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Ask HN: Develop skills, or “dive in” and start a startup?

6 points by adamzerner ↗ HN
There seems to be evidence (https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good-programmer-can-be-as-10x-times-more-productive-than-a-mediocre-one) that programmer productivity varies by at least an order of magnitude. My subjective sense is that I can become a lot more productive than I currently am.

Conventional wisdom says that it's important to build and iterate quickly. Technical skills (amongst other things) are necessary if you want to build and iterate quickly. So then, it seems worthwhile to develop your technical skills before pursuing a startup. To what extent is this true?

Furthermore, domain expertise seems to be important:

>> You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

> I've wondered about that passage since I read it in high school. I'm not sure how useful his advice is for painting specifically, but it fits this situation well. Empirically, the way to have good startup ideas is to become the sort of person who has them.

- http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

> The second counterintuitive point is that it's not that important to know a lot about startups. The way to succeed in a startup is not to be an expert on startups, but to be an expert on your users and the problem you're solving for them.

- http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html

> So one guaranteed way to turn your mind into the type that has good startup ideas is to get yourself to the leading edge of some technology—to cause yourself, as Paul Buchheit put it, to "live in the future."

- http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html

So then, if your goal is to start a successful startup, how much time should you spend developing some sort of domain expertise before diving in?

6 comments

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goldenbeet
First off, the goal of starting a successful startup is not a goal that I would recommend to anyone. Startups are hard. They require painstaking work, large amounts of risk, mental and emotional fortitude. Not to mention that the idea of focusing on creating a startup seems back asswards to begin with. You don't focus on creating a startup. You feel a need or see a problem and you focus on fixing it. If you feel like you have a solution that works then you consider going the startup route so you can fix your problem on a larger scale (startup is not the only option though).

My point is that the motivation shouldn't be a startup for startup's sake. It should be a problem you want to solve and a problem that you think you're the one who's going to solve it best. If you go about it like that, then there's no need to "develop domain expertise" because you likely already have that (but you can dive deeper depending on the exact scenario).

itamarst
If you want to be productive it's less about technical skills (though they do matter) than about how you approach problem solving. You need to ask why, understand goals, and execute in a way that achieves those goals with minimal effort. More at https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/

"Creating a startup" actually means two different things.

1. Create a VC-funded startup. This is all about making investors happy. AFAICT this is mostly about luck, in that you're being set up to fail and 5% of people happen to succeed. This is what Paul Graham writes about from his perspective as a VC, which is to say someone who wants a liquidity event. A liquidity event is not the same as business success, and having a large-scale liquidity event as a goal typically impedes your ability to create a successful business (e.g. you can't say "let's pursue this small, profitable niche" because it's too small for a VC to make money off of.)

2. Create a real business. In this case you need to identify an actual problem someone has. Then you need to solve it, and make sure people know about it (marketing). This is quite different than technical skills. It has some overlap with the productivity skills mentioned above (identifying problems and coming up with solutions) plus a whole additional set of skills (marketing, sales, etc.)

adamzerner
> If you want to be productive it's less about technical skills (though they do matter) than about how you approach problem solving. You need to ask why, understand goals, and execute in a way that achieves those goals with minimal effort. More at https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/

I get that being a 0.1x programmer helps with productivity. But don't technical skills _also_ help with productivity?

sharemywin
Alot depends on what your trying to do. I wouldn't try and start an AI company without at least one founder having a strong understanding of AI. If you're building some kind of social/mobile/marketplace (ie. crud app) just get it working first. The marketing and business side of that business is way more important.
itamarst
Right, that. Most businesses don't require particularly advanced technical skills, once you've reached a certain level of competence all the other skills are much more important.