Ask HN:Have you founded a startup where in you outsourced the whole tech work?

Re:Ask HN:Have you founded a startup where in you outsourced... by kno on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @12:26PM (#1807669)

A friend of mine an, MBA guy, founded a startup with almost all the coding outsourcing (the most important part of the code). His startup became well funded and he paid a heavy price for the outsourced decision.

He did not have the sourced code apparently did not bother to care about it when signing the contract because he taught once he have the money the whole thing could be rewritten easy. One thing he did not take in consideration was the downtime it will take to transition from old code to new code. The old code had serious issues and generated terrible scalability mishaps and great mistrust from customers.

By the time the code rewrite was complete the company had overspent money and had lost a truck load of customers.

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Re:Ask HN:Have you founded a startup where in you outsourced... by jaspalsawhney on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @12:43PM (#1807741)

Thanks. Did he identify what he could have done differently so as to mitigate the risk?

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Re:Ask HN:Have you founded a startup where in you outsourced... by kno on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @12:52PM (#1807781)

In my opinion, getting a technical cofounder would have been a great asset in helping him make the right decision in the first place. Unfortunately I don’t think he have learned that because the last time I check he was still doing something similar. It has to de with the thinking and respect he has for developers in general. I think his frame of mind is still in the era in which it was widely believed outsourcing could solve all problems. My take is if you want to build a tech company, you MUST have a tech cofounder to avoid dangerous pitfalls.

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