As a developer, it is frustrating to see fellow developers place too much importance on being able to code as a necessary ingredient for startup success.
As a hacker, I'd say that most hackers know how to make, but don't know what to make. That is to say, most startups from these type of hackers with the "if I build they will come"[1] mentality end up basically degenerating into non-profits or open-source (when their intent was to become the next big for-profit company).
To my fellow hardcore hackers. Please get over yourself and learn some non-technical skills: sales, marketing, design, product UI/UX, biz dev, getting distribution, negotiation skills, heck - some people skills! (this comment not withstanding since I'm frustrated with the comment above).
If you're going to look down on people who can't code, you should get out of your own comfort zone and do all those non-technical things I've just listed above first. Kevin Rose has a rolodex, which I'm sure has benefits to whatever his entrepreneurial venture is. You don't? Why not? Learn how to hustle.
Just because you can't code, doesn't mean you can't build a business - and vice versa - just because you can code, doesn't mean you can build a business.
/ end rant
[1] exception, not the rule
His main point? "Once they have that reputation as being awesome it will stick around no matter how badly they perform after their initial success"
And I totally agree. In fact, after a success the odds are more in your favor. So if you can't succeed again, it calls into question your 'true' level of talent.
The vast majority of these silicon-valley companies are built with investors' money (typically from Venture Capital firms). The VC business model generates outsized returns on a few successful companies which pay for all the failures. Careers and entire funds can swing to success based on the outcome of one company so if you're a founder you deserve that credit. It also means you've returned tons of extra money to investors that pays for all your subsequent losses.
Kevin Rose specifically is an interesting case because Digg was not a success for his investors, but her personally did well.
To me, this all sounds like the Fundamental Attribution Error. Kevin Rose is thought to have some special talent, when really all he did was get lucky, and really, not even lucky enough to get his investors paid. His subsequent failures would seem to support this.
However, we must have our stars and Time coverboys. I would say that the reason he keeps getting biz is directly related to his fame, and not so much his business acumen or skills. Call it Calcanis Syndrome.
Shave. Shower. Get a haircut. Despite the 'hoodie chic' look, make sure it's a clean hoodie. Or better yet, wear something nicer. (no, not a suit, but a step up from a hoodie will help people take you seriously).
As far as general likeability goes, usually that stems from people either complaining or saying offense things.
All of that is under your control.
Example: Sean Stephenson http://timetostand.com/ (see short video)
Not attacking you personally - but anybody, .. anybody at all who gives me that response are basically chickening out. Consider this the opposite problem of "business guy don't want to even learn how to code, give all sorts of reasons". Technical guy don't want to learn how to hustle, give all sorts of reasons. Again, Sean Stephenson.
So I'd reframe the question: it's more about solving real problems. If you can solve it with cool new innovation/code, great. I assume the goal we're talking about here is to build a for-profit business.
And yet he was such a persuasive and entertaining speaker than even when I thought he was dead wrong I wanted to hear more and find common ground with him. I liked him even when he was being an ass, and even in cases where I knew he was wrong (eg when he deliberately skipped over some significant issue because it undermined the argument he was making).
The things you mention help, but are by no means essential. You don't even need to believe in yourself, as long as you believe sufficiently in your idea.
I have worked for start-ups where people told me what to do, and also have my own bootstrapped start-up. I prefer the later. I think it is important to be well rounded in abilities from coding to business development. That way, you can see through people's bullshit a lot easier, and there is plenty of that going around in the industry.
Having said that, you can be an ideas person, but those ideas better be successful more times than not. Success five years ago and failures at every turn since does not exactly invoke confidence.
I had never thought of it like that before, but it makes so much sense and explains so many things...
Like why google is willing to pay 1-2 million per developer... But half of the bay area companies on careers.stackoverflow don't offer relocation.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U&feature=fvwre...
"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Confucius
Even better, learn to both hack and hustle. That is truly where the magic happens.
Therefore hiring an ideas guy makes perfect sense...
I get your point and mostly agree, but just want to stress that "open source" and "for profit" are not mutually exclusive. There are a handful of companies out there making a nice profit specifically by focusing on open source.
That said, clearly it (building an "open source company") should be a conscious decision, and you have to understand the subtleties that go along with it.
...uh, where exactly? Everywhere I know of is crying out for developers. The case for outsourcing is hugely overstated- having your entire development team half the world and a seven hour time difference away is a very real issue.
Everyone claims to be crying out for developers, but they reject all the candidates they're presented with, so in practice it's hard to get a job as a developer.
I'm not the best developer in the world, and I practically get offers in just going to bars in SF...
