Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

156 points by joeemison 12 years ago | 126 comments

I have been struck recently over many conversations with different VC-funded startup CEOs (series A or B money, all at least $5M) at how strong the CTO/tech team rockstar/ninja kool-aid seems to be. "Our tech guys are smarter than everyone else in the world" seems to be a pervasive sentiment. Generally speaking, the CTO/tech team also seems to believe that about themselves, and usually the CEO is personally self-effacing and does not have that kind of personal arrogance.

I know that there are dark days and uncertainty within a startup, and that you do have to "fake it until you make it", but there's a real danger in drinking that kool-aid and missing out on the fact that everything reverts to the mean, and not everyone can even be "above average", let alone the smartest people in the world. The reality is that your startup that's survived to series A likely has pretty decent tech talent, but it's unlikely that they're significantly better than the tech talent at other startups that have survived similarly.

In particular, it is a big mistake to assume that your tech team is going to be able to solve problems that were really hard for other tech teams, unless you're willing to make solving those problems one of your core competencies (and the other tech teams were not willing to do so).

As a tech co-founder, I am extremely appreciative of the support that I get from my CEO, but I would never want her to (nor does she) assume that I will be able to solve problems that other talented teams have failed to solve for way less money and/or in way less time and/or with way less organizational focus than they have.

So if you're a tech CEO who believes that your CTO and tech teams are far superior to everyone else out there, I would say: the confidence is good, and probably necessary, but you have to make sure that you spend some of your time sober enough to acknowledge reality.

drewcrawford 12 years ago |

Personally I think we (engineers) made this bed ourselves. I mean there are a few possibilities: one is that a CEO says their tech team is not so great. And of course behind that door lies Dilbert.

Another is that the CEO says nothing about the engineering team itself at all, and it's all product, product, product. On that path lies Apple, and I have heard many say (myself included) that we would not work somewhere where engineers are rarely seen and never heard. Although, obviously some smart people do.

And when CEOs give praise to the teams, they get flack like this.

So I mean, what do you want them to say? This is hacker culture; don't whine, submit a patch. If you think they are better ideas, go work at DilbertCorp, or for Apple. Or, if you think there is some other path, describe for us what it is. Or better yet, go start a company that behaves that way.

But the way I see it, CEOs like this are just following principles that we ourselves have asked for: we want to be taken seriously, we want to make decisions, we want to sit at the executive table, we want to be perceived as an integral role that uniquely contributes to the success of the venture. Saying "our tech team is really great" is a direct consequence of those principles.

jtbigwoo 12 years ago | |

Good point. On top of that, pretty much every CEO in every industry says some variation of the following:

"Our true strength is our team. They're the best and most talented group of programmers/butchers/bakers/candlestick makers ever assembled by mankind."

There's really no downside for the CEO to saying this. If he doesn't say those things it seems like he's trying to steal all the credit.

ArekDymalski 12 years ago | | |

Your interpretation is really nice, but I'm afraid it isn't true for many companies. IMHO "we've got top talent" is nowadays just another form of marketing bullshit that replaced "we are the leader" or "we are number 1" phrases which were mindlessly repeated by everybody for last 30 yrs. And in fact "we've got the smartest people" is even much worse because companies don't (and never will) have any metric to support this claim. It's just like yelling "we are the best". Pointless and kind of pathetic.

baq 12 years ago | | |

also, the contrary is also kind of true - they say that no matter what they tell you, it's a people problem.

tsmith 12 years ago | |

I don't think the point is so much around what the CEO says about the engineering team publicly. It's one thing to proclaim that your engineers are the smartest in the world/industry/space; it's a completely different thing to expect them to work miracles.

The toplevel post is a warning to not drink your own kool-aid when making executive decisions about what your team can and should accomplish; e.g. your team may be extremely smart and talented, but so are the teams of everyone else, therefore don't think your team will be able to accomplish miracles.

Pretty sound advice.

6d0debc071 12 years ago | |

I think the OP was less about the team getting praise and more about the team being expected to solve hard problems with silly constraints. Why can't we be experts without the need for mythical estimations or our abilities?

But how about "Our team is competent?" "Our team are subject specialists." "Our team are pretty good." ?

