You might think you are joking, but this blog clearly proved it to be true. All you need is a startup weekend and 8 "fucking nerds" to scam into coding your idea for free.

I would bet that if Billy actually took this code to the "customers" he has lined up, they wouldn't use it. They'd have a bunch of other functionality they'd need implemented first before they even considered it. Then he'd take it to an outsourcing firm, who would collect a fee, throw out the original code (because they can't understand it), and then deliver another pile of code that doesn't work. Nerds can scam back, particularly when they live on other continents. Maybe he'll try another outsourcing firm, or maybe he'll try a naive college student, but I think the chance of him actually delivering a product that people will pay for and that stays at the forefront of the market is about zero.

This method of founding a tech startup doesn't really work. Either learn to code yourself, or build a trusted long-term relationship with someone who can.

I've met guys like Billy.

His goal is not to get customers with this code. His goal is to get investors. And, I wouldn't be surprised if he succeeds. He helped the team win Startup Weekend with a seemingly effective presentation, after all. Further, I wouldn't be surprised if his plan now (that it's become clear his developer team wants nothing to do with him) is to raise money with the prototype built at Startup Weekend, and then trash it and start over, so he believes he is free of the obligations he agreed to in order to get the code (that 0.4% stake everyone agreed to). Investors always ask who else you have equity and economic obligations to...and I'll wager he neglects to mention the situation with 8 devs owning a total of 3.2% of his company.

Regardless, dude's a douche hat, and I would hope nobody would fund him. Nobody smart would, since he's not gonna be able to deliver a product worth selling.

Yes, unfortunately too many people see it this way.

I think it comes from the fact non-technical people don't necessarely understand what building software is. All they see is some nerds doing arcane magic with keyboards.

The question is, can we do anything to make things better?

We need to educate ourselves.

Such a startup weekend would be a wonderful occasion. Why organizers do not draw up a simple legal checklist is beyond me.

Just drafting a paper signed by the whole team at the beginning of the event stating "I am going to put ~30 to 40 hours at my hourly rate of $X and thus my contributions can be bought for $Y", or whatever stock terms float your boat, would set clear expectations. They actually were less naive than most since they had that "handshake deal", but they should have gotten it in writing.

That, and realizing "Applicant tracking system in an original niche" is not a revolutionary idea. They owed that Billy guy absolutely nothing and should probably have kicked him out.

Because the organizers themselves are ALSO suits.

They see SW's (in general) as a way to get free labour, they've just learnt enough nerd-speak to bamboozle them into providing that labour.

I've been in the receiving end of "You know this'll be a commodity soon enough" from a guy who's product still relies on a database from 1992, renormalized of course, and who stores dates in packed 16bit numbers.

My advice is to reply with "Great. Best of luck, but you can't use my IP." Better yet retain operational control at all times - don't give out Heroku credentials, etc.

They usually go quiet when you finally show your cards and it's a straight flush.

And hopefully they don't have the need to take it as far as suing you once you withhold things (as you rightfully should in such a situation).

What would suck is doing everything to protect yourself, and then need to waste money (if you can even afford it) on a lawyer if the idiot tries to sue you.

Yes we can do a lot to make things better!

1. Nerds should run companies. The core problem is this assumption the CEO needs to be a "biz guy" like this seeming frat boy. I don't know why nerds think this, I think it may be some high school trauma.

But being the CEO is a lot easier for a nerd than it is for a biz guy-- biz guys at best are going to not touch the product development side, and more likely are going to undermine it... while nerds can easily manage a VP of sales, a VP of marketing, etc.

So first solution- don't work for biz guys. Only work for nerds. (and for purposes of this discussion, I consider Tim Cook to be a nerd- his nerd area is global manufacturing, but he's not a "guy who owns a restaurant" and thus has no relevant skills for a tech startup.)

2. Biz guy ideas are not better than nerd ideas. I don't know if SW doesn't allow it, but they should have come up with an idea that they, as engineers, were passionate about and worked on that. I think the results would have been better.

3. Focus on bootstrapping. The way biz guys get in is that they have connection to money or money and they use that money to take over and exploit the nerds (VCs and the bad angels are nothing other than these exact same biz guys--only VCs are incentivized to get you to bet it all on a longshot to be a unicorn because it's better for their portfolio, even though it diminishes the likelihood your company will be a success. )

Sorting humanity out into "nerds" and "biz guys" might make sense from 20,000' if you squint hard enough but like any form of tribalism it does way more harm than good when used to make in-the-moment decisions about real problems affecting real people.

It's a sometimes useful generalization, but it can also be a shortcut people use to trick themselves into thinking that they are part of some wise and good group of people (who coincidentally are just like them!) and gives them carte blanche for othering anyone they decide they don't like or don't want to work with.

