[JoeAltmaier]

Yeah, everybody in the chain thinks they are the critical link.

The difference is, without a product the investors don't come easy. A hacker can make something, get it in front of users, maybe even get a sale all by themselves. So they have a natural inclination to see the other half as 'hire some marketing once I have something to show'.

[conker]

Enlighten me, what's the product investors want?

Is it your boring as hell slide deck?

That overly optimistic spreadsheet?

That oh-so-inspiring blog post about stuff not related to the product itself?

Or maybe is the app the technical founder made?

[JoeAltmaier]

Its a product with customers and traction.

Investors? If that's your goal, I guess you have to buy into the whole slap-happy salesguy smilefest. Tell that to Mr. Persson (minecraft).

Sure one example doesn't prove a point. I refer instead to the ideal web product that goes viral. It's self-funding and low-maintenance, and the topic of lots of discussion on this site. And it doesn't necessarily need any marketing staff. Sure SEO etc are often done by Marketing, but consider the more statistics-driven and testing-centered, the easier it is for an Engineer to grok the task.

[georgespencer]

Investors want a return on their fucking investment. That isn't just an app built by an asshole engineer who lives in a myopic world. It isn't just a spreadsheet showing projections for growth and a strategy behind it.

Investors want a return on their fucking investment. To get that you need all the parts of your startup working together, and nobody wanking on about being valuable and stupidly and pointlessly generalising the work of others.

Well done on listing a bunch of straw men.

Is it your patchy account session controller?

Is it your user View which specifies Arial before Helvetica in the stylesheet?

etc etc etc.