Terrible discovery: business != development
It's just my recent discovery that made me faced with the vital choice: to be a businessman or to be a developer (before I thought I can be both).
Do you agree or disagree?
Thanks, people!
It's just my recent discovery that made me faced with the vital choice: to be a businessman or to be a developer (before I thought I can be both).
Do you agree or disagree?
Thanks, people!
If you're a solo tech entrepreneur, you will need to be both. Once you're able to hire staff, you can get away with playing the business man, but until that time, you will need to be both!
I have yet to meet a tech founder who hired a COO to manage his company to successfully keep doing development 100% of time. As the founder you have a much bigger impact in management; and development is just so easily "outsourced" to capable employees.
Oh there are lots of founders who take the CTO role and stay hands-on technical.
Google with Eric Schmidt? Just one example, but there any many others. There's also plenty of examples where a tech founder brings on a cofounder to run operations.
It's your business you can do whatever you want too. Want to spend some time developing, do it, want to focus on the business side do it.
Yes it's hard to do both, but nothing is easy.
Most VC backed companies the CEO won't code anymore, but that is part of the consideration when you think about taking on external funding, or you agree to give up control of the business side to focus on development.
A lot of people bootstrapping their businesses do both, because the don't have resources to do otherwise. Bootstrappers typically wear many hats, it's not just developing, but designing, marketing, and sales etc.
Probably at some point you pick one, but that point can be years away.
Of course they're not the same thing, but many people do wear both hats. The evidence for this is all around.
Only if you have a business cofounder. And only in very early stage. As soon as your business is getting serious you will not develop anymore - I saw it all around :(
This comment was deleted 8 years ago
Zuckerberg and Gates would disagree with you! Not every developer is naturally going to be a good business person, though they are by no means mutually exclusive.
Sorry, I don't understand you. Neither of them developed as soon as their business's grown up.
Fine, though your original post implied that one person could not do both things. They clearly did both things. If you meant you can’t do both at the same time, fine, though you were not clear that it was an issue with parallelism you were referring to.
The problem is at some stage of your business you can't develop anymore, you only may do the business itself. The development became just unproductive and this can be a reason for frustration because it turns out the what you do is controversial.
Topic title is on point. Lots of people, be it designers or developers, underestimate what's needed to run/build a business. A great working and bug-free product doesn't simply mean you have a profitable business.
Although I believe—and know—one can be and do both, not everybody enjoys the business part. If you fall into the latter group just enjoy working as a developer somewhere. And also enjoy working on on your side-project in your free time. In the end what makes you truly happy is what matters (and the romanticised idea of running a business often doesn't do it).
I think it's very possible to be both but its definitely a balancing act. As developers we have a tendency to focus on what we're good at and comfortable with like writing code or making tweaks to the UI. Marketing and business development is generally outside of our comfort zones so we sometimes shy away from the things we actually need to be focusing on. This in my opinion is the pitfall of trying to balance both. Being objective about what you should be focusing on to grow your business at any given point should help keep you on the right track.