[knighthacker]

I completely disagree. Traditionally, Sysadmins are what you bring in once you've grown enough that operational issues detract from development. Not only this made sysadmins feel terrible over the years having to deal with nasty production environments, but also developers were always slowed down because "Ops" were the bottleneck. And they were the bottleneck because developers didn't think like sysadmins when they started. It keeps going back and forth.

I hope the audience is smart and intuitive enough to understand that if none of the co-founders is a coder, then obviously your first hire can't be a sys-admin. With that assumption, having a sysadmin early on will only improve the productivity of the development team as is the case at Crowdtilt.

I guess the better word than Sysadmin is DevOps. Because what the author did at Crowdtilt wasn't just deploying and maintaining servers, but actually impacting and streamlining the development process.