The Doers are the Thinkers: Why Silicon Valley must reject the “non-technical founder”
These days, a strange new breed has emerged in Silicon Valley. They don’t code, they don’t build, they don’t even have management experience, yet they sit in the founder’s chair of their companies and raise small fortunes in venture capital funding. They are folks like Adam Neumann and Doug Evans with their $700 Juiceros. They are folks known as the “non-technical founders.”
Their rank defies logic. A successful business isn’t just a couple of good ideas, it’s also effective execution of those ideas. Distracted, incompetent founders will inevitably run their business into the ground. Looking at recent high-profile failures such as WeWork, this is obvious wisdom. But not only are many in the technology industry forgetting this rule, but they are also purposefully ignoring it.
These days the whole industry, from trusted venture capital firms to technology publications, is committed to practicing willful amnesia. Under misinterpretations of popular ideas like “humanities in tech”, the gatekeepers on Sand Hill Road have increasingly normalized and glamorized the “non-technical founder” to the industry’s detriment. For proof, look no further than this glowing Techcrunch interview of the now-disgraced Adam Neumann. “Non-technical,” a term that should be a euphemism for “useless”, is somehow being elevated.
Of course, it is perfectly legitimate for a technology company to have non-engineer founders. A medical device startup, for instance, will likely be led by a doctor. An e-commerce startup may be founded by someone with supply chain experience. In these situations, however, “non-technical (co)founder” is a misnomer. That individual, while not coding or building things, is still invaluable. They contribute the necessary domain knowledge and context in order to position and run the business.
“While functions such as marketing, sales, or motivational speaking are important to any company, they are not part of a technology company’s core value offering to its customers.”
Other such founders, however, should be scrutinized. If someone with “founder status” cannot answer what their unique contribution to the company is, that should be a red flag. Engineers are generally skeptical of teaming up with shady marketers who claim they will “handle the business side” (yes, that has become a meme). The larger technologist community should be too. While functions such as marketing, sales, or motivational speaking are important to any company, they are not part of a technology company’s core value offering to its customers. In other words, those who perform these functions, and solely those functions, are replaceable in a way that a startup founder should not be.
Silicon Valley’s bad habits
The worst offenders among the latter group should have been laughed out of the room after the first minute. Yet strangely, they are also often precisely the ones that venture capital firms have supported the most. You know who they are. They are the smooth-talking, quasi-cult leaders who talk more than they actually do and have little actual technical skills or even education. These “entrepreneurs” hype up a half-baked business idea (and sometimes their own credentials) to delude unwitting investors into forking over precious financing for the kindling.
With all the early Pets.com failures of the early 2000s, you would think the technology industry has learned its lesson by now. But Silicon Valley has a short memory. Every once in a while, a spectacular failure like Juicero makes any sentient observer facepalm and realize how truly short that memory is. How many folks had to be asleep at the storied Kleiner Perkins for the firm to throw millions of dollars at Doug Evans, a high school dropout and part-time graphic designer, and his $700 juice machines? What in the world made Softbank believe that Adam Neumann, an erratic college dropout and clothing retailer, could efficiently deploy billions of dollars in capital?
It’s one thing to support erratic technical whizzes. It’s another thing for these venture capital firms to give literal blank checks to someone who is merely erratic. Why is it no longer taken for granted that a tech startup would be vastly more likely to succeed if run by a technologist, rather than Joe Schmoe the salesman?
Arguably, it is because many folks have unconsciously chosen to subscribe to a romantic, but distorted view of the technology startup world. In this world, it is the “idea person” who shepherds the unenlightened engineers to creating the “next big thing.” Because the idea person is so important, he/she shouldn’t need to worry about the technical nerd-speak. He/she is already bringing their “valuable” diverse and unique viewpoint.
The myth and facts of Steve Jobs
In recent times, the sensible idea that the humanities also matter is something that has gained credibility in the technology field. Unfortunately, how the humanities matter is not generally presented clearly. As Rice University researcher Kirsten Ostherr notes in this article about AI, “the word “human” crops up in conversations across the technology industry, but it’s not always clear what it means — assuming it means anything at all.” In other words, Silicon Valley doesn’t want to seem evil. If engineers are inadvertently creating evil things, then Silicon Valley can convince the public (and itself) of a credible antidote: these problems can be easily solved by putting humanists in charge. Whether or not these humanists grasp the technology well enough to make a difference is not relevant to the PR narrative.
