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A comment on Experienced Hires Will Save You From Yourself.

Re:Experienced Hires Will Save You From Yourself by orangethirty on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @01:23PM (#5177933)
From my years of meeting, talking, and working with business people, I've learned that those who stand in the shoulders of others end up being more successful. No need to learn everything directly. You can hire someone more experienced who can teach a lot you while reducing the amount of time spent learning. That's why it boggles my mind when startups pay top dollar for programmers, but cheap out on business talent. Stupid mistake.
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Re:Experienced Hires Will Save You From Yourself by prostoalex on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @09:11PM (#5180093)
Depends on the sales channel.

If the idea is to build tools for airline industry back-ends, then you better have top business talent who has a foot in the door of airline industry.

A place like GitHub or Heroku, for example, would benefit very little from top-tier business talent.

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Re:Experienced Hires Will Save You From Yourself by seivan on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @02:17PM (#5178225)
Business talent aye? Top dollar for programmers mean finishing the product and shipping, also quality work.

Usually the founders are the business talents (regardless of profession) (or I'd hope so)

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Re:Experienced Hires Will Save You From Yourself by orangethirty on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @02:29PM (#5178279)
? Top dollar for programmers mean finishing the product and shipping, also quality work.

Agreed. But the product is defined by the business talent, and not the programmers. If I give Linus Torvalds a job to make me Facebook for cats, he will deliver FB for cats. But I cant then turn around and say that Linus failed delivering the product. No. It was me, the guy in charge of the product.

Usually the founders are the business talents (regardless of profession) (or I'd hope so)

And that's the issue. Most "founders" are just people with an idea and not a fucking clue on how to sell something. Then they go and hire programmers, spend their ass out on stupid shit, and blame everyone but their own stupid self. The role of a "founder" is to get the fuck out of the way and try to be as useful as possible to those he/she hires to build a product. Nothing else. Founders are more like evangelists than anything.

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Re:Experienced Hires Will Save You From Yourself by GuiA on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @03:45PM (#5178709)
> If I give Linus Torvalds a job to make me Facebook for cats, he will deliver FB for cats

Actually, he likely will deliver a poor product, as his field of specialty has nothing to do with developing web apps.

Regarding your second paragraph, it sounds like you've never worked with good founders.

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Re:Experienced Hires Will Save You From Yourself by orangethirty on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @06:41PM (#5179652)
May you define what a good founder is?
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Re:Experienced Hires Will Save You From Yourself by seivan on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @02:47PM (#5178380)
Sounds like a shitty founder.

Would you say the same thing about Heroku?

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Re:Experienced Hires Will Save You From Yourself by orangethirty on Wednesday February 06, 2013 @04:38PM (#5178997)
May you expand on the Heroku question? I don't follow.
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