| The TVM (Time Value of Money) aspect here is the one most often issues under valued by "business types". That said it goes both ways, I've been a serial entrepreneur and a big corporate type. And it's clear that on the business side people work hard too if they are going to be successful and they too have a TVM problem. The biggest failure I see tech people make is not properly communicating the real level of effort a project takes. In a room full of techs if we talk about a problem we all have a reasonable understanding of how hard it is. We might be off a bit in our estimates but in general we understand the difference in effort of various proposals. When in a room of business people with no domain expertise we assume they understand what it's like to spend 100's if not 1,000's of hours working on a technical project. They don't understand it any more then most techs understand how hard it is to setup a company, get the business registered, shareholder agreements written, contracts developed, taxes handled etc. That issue however is a failure on both parties part, techs have to learn to own their half of the "assumption" problem. They need to clearly articulate how much work something is going to take and convert that effort into real dollars and timelines. True story a very famous musician friend of mine and I were talking one day and I asked him "How long did it take you to write that song XXX" (very famous song) and he said "Hmm a couple days here and there then in the studio.." we both agreed it must have been maybe a 60 hour commitment. Then he asked me about a project I had just finished with a major car manufacturer and I said "Oh that was 6 man years of effort". He asked me "What is a man year?" and of course I tried to explain in lay terms what it's like to have someone at a keyboard for 2,000 hours and do that with six people. He was blown away at the effort he literally would bring it up in future conversations for years when we would chat on various topics. In tech we take for granted that we work on labor scales that are massive and our failure to explain that to other people only makes the "startup conundrum" worse. |