Come for the Ride!

After working with our developers in both India and America over the past month, I have come to think about various differences between the two. I have started to see similarities in people I know here in the US and able to divide them into groups with respect to the skills needed to be an entrepreneur. For example, our American developer is a very independent person who can take an idea and run with it. He lays out a variety of prospective directions to take a project and goes out of his way to present the best solution for a given project. With his knowledge, we’ll be able to use Amazon Web Services and EC2 services to process a large portion of the code we’ll have to run on a daily basis. It will cost us money, but in the long term it may save us quite a bit due to the costs of maintaining hardware and the omnipresent possibility of hardware failure. He’s creative and really knows everything within and surrounding the scope of what we need, allowing us to expand what we would otherwise be able to do.

On the other hand, we have our Indian developers who are very strict about what they do. Any questions and there is constant contact. There is very little initiative and creativity involved in their development. Much of the project is done with a lot of hand holding. There’s not as much initiative. There is, however, consistency. I can expect consistent updates. I can expect questions every few days. And in the end, we do still get excellent code that works.

What this all comes down to is Americans value creativity and innovative thinking well above and beyond most other cultures. I had read an article a long time ago about why startups work in America the best and one reason was our educational system. It’s unique structure often allows for children to go through 21 years of schooling and still not know what they want to do when they grow up. It allows for a higher degree of success (and failure). It values hard work and creativity above pure intelligence (Warren Buffett is a very smart person, but if you’ve read his biography you’ll see that hard work and creativity got him where he is today). That’s what entrepeneurialism is all about: hard work and creativity. It’s the reason you go out and start you own company. It’s the same need for freedom, not the “promise” of security, that drives people to put time and effort into a project that may or may not succeed. It’s faith in something you’re passionate about.