...

And then I find myself wondering, how much domain knowledge do you need to identify a hard problem. Are founders just bad at estimating difficulty?

l0gicpath 12 years ago | |

It doesn't have to be all black and white.

Over praising your tech talents, saying nothing about them or saying something that isn't particularly good in nature are just all extremes.

It's really not a two side of a single coin, either this or that.. No, it's more of a spectrum.

Humility has never demoted a person nor has it affected their odds of succeeding in their endeavor. I think the real issue at hand here is the line of thoughts that "My company just got itself a VC round, I must be the BEST".

Well, maybe they are good, maybe they are even really good. But by all means with 7 billion humans on this planet, I'm pretty sure someone else is better out there.

fleitz 12 years ago |

OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team.

Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or Twitter, or Facebook solving?

I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is 5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the points*timedecay system than HN uses for ranking works.

Fuck, even Google was a 20 year old algorithm.

We're building CRUD apps on what 20 years ago were $75 million dollar computers, not putting men on the moon with pocket calculators.

mahyarm 12 years ago |

I thought everyone knows that it isn't true, it's like a BS marketing talking point. The things most of us in startups work on isn't technically difficult or pushing the envelope, and that alone should point to not having the best people or teams. Because these places will never gain the interest of or the pay the price for the for the very best, which can easily reach $400k/yr starting. The only technically challenging item is scaling a large software service doing relatively simple things, and that happens once you've gotten traction. Once you have traction you can pay for those people.

Is text chat hard? No. Facebook? Nope. Video Chat? Yes that is a bit harder, but still relatively solved. Social _____? Probably not. Any casual video game? No. Salesforce.com? Nope. Zoho? No. Airbnb? Nope. Dropbox? Nope.

The more interesting things are the google self driving car, machine learning and the occulus rift to a point. But those things are few and far between.

forgottenpaswrd 12 years ago |

Well, in my experience managing my own software company(I guess I am CEO but I did code a lot in the early days so I know what it is) it is not so much about the quality of the people.

The quality is something very important when your company is made by two developers. When you go up from this, you have lots of interactions and complexity.

You have love, hatred, you have admiration and envies, you have people that need money or need time to see their family. You have people that is afraid of their own mediocrity that try to protect their knowledge or "own" part of the company(fiefdoms).

You have people in some areas fight against others(marketing or sales vs it), you have different personality types that don't understand each other.

If you get all this right, life becomes easier and you have time for writing in HN, or kissing your kids, because it is a fantastic machine that works alone, and yes your tech people will kick ass.

Get this wrong, and most people do it not wrong, terribly wrong, and life is hell(I know because as a geek I did terribly wrong in the past).

If the best engineer does not sleep, you have a sh*t engineer(Chernobyl).

lifeisstillgood 12 years ago | |

so how do you get it right?

what is right - focus on technical excellence and product fit or are you meaning trust and honesty levels in the company?

theboss 12 years ago |

My question is this:

Startups I see here are usually looking for the same kinds of people to help build their products (Rails, iOS, UI/UX, etc.).

They look to really only hire people who are really good at things like this to build their product. Are these people the best people to have around later? Once your company has bigger problems than just getting something out the door are these people a hinderance?

I don't want to sound like these people are not smart but being REALLY good at one thing generally means you are lacking in other domains (only so many hours in the day right?)

I ask because I'm honestly curious. I'm not involved in the startup world at all but this was always a question I had when reading job postings here.

skrebbel 12 years ago | |

I've wondered about exactly the same. Are generalists appreciated at all in the startup world?

invalidOrTaken 12 years ago | | |

You have to be careful with the word "generalist." It specifies a (lack of) specialization, not an absolute level of competence.

People who are equally mediocre at everything are worthless. People who are savvy and hustle at everything are worth their weight in gold. But it's hard to sell that.