As a result, not surprisingly, the unfounded notion of the idea-man who will make technology more human persists. The poster child of the subliminal belief, and the person who many discredited entrepreneurs worship, is none other than Steve Jobs.
In popular culture, Steve Jobs was the marketing genius who teams up with Steve Wozniak the engineer. A college dropout, he nonetheless had such a forceful vision of what computers can be that he changed the computer industry. He introduced to the public the computer mouse, the graphical user interface, and (years later) the iPhone despite never writing a single line of code. As Wozniak himself recounts in a widely-cited letter to a fan, “[Jobs] didn’t ever code, he wasn’t an engineer and he didn’t do any original design.”
Unfortunately for all the non-coders aspiring to be the next “it” founder in Silicon Valley, that is only a half-truth. It obscures how remarkable Job’s technical competence was. In the very same response, Wozniak goes on to note that Jobs was “technical enough” to “alter and change and add to other designs.”
In reality, “technical enough” would be a vast understatement. When Steve Jobs was a teenager, he already knew enough to convince Bill Hewlett himself to hire him to build frequency counters at Hewlett Packard (the Google or Microsoft of the time). During the same internship, he taught himself how to program the highly complex Hewlett-Packard 9100 in B.A.S.I.C and A.P.L. Jobs’ first impression of Steve Wozniak and why he chose to team up with Wozniak to start Apple? “[The] first person I met who knew more about electronics than I did.”
Think about what the modern-day equivalent of that would be. It is humbling to imagine: a teenager getting a coveted internship at a major technology company, teaches herself how to use said company’s cutting-edge technology, and then deciding after a while that she knew more about computers than almost all the senior engineers she met in Silicon Valley.
Steve’s technical competence continued to be on display during his later years. As one former Apple engineer recalled from a meeting with Jobs during the 2000s:
“When it came time for Steve to compare the quality of our prototype … Steve started asking me very detailed and specific technical questions. I had the answers, but he kept digging deeper and deeper … This was not the type of questions you expect from the CEO of a large company.”
The Doers are the Thinkers
Jobs not only expected technical competence for himself and others, but he demanded it for anyone building a product. “The Doers,” Jobs said, “are the major thinkers.” In Jobs’ view, having valid ideas is not enough. Only when you actively engage in the “doing”, Jobs argues, will you “get into the subtleties of [your idea]” and realize the places where your idea was incomplete or wrong. As Jobs asserts, those who succeed are almost always “the thinker and doer in one person.”
As Jobs asserts, those who succeed are almost always “the thinker and doer in one person.”
In other words, far from embodying the mold of the “non-technical founder with great ideas,” Steve Jobs instead presents a strong argument for why, without technical competence on the founders’ part, the companies they lead will flounder. Core ideas are convincing in their simplicity. For example, the core initial idea of Uber, tapping an app and getting a product or service, is so simple that the “Uber for X” catchphrase has become part of the lingo of many aspiring companies. However, turning that idea into a business, not to mention a profitable one, is very difficult.
Indeed, Uber’s own difficulties lately have raised many questions. These include: how do you deal with laws asking you to pay drivers as employees? How, in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, convince folks it is safe to get into a stranger’s potentially virus-infested car? How do you balance the supply and demand of drivers? How do you prevent drivers and riders from committing account fraud? Uber hires armies of engineers, lawyers, and economists to figure out these problems. These problems are hard. Without a knowledgeable leader at the helm, they are impossible.
Conclusion
For decades, the allure of the technology industry has been irresistible in the public imagination. From Bill Gates to Steve Jobs, Silicon Valley has always been known for attracting the smartest and most ambitious minds — the mad geniuses. Credentials were always secondary. But the industry’s understandable willingness to forgo traditional resume markers has also made it susceptible to those with a lot of ambition but little smarts — the mere madmen.
Members of this latter category are lethal to the wealth and health of the technology startup ecosystem. Yet we are allowing the once-sporadic outbreaks of them to become permanent plagues.
We all have a duty to create a climate of accountability and spread the gospel of competence within the startup ecosystem. We must remind ourselves that companies exist to solve problems that their customers are willing to pay for, not to create lucrative marketing jobs for people who make convincing elevator pitches. So it’s time we stopped the madness and separated the mad geniuses from the madmen. It’s time we learned to just say no to the non-technical founders.