Hope you don't spend the rest of your life either trolling or being a miserable wretch shitting on successful people. :)
As a developer, I agree that some "ideas guys" suck. But some of them are fantastic, and have a huge talent in taking a core concept and fleshing out requirements, objectives and so on. Often we developers are actually really bad at that, and we end up getting distracted by endless refactoring, or bringing down response times, etc. etc.
There is nothing wrong with a mix of the two.
Um he had an idea, paid someone to build it (ojbyrne on HN). Promoted it on air in his role at TechTV and had it take off.
Its not like he toiled in his basement for years slaving over it. (Though he did seem to spend a lot of time on it once it became his day job, I don't want to discredit that)
You can also say that the Digg 4.0 was his "idea" and its what effectively buried Digg and started the mass exodus to Reddit (which is now very true to the original digg).
Right, so he made it a success.
I just find it disheartening sometimes that developers (and I am one) seem to think that good code is all that matters. It isn't. You can have the most functional, highly-tuned web site in the world and have no-one use it.
Even if Kevin Rose is nothing but a giant hype machine then he deserves credit for being a giant hype machine. Digg would have failed if he wasn't.
Right, but what's he going to do for Google? Make me want to use that +1 button?
most developers hate successful people who don't have technical skills (Steve Jobs, MBAs, managers, non-technical founders, etc.) because they make the developers look a lot less important.
As a developer who also has an MBA (and who's originally from India), I never understand why most MBA students at my school undermined developers so much ("Just hire ten people from India"). On the other hand, I also don't understand why many developers undermine domain experts and businessmen as "MBA types" or "ideas people".
It should be very easy to understand (for anybody who is smart enough to be a developer or to get an MBA) that the level of expertise you need from a software developer or a sales person or a finance person or a product person depends on your specific case. Not every business can be built by outsourcing all development to India. And not every business can be built (or be successful) without the help of a great domain expert / sales person / product person.
You can outsource to a lot of cheap, technically talented developers (you can also very easily end up with awful developers, though). But they won't think on their feet or be able to make independent decisions- they are contractors, and they will make exactly what you tell them to.
If you're technically minded yourself that might be fine- you can give very specific, down to the pixel instructions. But if you're an "ideas guy" you're not going to have any answer when feature X is not technically possible, and the contractors aren't going to help you.
execution is not limited to personal skills. if the "ideas guy" doesn't have the skills to implement his ideas, he can hire/partner with someone who can.
Right. A developer.
One of them had come up with oink aka foursquare aka yelp aka gowolla ...
Sad really.
Beatle, I think the problem is with defining what "great idea" is. looking back today at "ideas" from couple years ago websites like youtube or even myspace would look like "illegal, won't touch it" and "oh, who would have time to build groups of friends and post stupid status updates". as we both know, both were/are worth alot in a terms of $.
Take example of Pinterest and read recent article with the founder -- even he wasn't sure about his idea at first. First 8 months there was no growth so you can easily say it was a "poor idea". I am pretty sure today he knows it was a great idea, but just because stats behind it that proves it.
There was a plenty of "good ideas" that didn't take off -- not because there were not great, but either market wasn't ready or internet userbase not mature enough or investors fighting over money, who knows? The bottom line, as much as your comment sounds smart, I think you are 100% wrong.
GREAT ideas? rare.
Great ideas + execution? rarer.
Also in my experience ideas and idea people are a dime a dozen. I have notebooks full of hundred ideas I don't have the time, energy or money to execute on. Talent (and availability and interest, etc) is hard to find. That's the bottleneck.
I agree that the proposition is naive. That said, the global market for programmers' salaries (or contractor's rates) is most definitely not efficient.
While it's true that you don't need to re-implement MongoDB in Clojure to create a successful product, it's not like product quality doesn't matter. Unreliable performance could certainly cost you clients - especially in the enterprise world. Why risk it just to save a few $k?
I have a relatively who consults for a big publisher on these offshored educational software products. None of them sell.
Wordpress and nearly every PHP app you can find.
The reason those educational software products aren't selling has nothing to do with the fact that they were offshored and everything to do with poor market fit or marketing, I guarantee you.
I don't think anyone has argued against this. He does deserve credit for this.
The problem is that he has been given too much credit. I.E. that there were far more ideas of the same caliber. I am sure this must have been tough on him, to fail at producing again like the early digg iteration.
I see the evolution of the social content site to be:
Slashdot --> Digg --> Reddit.
Each a stepping stone for the next. And I do not think this is about THE CONTENT -- I think this is about the UX you provide the users, and the control over that UX you leave to the users.
Digg evolved /.'s model. Reddit evolved Digg's.
Reddit has provided a UX which allows for a VERY fluid and quick experience with the content, given FULL control to the users on what content they see, how it is categorized, modded etc.