Robin_Message 12 years ago | | |

Yes, the good ones become CTOs at startups :-)

No-one appreciates a bad generalist, but a good generalist, who can pick up any piece of code or system you happen to have lying around or need to work with (e.g. can use tcpdump to debug a problem connecting to a client's server, or write a useful shell script, or do some C# coding for an integrated version of your Ruby app) is worth their weight in bitcoins.

enjo 12 years ago | | |

My preference, as a (long-time) startup CTO, is to always hire generalists. The work at a startup tends to be varied and require people with lots of flexibility. I can't imagine anyone would hire any other way.

meowface 12 years ago | | |

I've never founded or worked for a startup, but I would imagine that especially at the early stages, all your engineers will need to be pretty good generalists. You're (probably) going to need a website, a product frontend, a product backend, an infrastructure, etc... And if that work's being split between 3 - 8 people, most of them are going to have be generalists.

jtbigwoo 12 years ago | | |

I suspect it has more to do with not wanting to train somebody rather than not wanting generalists. Once you get in, you'll be expected to do a little bit of everything if the company is small.

Sakes 12 years ago |

I don't know. If you have a team that is able to consistently ship products that work and are well received by your existing client base, you probably do have some badass tech guys.

You don't necessarily have to claim that you are better than all other startups, you just have to claim to have a tech team that is magnitudes better than average teams at other companies.

It is crazy to me how many failed projects are floating out there. And once you are tasked with trying create a solution that requires coordinating with another tech team from another company, you will realize just how badass your team really is, and how many terrible tech teams are out there eating as if they create value.

zacharycohn 12 years ago |

On the upside, most problems startups are working on aren't necessarily extremely technically difficult.

zwieback 12 years ago | |

Definitely true for software. Compared to other engineering disciplines software development isn't necessarily easier but there's a tendency of software developers to overestimate their achievement. I know from my own experience that the ease with which complex SW systems can be created out of nothing is very satisfying and can lead to a positive feedback loop with a runaway effect.

When I work on EE or mechanical projects the physical elements involved have the opposite effect and create a negative feedback loop and (perhaps) lead to more deliberate development and more realistic views of the relative difficulty of the development effort. Anyone who has studied controls knows that negative feedback is generally what is wanted to reach the point you're aiming for.

zacharycohn 12 years ago | | |

Good clarification: Software startups.

Matt_Mickiewicz 12 years ago | |

A huge portion of the "talent shortage" is simply technical interviews that assume the exact opposite, and that only the best 1% of technical talent will do when you're running an ecommerce site selling unicorn horns.

angersock 12 years ago | |

This is really quite true.

lilpirate 12 years ago | |

Couldn't agree more!

mathattack 12 years ago |

Let's start by accepting that 50% of CTOs can't be above average. What can you do about this as a CEO? I see variations of two themes:

1) Find some benchmark, and reset internal expectations if they're wrong. Replace the technical talent if they're not great.

2) Claim that they're the best, and set high expectations.

My belief is that once you've chosen your team, you're better off going with #2. This isn't to say putting your head in the sand is good, but setting a high bar can be better than second guessing folks in an area you're not knowledgable about.

Perhaps it's ok to make a good judgment over time, but I think there's a lot to be gained from saying, "You're the top team, I believe you can do it." If over time they struggle to make the grade, then you have to recalibrate.

This is very tough, because studies have shown that most people of all fields do believe they are better than average.

Much more on this phenomenon here -> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57568186/

Thank you for starting this discussion.

tensor 12 years ago | |

And of course, this applies to CEOs too. What is a CEO to do when they realize that they are worse than average? What can you do about this as CTO or another part of the team? Sadly, the only option appears to be to quit.

mathattack 12 years ago | | |

If your boss is a weak performer, your options are to transfer, quit, or organize a coup. The third option is very risky, and doesn't work often outside of investment banks. If your boss is a weak performing CEO, then transfering is taken away.

I'll add a question though... "What makes you think you know your boss's job enough to judge their performance?" This isn't aimed at you, but people in general. As a manager of managers, I've seen people 2 levels below think that their failing manager was outstanding. The reality is they didn't see the things that were important in that manager's job. (This goes for the CEO valuing the CTO)

Understanding other people's performance is very difficult.

balls187 12 years ago |

It's not necessarily the CEO's fault here. If investors, and press would stop asking questions like "Why is your team better than everyone else" the CEO's wouldn't have to make up ridiculous statements.

