The Initial Capital

Remember Snood^[1]? It was a popular puzzle bobble game a grad student made because he got bored. Linux was a hobby project of a Ph.D. guy. Gates and Allen built a product that Ballmer helped them sell. Wozniak built a product, Jobs came and did the rest. Woz poured himself into hacking a cool computer. It was the ownership of his idea that motivated him to build and showcase his product. When 95% of initial effort in a startup is product development, it is by all odds best when the development team is well motivated. And hackers are the ones doing that work. It is impossible to make them work hard unless that idea is theirs. Money, equity, or other business aspects have very little or no room in their heads. Ownership of the idea is paramount to them. Any hacker would need a brilliant marketing person, a sales guy, or a CEO. But it is the hacker who builds the product, not the other guys. If it is hard to find a brilliant hacker, it is harder to find brilliant CEOs, marketing, or salespeople. It never is one guy who builds a successful startup, but the starting capital for a startup is always the hacker. And a hacker should only work on his ideas.

Startups these days are not a lot different from Apple, Microsoft, or Google. In the development phase, you have the hacker hacking all the stuff and in the sales phase, the business guy handles the funding, marketing, and accounting. The hacker may be [technically] capable of handling such business aspects, but he shouldn't do them. His heart is in the product, and he should stick to it. Doing otherwise is a perfect recipe for enterprise failure. People who see value on both sides of this equation are worth their weight in gold and they are the rarest to find.

Clearly, successful businesses exist that were started by sharp businessmen who hired product developers. But traditionally, good hackers have been the most undervalued in the equation. And that is because they aren't good at selling themselves. They normally fail to stake out their territory. Their interface to the outside world is seldom professional. And the profession as such attracts certain idiosyncratic personalities that affects this image a little more. The nature of programming work, algorithmic ideating, and hacking is such. These guys are the ones that after a day's work of programming, do programming till 3 A.M for the joy of it.

Few people value what they know. An idea is worthless until pursued. Serious entrepreneurs are very few. A great product is not the same as a great company. Great hackers undervalue their field of knowledge. Greater hackers overvalue themselves.