Re:Ask YC: Startup crisis. Out of money and tech co-founder ...
by mixmax on Wednesday May 07, 2008 @05:12PM
(#183866)
I think that what drino is bringign to the table (this is pure speculation based on the original post) is knowledge of the domain, and persistence. If she is good at selling the solution then I think she has a good chance of succeeding.
An overall note on your post: I think that when you break it all down there are basically only two things that matter in a startup: 1) having a product. 2) being able to sell it. Often the people that are good at making products are terrible at selling them and vice versa. So you certainly need good hackers, but you also need great salesmen. And both of them need to be pretty persistent, since they're facing tough jobs.
For your experience, persistence and not taking no are both really important to startups and very difficult for many technical people. So you added some value that a hacker couldn't get by just going off and doing the same thing on his own.
In the startup I mentioned above, the founders were all technical people and didn't really add anything of business value besides that. They were outsourcing because it was cheap and out of a misguided assumption that they needed a big team (and probably because they were spending Other People's Money). They would've been far better off writing the product themselves.
I don't know enough about drinko to know what s/he brings to the table, but unless it's a lot of sales connections to potential customers, it'll be hard for a good programmer to justify spending time on her project vs. all the other projects out there.