| 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. |
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.