2011-08-18

The Roggr Rule

Idly chatting on IRC with other nerds, and reading stories about failed startups, this particular quote got me thinking:
  • Problem 1: Founders
We are two founders (business oriented). In a very short time, we ended up 6 people with various business areas of expertise (web marketing, communication, finance, legal, etc.) but no tech person. Wrong. Each one of my co-founders was a kick ass guy/girl in their own area of expertise but every tech/web startup needs a tech person. This tech person is actually the core of any startup, everyone else is expendable (early stage).
Mistake #1: Assemble a small (2, 3) team. Get a tech co-founder.
My first reaction was "duh", which is a little glib and facile. But then, looking back at my previous startups, I came up with the following completely baseless, arbitrary, unsubstantiated, and therefore awesome, rule of startups, which I modestly named The Roggr Rule:
Any Web startup that doesn't have 2-3x as many techies as business people until it has 15+ heads will fail
Expect to read abundant case studies in best-selling business school textbooks soon.

2011-08-11

Devs need to stop being such pampered whiners

The 37signals people are smart and have a lot of interesting ideas to make software development better.

The "Boycott A Meeting" movement, however, is bullshit and idiotic groupthink at its worst.

Bad, pointless meetings are bad and pointless and should be avoided.

Gatherings where people discuss features, ideas, implementations, etc. with a clear agenda at the beginning ("let's decide how to build X") and actionable outcomes ("you do this and that, I do this and that, we'll use technology A and B, and will have a prototype out by next Friday") are one of the best ways to foster good ideas, code quality, camaraderie, and productivity.

It's hip to be a contrarian and spout off against-the-grain blanket generalizations as facts, but when your blanket statements are complete bullshit, you lose a lot of your credibility and just come off as an arrogant opinionated mollycoddled sniveling little whiner. Being a self-centered opinionated impatient whining bratty know-it-all is not a requirement for cranking out lots of high-quality software.