When dealing with externals, winning isn't important. It's the appearance that you're winning, and having the CEO brag about tech talent is just part of the game.

Just like when CEO's brag about having former MSFT, GOOG, FB, engineers on staff, or having someone who went to MIT, Caltech, and yada yada yada.

In the end, what really matters is building a great product that helps your customers scratch an itch.

300bps 12 years ago |

If startup technology people didn't believe they were superior to everyone else they probably wouldn't be in a startup.

I am under no illusions of my superiority; I am a developer at an investment bank.

hangonhn 12 years ago | |

I've done tech at a hedge fund. I'm an engineer at big tech company. I'm friends with many startup engineers. The whole lot is a mixed bag. You can't imply anything from their place of employment. Some really brilliant engineers stay in finance because they like the problems they work on and they get paid a ton. At some point, it's really a life style and values question.

The best engineers I know are usually quite humble. They don't lose their sense of wonder and are always hungry. Everything they see is shit, including work they've done. They have a relentless drive to improve.

meowface 12 years ago | |

I've worked with and encountered a lot of talented developers and tech people working in the finance industry.

Hell, look at Walmart's tech team: https://github.com/walmartlabs

There isn't necessarily a correlation between intelligence or talent, and the industry or company you work in.

Kiro 12 years ago |

This is spot on and my company is exactly like this. We get the rockstar team label slapped on us all the time when we're really just a bunch of mediocre programmers.

I don't think there are that many truly talented teams out there even though you get impression every other hip startup has one.

soneca 12 years ago |

I think this behavior is created by the fundraising process as we know it. From angels to VCs to YC everybody focus on the team to decide wheter to invest or not.

The CEO is supposed to be inspiring leader and a good teamworker, if he praises the CTO as a genius he is perceived as both, with the plus that, if he is a good salesman, the investors believe that the CTO is a genius. So there it is, the startup dream team, a inspiring leader and a tech genius, the next Jobs+Woz.

And the best performances are usually of those who actually believe in it, so no surprise that after a few years successfully saying that, they start to believe in it.

mahyarm 12 years ago | |

I agree, the 'we have the best team ever' marketing is for investors. Or there is a big implicit disclaimer of 'for the level of difficulty we are working on'.

dmourati 12 years ago |

I was recently on a college recruiting trip for my startup and I said something similar to a candidate and I meant it.

I've worked in four startups in the valley and while each team had a large number of really smart engineers, all but my current one had some real lackluster ones as well. Maybe it just takes time to figure out who those folks are. I've been here less than a year.

This company has extremely high hiring standards and will turn away viable candidates who fail to impress. We spend a ton of time in recruiting, but I'd like to think the result is worth it.

Reminds me of a talk about 10x engineers I watched recently:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI

That was from the Eng VP at joyent.

Since then, I've had a really bad experience working with one or more joyent engineers who were anything but 10x. More like x/10.

avifreedman 12 years ago |

Consider the domain and the comparable.

For a limited subdomain (data anlytics, content distribution, Internet routing), I think it can be true that startups that are focusing on those areas are started by, or attract, world experts in those areas. Not because their brains are bigger than the random startup geek but because they have experienced frustrations in the space, have seen the history and evolution, and wake up thinking about solving problems in a particular space.

Also, the comparable. An environment where people can protoype, implement, test on customers, and then flesh it out will be > 10 x cheaper and 10 x faster than a 9-5 environment where you have 10 engineering and ops groups to convince and add headcount to to do anything, and often non-technical product managers in the way who need to be educated and can block or at least massively slow down GSD.

conductr 12 years ago |

A symptom of the acqui-hire culture? If the CEO sells the team, he could sell the company

poissonpie 12 years ago |

The trouble is less that CEOs believe they have a superior tech team, because any set of reasonably smart people working on a problem domain day in, day out will eventually gain a level of expertise in that domain beyond what most people have. The problem is, to believe you have more innate talent than others, rather than accepting that hard work is what makes people good at what they do. Arrogance is an easy trap to fall into though. Creating a truly humble team is the real challenge.

wslh 12 years ago |

It depends of your market sector. In my main market (Application Virtualization) my tech team is critical. I have few developers who are the famous 10X (or 50X?) ones. Without them it would be impossible to ship the kind of products we are doing. It's not about being faster.