Kevin took money from ivestors for his own little think tank - that money was largely given to him by charismatic reputation alone.
Now, after a very short period, he isn't even pivoting, or "shooting this idea in the head to work on others" -- he is abandoning the whole freaking endeavor and taking (unknown) position in struggling social company, Google.
This doesn't leave a good taste in anyone's mouth (Sour Milk? (Sorry)) because being given $1.7MM which he gets to walk away from is a slap in the face to the people who work their asses off on good ideas and don't get any of the valley coddling as Kevin.
They started around the same timeframe and it was as much Mac/PC in terms of fanboyishness. Reddit won because of the power of subreddits and capturing the long tail for content and communities.
What's out of touch with your story is that Digg users thought Reddit's UX was horrifying and avoided it like the plague. Even to this day without enhancement suites I wouldn't crown Reddit to be the pinnacle of UX. It's very much Linux terminally compared to Digg's Mac.
Finally, this jaded bitterness that Kevin Rose got $1.7MM to piss away...
If you were worth getting $1.7MM to piss away you would have had $1.7MM to piss away.
I am saying the IDEA of social content sites evolved from one, to the next, to the next.
As I mentioned, it is not about UI, or content, it was about UX!
The UX that digg had, especially in V4 wrapped too much UI around the content resulting in a poor UX!
Reddit, while seemingly ugly - allowed for far faster and more fluid consumption of the content. It also left more control over what content users wanted.
>It's very much Linux terminally compared to Digg's Mac
I think you're putting too much weight on the shiny.
I think anyone would agree that the speed and agility one gets on a CLI (linux) vs any GUI when you're a savvy user is incomparable.
Finally, I am not jaded/bitter because Kevin Rose got 1.7MM -- I am jaded bitter that anyone would get 1.7MM and so nonchalantly walk away from it AFTER making the types of comments he did.
I think I just have a different perspective than you, I also think you believe I am focusing on things which I am not. :)
So you are implying that a luck and contacts and more other things such as your experience, geolocation, etc. don't matter as long as you are worth getting $X, you will have $X to piss away.
uhm, is there any website to sign up? I want to try my skills against it -- perhaps I am "worth it".
If you were the inventors of the facebook, you would've invented the facebook.
For some reason, I really like this type of argument. There's really no comeback to it. It's so, matter-of-fact.
"If you were [x], then you'd be [x]"
A LOT of ideas can succeed when you get to skip the whole network effect hurdle.
I think he has some insightful thoughts once in a while (like predictions he makes on Diggnation), and he did a great job parlaying Digg into Rev3.
I'm also pretty jealous he'll get a paycheck to say "Hey this feature would be cool" or use his celebrity to push Google+.
The "idea guy" is the guy who comes to a developer and start with "I've got this great idea for an app…", thinks it's genius but never dives down to all the details of said-app.
A product person might or might not know how to code but s/he will(/should) be able to articulate exactly what the product should do or not, how things should work together, etc. It's common for developers to think they don't need anybody to make a good product but a great product person will make a difference.
It doesn't matter if they understand how to code or not.
Indeed. That's not their role. Understanding how to code does not a good product make. There are tons of examples of that.
However, you have a point about the industry giving a pass to people with previous successful project(s). But probably with good reason: overall there aren't that many very successful projects, so if you had one, it's still much better than a lot of people.
I'm hard-pressed to discredit someone who got Digg the attention it got, then maintained and built a personal following that he unquestionably influences, and THEN spearheaded a product that you may not love but did get 150k users and was damn beautiful to boot.
I'm not a fanboy, but Kevin Rose is on a short list of people who can really fuel a product and it doesn't require technical knowledge or even 'having the idea' for that to be valuable.
You don't need both legs to run a marathon. But it's so important to have them both. That it's no coincidence that every great runner has them both.
To me, there's actually a difference between knowing how to code and knowing the technology. You can know how things work and what's technically possible without really knowing how to code it.
But this goes both ways too: developers don't necessarily have a good product sense, and without knowing about interaction and design patterns for example, or know what the current product landscape looks like, they would also be limited in their implementations. My comment above was mostly to contradict comments like the parent, that are fairly common: hackers can do it all, knowing how to code is the most important thing. Coding is not important. Knowing what can be coded is.
Specific comments on your rant:
1) "Ideas" types do well at Google, they reward people for starting new things, not so much finishing things.
2) "it seems like people in the industry get by based on one previous successful project." - works both ways, people also get tarred with one unsuccessful project. And like success depending on how hard the fail was it can be an influence on the rest of your career.
