One of the lessons I've learned in my startup life (2 years) was to never deal with people who aren't competent with execution - what's the right thing to do, how to reason about it in a logical way, how to do it, how to finish it, contingency plans, etc.
"Try him out for the junk drawer job in the startup — CEO" is a terribly easy mistake to make, when you're still at early stage with nothing to show. I've done this for almost all the positions in my previous companies - programmers, "product" guy, all the way up to the CEO and investors look-alikes, and I regretted it every time.
When my CEO was still a business school student of a certain prestigious university, I thought he's well connected and would be a valuable partner later. The company did well for a time - but mostly besides him. Once he took over the reins, everything went downhill and the company never came back to its former glory - despite the CEO's claims of "funding is near", "I'm good friends with <insert big name here> and he'll cough up $50k without a blink" for a full 2 years. Every time I called him out for non-performance, he plays the "CTO is not a team player" card. But I believed him, for 2 years - all the way until he badmouthed his partner - me - to his friends right in front of my eyes. And for quite some time I actually thought I should keep the company breakup somewhat secret. Silly me.
Bad "product" guy... got him because he's a friend and he looked somewhat experienced. Ok.. now we've agreed the product would do this and that, now draw me something please? Uhh... wtf is that? He stayed for a few months, was fired, but caused the company some trouble after that.
Bad programmers.. went through quite a few of them, mostly contracted. Some even from big named universities with very impressive looking resumes. Again, hired them because of a sense of urgency (e.g. need to demo X to VCs soon!), so I lowered my bar to what I thought I could get. Wrong - those ended up wasting time rather than contributing.
At the end of the two years, I think I must have went through 2 dozens of people, co-founders included. Of the 2 dozens, only 2 of the choices were right - one programmer, one junior product guy. The others are all a waste of time.
If I were to do a startup again, I'd be super careful at picking who I work with. PG's advice at getting a co-founder? Yes it's definitely needed. But trying to do something investors like while sacrificing quality? That's the #1 startup mistake to make, IMHO. Don't do that.
> Bad programmers.. went through quite a few of them, mostly contracted. Some even from big named universities with very impressive looking resumes
This is baffling to me. We hired some graduates from big named universities and I am constantly amazed at their incompetence. Now they don't lack enthusiasm and are good talkers but not great doers.
We also hurried and hired because we had large contracts coming up and management has slipped and fell into the trap of "well one experience programmer left, we can hire 3 graduates to replace him for about the same salary!". I don't mind that we grow and train our own but these are not a replacement for a experienced engineers.
>We hired some graduates from big named universities and I am constantly amazed at their incompetence.
I experienced the same exact thing due to my ignorance of programming. I wanted to launch an idea that a friend and I came up with, but neither of us knew how to program. A friend of a friend attended a top university for CS so we assumed he competent. Two-three months after joining us he had not done much except write code full of bugs and didn't understand the concept of OOP. He had some half-assed PHP scripts written; that's about it. When I confronted him he said "it's too hard, I can't do what you guys want." Well, needless to say we were both upset because we pretty much wasted 3 months. I was so frustrated one day that I decided to look up some PHP tutorials and see if I could fix his code. Well, after a couple tutorials I felt pretty comfortable and said "screw his code, I'll write my own." Three months following that (puts us to about a month ago) and I finished nearly 75% of the coding for our website and I feel pretty good knowing that I was able to do what this guy said couldn't be done (also knowing he has a CS degree and I don't).
I learned that you can't pass responsibility to anyone during crucial times unless you truly know that person's abilities , or if you know the basics well enough to keep tabs on that person (who hopefully knows more than you).
Please excuse my blatantly rude question and over-analyzing from across the pond but... you hired fresh-out-of-college/university hotshots into leading and crucial positions: CEO, CTO, "product guy", co-founders and programmers positions - what the frakk were YOU doing there? I always had the impression that, if it is your "shop" one way or another during starting-up phase you fill those positions and do those tasks, you are the CEO, CTO, "product guy" and if you are lucky and get things off the ground and only when things get TOO much to handle on your own, THEN you start taking people on board to help you out - but then you are stuck with having to lead them?
It sounds a terrible lot like you hired good résumés, probably even ready and able people, but never succeeded in uniting them, giving them a common vision, a direction to go into and you had no idea what you could request and expect from them or you failed to communicate it well, so you could only believe their big promises even they had nothing to show for it. Which would also be in accordance to that CTO bad-mouthing you, obviously you were no authority or respected person to him because you never managed to effective "jump the chasm" and switch into "boss-mode" and make the whole bunch of them row to the beat of YOUR drums.
> what's the right thing to do, how to reason about it in a logical way, how to do it, how to finish it, contingency plans, etc.
I think that also takes good leadership - not everyone who might even be FANTASTIC at their job has that quality of being a SEAL-type "lonesome wolf" who can move heaven and earth completely on his own, commando style. Most people need some sort of guidance, a feedback between expectation and how they met them to get them to a productive level.
> hired them because of a sense of urgency (e.g. need to demo X to VCs soon!),
In your position, there is no excuse to NOT knowing that throwing bodies at rapidly approaching deadlines will only make things worse and more complicated, not better... you have heard of Tom DeMarco, right?
> At the end of the two years, I think I must have went through 2 dozens of people, co-founders included.
That can also potentially poison the whole team that probably hardly ever existed to begin with because there must have been people coming and going ALL the time...
"Try him out for the junk drawer job in the startup — CEO" is a terribly easy mistake to make, when you're still at early stage with nothing to show. I've done this for almost all the positions in my previous companies - programmers, "product" guy, all the way up to the CEO and investors look-alikes, and I regretted it every time.
When my CEO was still a business school student of a certain prestigious university, I thought he's well connected and would be a valuable partner later. The company did well for a time - but mostly besides him. Once he took over the reins, everything went downhill and the company never came back to its former glory - despite the CEO's claims of "funding is near", "I'm good friends with <insert big name here> and he'll cough up $50k without a blink" for a full 2 years. Every time I called him out for non-performance, he plays the "CTO is not a team player" card. But I believed him, for 2 years - all the way until he badmouthed his partner - me - to his friends right in front of my eyes. And for quite some time I actually thought I should keep the company breakup somewhat secret. Silly me.
Bad "product" guy... got him because he's a friend and he looked somewhat experienced. Ok.. now we've agreed the product would do this and that, now draw me something please? Uhh... wtf is that? He stayed for a few months, was fired, but caused the company some trouble after that.
Bad programmers.. went through quite a few of them, mostly contracted. Some even from big named universities with very impressive looking resumes. Again, hired them because of a sense of urgency (e.g. need to demo X to VCs soon!), so I lowered my bar to what I thought I could get. Wrong - those ended up wasting time rather than contributing.
At the end of the two years, I think I must have went through 2 dozens of people, co-founders included. Of the 2 dozens, only 2 of the choices were right - one programmer, one junior product guy. The others are all a waste of time.
If I were to do a startup again, I'd be super careful at picking who I work with. PG's advice at getting a co-founder? Yes it's definitely needed. But trying to do something investors like while sacrificing quality? That's the #1 startup mistake to make, IMHO. Don't do that.