wanderingstan

At dinner the other night with New York entrepreneurs we realized that half of us came from technical backgrounds, and half not. One of the non-technical founders said something like, “I wish that I could get in there and help with the coding, but that’s one place where hard work isn’t enough. You really have to know how.”

My immediate response, echoed by the other technical founders, was “No, you don’t want to know how to code!” The problem is that if you know how, then you feel guilty for not doing it. In fact, the more competent you are, the easier it is to think that you can or should do it all. It’s the classic problem of founders not wanting to let go.

On the other hand, if you are a non-technical founder, you are forced from day one to rely on other people to build your product. You learn other skills like “how to assess someone’s competency” and “how to inspire others to work” and “how to lead.” These are skills that scale.

(In the parlance of The Black Swan, coding is in the same category of bakers, dentists, and prostitutes.)

Still, in the early stages of any company (and especially when there is no company, but just an idea) a non-technical founder can blow a lot of money paying other people to build prototypes that don’t work.

It broke my heart last year (in a purely business sense) when I talked to a business guy who had spent nearly $20,000 on outsourced programming to build something that really didn’t work.

In a perfect world, you need a founder of each type who trust each other, or a technical founder who knows when to let go.

Startup Weekend is amazing. 70 some folks attempting to build a company in 48 hours. They are less than 24 hours in and already further along than most startups after 6 months.

As soon as I walked in last night I was blown away by the hourly progress report: Legal team says “Company is incorporated and we’re almost done with the terms of use.” Creative says “We have 5 logo designs”. Engineering says “We’re integrating with id345 mobile platform and will have beta ready by 9pm”. GUI team says “We’ve outlined the signup flow and have requirements for all functions.” And so on. And that was a mere 4 hours after everyone met for the first time with no set idea what they were going to build.

Last night I had a guy sleeping on my couch who had flown in from Virginia to take part in this. Wow.

This is something very new, and very cool. Boulder is making me proud.

Thanks Andrew for organizing this.

Check out the whole team this morning doing their hourly yoga exercises.

(Click here if you can’t see the video.)

I’m working on stuff for the Lijit board meeting next week or I’d be there too. Damn.

The questions are: Is this a fad? A one-off “see if it can be done” thing? Or could this model be expanded? What can we learn from this?