3) "What could he possibly be bringing to the table with Google?" - this guy has 'model googler' written all over him. Seriously. Lots of ideas, lots of ways to use existing technology tied together in fun ways. If the guy can convince two or three developers at Google to help him bring an idea to fruition he'll do well.
This doesn't actually seem to be the case. The startup space is littered with ex-CEO's who can still raise capital. These folks are seen as battle hardened. I think all of the Color guys are going to end up fine despite that debacle.
I tried to help Ed Patterman build a Golf magazine on the web in '95 it failed because it was too early. Sony tried to create an e-reader where they charged money to put out of copyright works in PDF on to it for you to read. It failed because it was a stupid idea.
Kevin Rose himself would be a counterexample. If he was responsible for Digg's rise, he is also responsible for it losing its audience and relevance.
However, if I had to bet on which one had staying power, it'd be Alexis. I have a lot of respect and admiration for him.
As a developer, I hate these kinds of people because more
often than not their ideas suck.
There are people out there to hate on, but Kevin Rose is not one of them. He would be a great product manager at Google.
Actually, product people with experience about trendy consumerish topics is what Google needs. Too many engineers, not enough touchy-feely people there.
That being said, based on his recent changes in directions, it doesn't sound like a long-term fit just yet. Time will tell.
Say what you want about Kevin Rose in terms of things he's created, but he does have a very good eye for great ideas, see early investments in Fab, Path, Zynga, Square, Foursquare, Twitter for evidence of that.
Fundamentally, Google is taking the wrong approach. Listen to how Vic Gundotra talks about Google+ as opposed to how Zuckerberg talks about Facebook.
This may be a step in the right direction but it will mean more than just hiring idea people. Those people need to have real power in the org if they are going to make a difference.
It's more likely that Kevin Rose will end up like Dennis Crowley. He'll try his hand at Google, will realize that he can't make much of a difference given his position and leave in a few years to scratch that itch at another startup.
Many similarities and differences in how they talk--which particular differences do you have in mind?
Many historical counter-examples.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Google%20Plus%2CRed...
He still has a job to spin it in the most positive way and anyone else in his position would be forced to say the same things.
And it "doesn't matter now, but if it keeps up.."
WTF?
Knowledge of how things fail, as much as how they are started. He's not just an ideas person, he's also a signing-the-checks person and a making-the-deals person and a catching-the-flak person. In short, a business guy.
I have never liked or used Digg so I'm not carrying any water for him. But I've had that 'I do all the work and he gets all the credit' feeling, only to realize that the difference was that I had taken a job rather than starting a business. Code is just a means to an end. Sure, architecture and good code are important, but they're important so that users don't have to care what's making it work. When I walk into a store, my life is in the hands of the architects and laborers who built the structure; and having worked in construction, I can tell you that they did a hell of a lot of hard work. However, that's incidental to my purpose in entering the store, and I don't hold it against the store owner that he didn't personally build any of the structure his business operates in.
I'm not sure how successful they are financially but just based on the fact that they're still around with many many shows going, I'd guess they're doing just fine.
Proof of ability trumps everything else.
Desired abilities are rare and lasting.
It is very expensive to try someone new.
Everyone can see which trials worked or not.
Winners are free to demand more money or walk.
Like you I have no clue what this guy brings to a company as big as Google and their products.
I wish him all the best at Google.
Burka has great UI skill. I really don't know what value Rose could bring to Google.
He makes insecure high level corporate types look successful. The guy who didn't hire a famous guy this year is going to get fired. Fame is a useful product to some people.
Kevin is an successful angel investor and an influencer in the techs space. Not to mention that every company that he has worked with have nothing but good things to say about him.
Google currently employees more than 20,000 people. I'm sure at this point they have plenty of engineers. A couple guys with some sense of design will not hurt the bottom line but have huge potential to add some much needed polish to Google's social initiatives.
/2 cents
Look up his CS degree dude..
At least know about the effing subject before you open your effing mouth
He then attended the University of Nevada Las Vegas, majoring in computer science but dropped out in 1998.
About Digg's original code: http://blog.mixergy.com/pr-lies-destroy-your-understanding-o...
Anyway, I quite like Kevin Rose from what I've seen. You need all types in the industry, not just technical people.
In any case, what I am saying is that it seems like people in the industry get by based on one previous successful project. It doesn't matter if it happened yesterday or 10 years ago. It doesn't matter whether they had a little to do with it or a lot. It doesn't matter if they understand how to code or not. Once they have that reputation as being awesome it will stick around no matter how badly they perform after their initial success.
What could he possibly be bringing to the table with Google?
Just my two cents. I'm probably alone with this opinion, but it's extremely frustrating to see this stuff happen over and over again.
/end rant