringent criteria. He had a credible name, a Ph.D. (from Berkeley), and he promised not to push the boys aside or dismantle the quirky culture they'd engendered. "The board members told me, basically, 'Don't screw this thing up!' " Schmidt says. "They said, 'It needs some infrastructure, some growing, but the gem here is very real.'"

[ZephyrBlu]

Wow, that growth is absolutely insane even by startup standards.

Has there been another company since Google that grew so fast? $19mil revenue in 2yrs, then tripling and quadrupling.

[davemel37]

When Groupon pivoted from The Point it grew insanely fast. 2008 - $0 2009 - $15 million 2010 - $313 Million 2011 - $1.6 Billion

Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GRPN/groupon/reven...

[renewiltord]

I believe Uber's revenue grew at that pace.

[marc__1]

Fastest company to reach $100m ARR [1]:

Slack - 3 years Twilio - ~5 years ServiceNow - 6 years Shopify - 7 years

[1] https://www.bvp.com/bvp-nasdaq-emerging-cloud-index

[davemel37]

This list is saas companies. Its missing all consumer brands.

[wombatmobile]

Nicholas Carr wrote in Los Angeles Review of Books:

Seeking to keep the true nature of its work from the public, it adopted what its CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, called a “hiding strategy” — a kind of corporate omerta backed up by stringent nondisclosure agreements. Page and Brin further shielded themselves from outside oversight by establishing a stock structure that guaranteed their power could never be challenged, neither by investors nor by directors. As one Google executive quoted by Zuboff put it, “Larry [Page] opposed any path that would reveal our technological secrets or stir the privacy pot and endanger our ability to gather data.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thieves-of-experience-ho...

[AlchemistCamp]

> I suspect it was after they hired people that weren't engineers to help

For years, they required that all their hires could program, even those in completely unrelated roles.

[Grustaf]

I suppose this might explain why all google products have terrible UX, to this day. But it's not really an argument against non-technical co-founders. Steve Jobs was non-technical, I think it's safe to assume Woz's Apple would have been less successful.

[haakonhr]

But he definitely had a technical background (working at Atari) and he knew his way around a circuit (compared to people one could classify as non-technical)

[fizixer]

In my opinion, 'business person' is not the right word.

You need someone who has the right network, and/or can network, and/or can comfortably network. While still contributing as a co-founder.

Usually extraverts are good at this. If you're an introvert, you could still do it, but chances are you spent most of your life avoiding and/or wanting to avoid other folks.

[dublin]

You're forgetting Infoseek, which was a dramatically better search engine than anything else out there (including Google, Excite, and Yahoo), until it was bought by Disney/Go and was emasculated before finally being dumbed-down literally to the point of uselessness.