Come for the Ride!

After talking to entrepreneurs and observing web based startup teams over the last couple of years, it’s becoming easier to spot teams that will succeed vs. teams that may succeed. One notable things about teams that are more likely to succeed, the ones that have been staying on track week-to-week, is that they have diversity on their team – mainly separating the role of business development and technical development into two or more people.

The biz dev and hacker dichotomy is important and like our government, the two serves as a check-and-balance system for each other to make sure neither one is going off doing stupid things. When the roles are not split up… well… things tend to go in haywire with there’s no direction or momentum.

When you have a team with just programmers, things move at a tremendous pace but for many startups, these teams are just doing donuts in a parking lot without a clear direction of where they should be heading. As a hacker, it’s your job to keep your head down and worry about the details and often this means that programmers who work without business development counterparts will start to tackle obscure “programmer problems” that come up instead of solving “business problems” that are critical for achieving the mission. Solving the former is challenging and fun, but more often than not, pointless. While it can be really cool to learn how to drift a car, if your next race is a quarter-mile drag between start and profitability, you are just wasting your time trying to master drifting which won’t help you win.

When you have a team of just business development people, the opposite is true. They see the end goal and the path to get there but they just don’t have the drivers or the vehicles to take them, which can also make for a frustrating experience.

The best teams I’ve observed and worked with have both parts and the two work together like GPS systems. The hacker in charge does the driving and worrying about details such as red lights, stop signs and turns while 50,000 feet up, the business development keep track of where development is, and where it is in relations to its final destination.

Is it possible for a team to succeed with only one person doing both jobs? Sure, anything is possible but even during the yesteryears of paper maps, it was still more preferable to have a navigator sitting in the passenger seat than having the driver pull double duty of watching the road and reading the map. If you can achieve your goals faster by having the right people and tools with you, why wouldn’t you want that?