Monday, December 17, 2018

Engineers Turned Entrepreneurs, Part 2

Imagine this...

A candidate for a software engineering position comes into your office to interview as your first hire to build your application. The candidate has virtually no experience at software engineering, design, development, or deployment, but they tell you how hard they're willing to work because they believe in your business vision. During the interview, they describe and quote numerous articles they've read about famous computer scientists and CTOs in the news and on Wikipedia. Plus they give you a high level overview of bubble sort, map and reduce, object oriented design, and big O notation, although they've never coded.

Do you hire them to be your first software engineer? Of course not. So why would an angel or VC invest in an unproven career engineer turned entrepreneur, no matter how good the business idea?

Engineers are smart people and they know they're smart. Where they're not so smart is in dealing with people, in general, be it customers, employees, or investors. They're not the best communicators and often focus on features, not benefits. Frequently, in the mind of an engineer, they believe that if someone doesn't understand their vision it's because their audience isn't as smart as they are. It might seem easy to market and sell your idea, but it's not. 

Part 1 in this series:

Part 3 in this series:

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