2008MAR211120
Ask YC: Can a startup entrepreneur not be a coder?
"... Can a startup entrepreneur not be a coder? ..."
Yes. Mitch Kapor was underestimated and you can use this to your advantage. He was seen as a novice non-tech in his Startup, recognised this & profited from it. Read about Mitch Kapor ~ www.kapor.com/bio/ and I've written more about this here: www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2296168310/
Some time later a response ...
"... How is Kapor a non-coder? He was writing software throughout all of his early endeavors. He didn't outsource development of Visiplot and Visitrend. ..."
In hindsight you are making a similiar mistake the professional programmers at Software Arts did. Kapor didn't train as an engineer. He didn't have the pedigree of working with technology, startups. He had a great number of non-technical attributes that I think non-coders should utilise and exploit
- insight into people
- ideas of what is wrong with things & the solution
- business nous & how to extract money from buyers
- empathy for people & staff
- the determination to move good ideas forward
When I infer he wasn't a coder it was through research, not mere assertion. [0], [1], [2]
"... I'm having a hard time imagining how Kapor could possibly be considered a non-technical/non-coding founder. He may not have gone to school for it...but most of us didn't learn to hack in school (if you didn't know how to hack until you got to school you obviously don't love computers enough to be a hacker). ...
Once again. If you check his bio [3], track record (consider Chandler) [4] he is anything but the stereotypical hacker. He was not a coder who eats, breathes algorythms for breakfast. [5] It doesn't mean he didn't understand technology. He did some CompSci as part of his multi-disciplinary undergraduate degree. What made/makes Kapor good in my view was an amalgam of non-technical characteristics that make him a great entrepreneur to study and emulate.
"... So, sure Kapor hired additional developers, and his genius probably lies more in his dealings with other people than computers, but he was clearly a hacker from very early on, and one certainly can't hold him up as an example of an entrepreneur without any technical ability. ..."
I'm not trying to say he has no technical ability. I'm saying that in this case an Entrepreneur succeeded in spite of what is considered by many to be the prime requirement of Entrepreneurship. The current mantra is, "if you are non-technical, give up". If anything, Kapors success came more from his insight into human psychology and business nous than the mere sheer technical ability to code.
Reference
[0] Jessica Livingston. Founders At Work, "Stories of Startups Early Days", Ch6, Mitchell Kapor, pp90 - 102.
[1] Mitch Kapor, Bio: Though I found he did some Computer Science as part of a multi-disciplinary degree. To me this is the interesting bit because he obviously knew just enough about computers and a lot about other related areas. By not knowing enough CompSci did this allow a broader view of what improvements could be made.
[2] Startup School 2007, Mitch Kapor talks to hackers about what makes good startups.
feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Ycombinator-StartupSchool/~3/1065...
[3] Mitch Kapor, Bio et., al.
[4] Dreaming in code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software, Scott Rossenburg, "An embedded writer who dissects the failure of an ambitious software product, Chandler"
[5] Brad Templeton, Brad Ideas: I remember IBM, "... VisiPlot did graphs and charts, and a module in it (VisiTrend) did statistical analysis. Mitch had since left, and was on his way to founding Lotus. Mitch had written VisiPlot in Apple ][ Basic, and he won’t mind if I say it wasn’t a masterwork of code readability, and indeed I never gave it more than a glance. Personal Software, soon to be renamed VisiCorp, asked me to write VisiPlot from scratch, in C, for an un-named soon to be released computer ..."
It's Easter and time to dig out "Life of Brian". The shot above is of the "late, great Graham Chapman' of Monty Python fame from the "Life of Brian" book I picked up in the early 80's.
<<< start
2008MAR211120
Ask YC: Can a startup entrepreneur not be a coder?
"... Can a startup entrepreneur not be a coder? ..."
Yes. Mitch Kapor was underestimated and you can use this to your advantage. He was seen as a novice non-tech in his Startup, recognised this & profited from it. Read about Mitch Kapor ~ www.kapor.com/bio/ and I've written more about this here: www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2296168310/
Some time later a response ...
"... How is Kapor a non-coder? He was writing software throughout all of his early endeavors. He didn't outsource development of Visiplot and Visitrend. ..."
In hindsight you are making a similiar mistake the professional programmers at Software Arts did. Kapor didn't train as an engineer. He didn't have the pedigree of working with technology, startups. He had a great number of non-technical attributes that I think non-coders should utilise and exploit
- insight into people
- ideas of what is wrong with things & the solution
- business nous & how to extract money from buyers
- empathy for people & staff
- the determination to move good ideas forward
When I infer he wasn't a coder it was through research, not mere assertion. [0], [1], [2]
"... I'm having a hard time imagining how Kapor could possibly be considered a non-technical/non-coding founder. He may not have gone to school for it...but most of us didn't learn to hack in school (if you didn't know how to hack until you got to school you obviously don't love computers enough to be a hacker). ...
Once again. If you check his bio [3], track record (consider Chandler) [4] he is anything but the stereotypical hacker. He was not a coder who eats, breathes algorythms for breakfast. [5] It doesn't mean he didn't understand technology. He did some CompSci as part of his multi-disciplinary undergraduate degree. What made/makes Kapor good in my view was an amalgam of non-technical characteristics that make him a great entrepreneur to study and emulate.
"... So, sure Kapor hired additional developers, and his genius probably lies more in his dealings with other people than computers, but he was clearly a hacker from very early on, and one certainly can't hold him up as an example of an entrepreneur without any technical ability. ..."
I'm not trying to say he has no technical ability. I'm saying that in this case an Entrepreneur succeeded in spite of what is considered by many to be the prime requirement of Entrepreneurship. The current mantra is, "if you are non-technical, give up". If anything, Kapors success came more from his insight into human psychology and business nous than the mere sheer technical ability to code.
Reference
[0] Jessica Livingston. Founders At Work, "Stories of Startups Early Days", Ch6, Mitchell Kapor, pp90 - 102.
[1] Mitch Kapor, Bio: Though I found he did some Computer Science as part of a multi-disciplinary degree. To me this is the interesting bit because he obviously knew just enough about computers and a lot about other related areas. By not knowing enough CompSci did this allow a broader view of what improvements could be made.
[2] Startup School 2007, Mitch Kapor talks to hackers about what makes good startups.
feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Ycombinator-StartupSchool/~3/1065...
[3] Mitch Kapor, Bio et., al.
[4] Dreaming in code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software, Scott Rossenburg, "An embedded writer who dissects the failure of an ambitious software product, Chandler"
[5] Brad Templeton, Brad Ideas: I remember IBM, "... VisiPlot did graphs and charts, and a module in it (VisiTrend) did statistical analysis. Mitch had since left, and was on his way to founding Lotus. Mitch had written VisiPlot in Apple ][ Basic, and he won’t mind if I say it wasn’t a masterwork of code readability, and indeed I never gave it more than a glance. Personal Software, soon to be renamed VisiCorp, asked me to write VisiPlot from scratch, in C, for an un-named soon to be released computer ..."
It's Easter and time to dig out "Life of Brian". The shot above is of the "late, great Graham Chapman' of Monty Python fame from the "Life of Brian" book I picked up in the early 80's.
<<< start