But that team is not enough for being successful and you are overestimating it if you think it's enough. Marketing and Selling capabilities are the other side of the coin.

rhizome 12 years ago |

My thought is that so many are using "fake it 'til you make it" as a marker for their ambition. So, if they want to make it big, they are going to fake it big. This leads to, among other things, all of the job ads we have all seen that say, "Join CompanyX and help us change the world of shopping." Of course, how that world is going to change ("do I still have to use money?") is left unsaid.

andrewljohnson 12 years ago |

Maybe it's less important to have the best developers than it is to have the best developers in your market. That means you want better devs than the competition, and potentially domain knowledge that matters.

I wonder if that's a good explanation to give a VC - "Our guys are pretty decent, but it's not the quality of developer you are investing in. Our idea does not require rocket science right now."

staunch 12 years ago |

High motivation + high specialization. Any competent team that dives really hard into a specialization can very often become the best in the world at it. That's not because other people couldn't do better, it's just that they haven't put in the effort to do so.

LouisSayers 12 years ago |

CEO's make shit up all the time. They have to convince the world that they're the next best thing, so they say stuff like that to give others confidence in their, and their team's ability.

Don't underestimate the power of confidence.

trustfundbaby 12 years ago |

I think its like being married, everybody has to claim their wife is the most beautiful woman in the world, even though its not true :)

As long as you don't believe your own hype, I think its okay.

normloman 12 years ago | |

That's different. Beauty is subjective, so she may be the most beautiful woman in the world (to you).

fragmede 12 years ago |

> unless you're willing to make solving those problems one of your core competencies...

"Unless you're willing to solve hard problems, don't try solving hard problems"?

endlessvoid94 12 years ago |

You're absolutely the victim of selection bias. Most of this does not reflect what I've seen in successful startups.

sieva 12 years ago |

We're looking for an awesome web developer (oh the irony). Let me know if you're interested :) StudySoup.com

sblawrie 12 years ago | |

It took me about 30 seconds to figure out what your product does. You might want to move the bit about your partners to the bottom of the homepage and the stuff about the product and its features to the top of the page. I don't really care about your partners if I don't even know what you do in the first place. Good luck.

sieva 12 years ago | | |

That's quality feedback! I really appreciate you taking the time to write that out.

We figured since we're so small and unknown at this point, it would make sense to wear the partner badge high on our chest...but your msg makes complete sense.

In case the website didn't make it clear, we provide course creation tools so any educator can create or curate a textbook replacement.

asdasf 12 years ago |

>usually the CEO is personally self-effacing and does not have that kind of personal arrogance.

I haven't seen that. Usually I see the whole "my tech team are all the best awesomest rock ninjas" tripe from the CEO, and entirely because it is an extension of their personal arrogance and massive ego. You talk to the CEO and they have the best tech team in the world solving impossible problems nobody else can do, and you talk to that tech team and they are like "We're making a website, there's nothing special about it". The CEO believes the quality of their tech team reflects their ability as a CEO, thus they must have the best team since they are the greatest CEO.

A sidenote you can ignore but I just need to vent: these massive ego CEOs then insist on making their tech team do this: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell because they "know people", so they know what people want.

joeemison 12 years ago | |

In my experience, those who have made it to Series A have had enough humbling experiences to have learned how to hide obvious arrogance. I would agree with your assessment of brand-new CEOs, though.

walshemj 12 years ago | |

Until you get a new hr director (who has their own agenda to reduce the pay qantum) and suddenly your stack ranking and magically a load of "B" and "c" players arrive.

seivan 12 years ago |

Problems with incompetent leaders in Software/Startups.

1) Throwing engineers at something without asking the engineers

a) Twitter b) Spotify c) Soundcloud

Tweetie.app Lorens vs current twitter application.

2) Not allowing remote work.

3) Shitty domain knowledge that isn't worth crap.

nostromo 12 years ago | |

Twitter and Spotify and Soundcloud have incompetent leaders?

Where can I learn to be so incompetent!?