It's almost impossible not to do this, it's kind of a necessary evil when you're constantly dealing with lots of different types of people and don't have much information about them to make more nuanced judgements. Not a problem as long as people don't start mistaking the mental shortcuts and generalizations we all employ for reality. Most of the time I behave as if pi is 3.14 because that usually works fine, but I never allow myself to start thinking that it actually is 3.14, which is the vibe I get whenever anyone starts talking about how everybody is either an "x person" or a "y person".

I'll respectfully disagree with your characterization--being a CEO isn't easier for anyone.

Diving in a bit better: a tech person may well obsess over implementation details (because they understand, or think they understand) them better than whoever is on the dev team. They may rabbithole working on a rewarding intellectual work that has nothing to do with the success of the business.

They may not even know how to deal with a veep of sales or marketing, because they may not have any idea how that world works. I have a friend who is a CEO that, for the longest time, thought marketing was basically lies, and so saw no reason to invest time in it. They've since reconsidered their position as their business intelligence has caught up with their technical intelligence.

As developers, especially ones who haven't really built and scaled a business, we always love to think "Hey, I build the product--how hard could the rest be?"

We're usually wrong.

I've seen time and again that technical expertise does not imply any sort of ability to run an actual business. This should not be underestimated.

Sales, marketing, legal, taxes, accounting, organization, etc., are hardly things people automatically know how to do.

I agree with most of what you say, but let's be honest in that most "biz guy" types are far better salesmen than engineer types, particularly in niches like this. Having a network of influential family members, college buddies, and relatives of buddies is a powerful sales tool. Not saying it's fair, but it's reality.

Now, that doesn't mean they'd make a good CEO, just a better sales person, which is also a critical skill for most startups (although I do like the "growth engineer" movement, which puts some of this power back into the hands of engineers, in marketing if not in sales).

> software gets built by itself if you have the right ideas

And for those that read everything in the literal sense: this is a joke because of the /s.

I've seen some really scary situations that started with throwing things over the wall- like having investors and board ready for the finished product in a few months, while it's just some wannabe CTO and maybe a family member helping holding the pile of shit code with some seriously rich and powerful people expecting that they will be in production soon, for large companies they've already talked with and planned to sell it to.

Steaming piles of shit become rolling tumbleweeds of shit doom become ticking plutonium-enriched time-bombs of every-kind-of-animal feces...

This sounds exactly like a contract that I had once...

shudders

Execution is never a problem. GOOD execution is THE problem.

This is a nice platitude, but doesn't hold up to scrutiny. For example: I'd suspect most ideas aren't that good, so it logically follows that execution would not be THE problem in most cases.

More like:

GOOD execution is one of the major problems.

But then how else can we continue the narrative that it's the Engineers (because we're not programmers but Engineers with a capital E) who are the end-all-be-all of any tech startup, and it solely on our shoulders that the company lives or dies?

As a programmer, I can promise you that engineers are not the be-all-end-all. It's sales.

This is why engineers should not be afraid to sell, or at least, not be afraid to be out in front. The power in any organization comes from who sells the product.

Sales is not the be-all-end-all. It's engineering, and sales, and product/UX, and finance, and sometimes even customer service/marketing/PR/legal too. Salespeople need a product to sell, which has to be built, which requires money.

Good businesses understand that all their functional areas are important, and don't try to preference one over another. You may need to focus on one at first to make progress with it, though I'd argue that when you first get started, that one area should be none of the above (it should be customer development in the Lean Startup sense: talking to people to get a sense of what they need and how they do things).

Expensive and underperforming products are sold for millions every day in the enterprise software industry. That's not due to their engineering or UX, and certainly not to their customer support, it's mostly professional sales in action...

I suspect that engineers who work in enterprise software would strongly disagree with you. I've done consumer stuff for the last 8 years, but I started in enterprise software, with 2 different jobs and a few internships over the first couple years of my career.

The big challenge in enterprise software engineering is that your "customer" is the person who forks over money, not the person who uses the software. Pretty much all engineering effort is devoted to pleasing them. Engineering requirements for enterprise software are often insanely complex and sometimes even conflicting, and most of the engineering effort is devoted to satisfying them.

If you look at product/UX debacles like Taleo or Lotus Notes from the perspective of a department head buying them (rather than from the recruiter, job applicant, or ordinary worker who will be using them), a lot of enterprise software makes sense. There's a lot of effort devoted to reporting requirements, to making sure the buyer has visibility on what all of his department is doing and conversely can make that "productivity" visible to his boss, to covering one's ass with regulatory requirements, and not much effort devoted to making things pretty or productive for the end-users. That's because the end-users are not the buyer of the software.

Indeed, a lot of the investment thesis in consumer/smallbiz Internet is this idea that software should replace middle managers entirely, and so the end-users should be the actual buyer of the software who need it to make money, basically replacing management with markets.

I wish it wasn't true, but strong sales staff can sell crapware all day long. Again, I'm a programmer. I had to learn this the hard way so I could insert myself higher into the process.