Startup Advice: I'm a Geek, How do I Pick a Business Partner I Can Trust?

http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/03/27/im-a-geek-how-do-i-pick-a-business-partner-i-can-trust/

by alain94040 • 17 years ago

40 17 17 years ago

blog.fairsoftware.net

alain940402• 17 years ago

When it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

That's the problem with interviewing sales people especially. Telling the great ones apart from the used car salesmen can be tricky.

Any other advice on how to do it?

rokhayakebe• 17 years ago

If the sales person is truly experienced, s/he probably can get a job at a competitor that is well funded and will pay for his business lunches.

Early in the game, a startup cannot afford this guy. In such a case the hacker-founder(s) should opt for "passion+curiosity" over "skills".

This new addition to your team will be your "chief everything else officer". It does not stop at locating leads and calling them, creating new distribution channels, doing some grass root marketing/advertising, it also includes blogging, contacting bloggers, writers, local media channels (if that applies) and anything that at the end of the shift could increase your paying customers.

A passionate and curious, yet inexperienced guy can do all this and, on a few occasions, better than the guy who has been doing it for 15 years and is quite arrogant about that 1 million dollar sale he (accidentally) closed during his flight to Italy.

icey• 17 years ago

I don't agree with you on completely disregarding experience.

They make passionate idiots too.

azanar• 17 years ago

Inexperience != idiot.

Although, experience would make it easier to determine if the relative lack of clue is due to the former or the latter, or perhaps both. The former is far easier to rectify, but only if they also have the curiosity and passion that rokhayakebe mentions.

tomsaffell2• 17 years ago

>should opt for "passion+curiosity"

I very much agree. But I think it still leaves a problem. In my experience, sometimes the camps of 'business' and 'development' find themselves unable to have a conversation on common ground, and that makes the "passion+curiosity" test difficult to do. This often exhibits itself through language (one or both uses words the other cant understand), which maybe a symptom of domain protection.

My advice to someone who is trying to find someone who has a different skill set to theirs: find a way of talking about your domain in a way that can be understood by a bright lay-person. Then encourage them to do the same with their domain. If they can't / won't do that, then move on. If they can do it, then you can have meaningful conversations in which you can figure whether your goals are aligned, and how you can each help reach those goals. From there, it should be obvious whether you want to work with them (assuming they aren't lying through their teeth :)

dkarl2• 17 years ago

The other night I spent half an hour in a bar waiting for friends, eavesdropping on the conversation at the next table. It was two young guys (mid-20s) talking about search engines, both obviously comfortable with business concepts, one with a decent technical understanding and the other not so much. I gathered that they lived in the neighborhood, and I knew they needed to be extremely well-off to do so, so I was naturally curious about what kind of people make so much money so fast in technology. Were they, I wondered, extremely bright?

I figured out quickly that the technical guy was pretty bright, but I never got a hand on the other guy. He exhibited behaviors that I associate with idiocy or flat-out frat boy douchebaggery: making things up, pretending to understand things he didn't, ridiculing ideas that he didn't even pretend to understand (I'm not making that up), bragging about himself, continuing stories after his listener had pointed out that their premise was factually untrue, and so on. Yet occasionally he said something that made me think no, a stupid person could never have said that. Plus the technical guy, who apparently knew him well, was taking all of this douchebaggery in stride and was talking to him as if he were an intellectual equal, not holding back or simplifying at all. The technical guy had apparently known this guy long enough to realize that he was much smarter than he seemed.

Even the fact that the technical guy consistently, quietly corrected the other guy's facts -- and then sat patiently while the guy finished his story despite the fact that the correction removed both the point and the credibility of the story -- seemed to indicate that they had a considerable level of mutual comfort and respect. I mean, if the guy had really been a complete idiot, the technical guy would not have bothered correcting him so often. Not to mention that an arrogant idiot would not have been so tolerant of correction as this guy was.

Anyway, that whole story was just to illustrate that there is a huge cultural gap between technical people and nontechnical people. The way that guy acted, I would not have trusted him to feed my goldfish. Apparently, though, he was a bright guy who had learned a different set of social mores.

wheels• 17 years ago

There's a difference between "passion" and "drive". You want the latter. I'm passionate about music, but I haven't played a gig in two years. Passion is interested, drive gets things done.

andreyf• 17 years ago

Pick someone you have worked with before. People who specialize in deceiving others have a lot more practice than people have to detect deceivers.

There are tons of personable geeks out there who can both help build a product and sell them. Only work with people who speak your language when it comes to technology and that you've worked with before (preferably in technology projects - maybe schoolwork, or open source projects).

pxlpshr• 17 years ago

This blog post does not contain content unique to the challenge of matching E+B, his suggestions are pretty standard for any hiring process. And, I get tired of reading these type of comparison slanders toward opposite fields of interest. For as many bad business people — there is an equal number of egotistical engineers that talk a much bigger game than capable. And this applies to just about every industry.

It usually takes two to tango, just don't rush the process putting together your inner-circle. Find someone you really connect with, you'll be spending more time with them than your significant other. They might not be code/engineering savvy, but they definitely should have a firm understanding of technology and the moving pieces... even more than your average tech-scene-ster.

tphyahoo• 17 years ago

Hire them first for a short intense miniproject.

If you decide not to partner, pay them cash for their time.

If you decide to partner, pay them with equity.

alain940402• 17 years ago

Good advice if you can find them a small project. In other words: "date your future wife before you marry her".

In the situations I faced, we were looking for the co-founder/VP Business+Sales, so it's not a position where you say: "ok, try for a month and then we'll see". You sort of have to be sure because when you offer the position, it's a committment.

dkarl2• 17 years ago

I find business people confusing myself, because the persona they put on when meeting new people seems plastic and frightening. There is an image of the ideal businessman, infinitely trustworthy, infinitely confident, infinitely congenial, and infinitely gregarious, and every time you get a group of business types together for the first time, everyone does their best impersonation of this ideal. Whenever I wonder why some people are scared of clowns, I think of a gathering of businessmen to help me understand.

Unfortunately, the things you're looking for as a geek are things they might not even recognize and value in themselves. Trustworthiness between businessmen, for example, seems to be very different than trustworthiness between geeks. There's a cultural disconnect. The difference between "lack of integrity" and "reasonable behavior under stress" is very different between businessmen and geeks, with the difference cutting both ways and neither side comprehending the other's definition.

omarish• 17 years ago

common sense?

chiffonade• 17 years ago

You have to fail 3 or 4 times before you learn what to look for in a partner.

Startups are difficult.

bliving• 17 years ago

Right. So have a plan for failure, in addition to your plans for wild success.

ig1• 17 years ago

Use your social network to get a personal recommendation. That way you'll have someone vouching for his ability, plus they can't screw you without risking damaging his relationship with the recommender.

Startup Advice: I'm a Geek, How do I Pick a Business Partner I Can Trust?

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