All successful startups begin with two founders. One guy is the Engineer, and the other guy is the business dude. Over the years of working with various people, I've learned what makes a good engineer, and what makes a good business dude, and the two are complete opposites of each other.
| CEO | Engineer |
|---|---|
| Compulsive Liar | Compulsively Honest |
| Optimistic | Pessimistic |
| Can't keep his/her mouth shut | Only talks when he/she has something smart to say |
| Good with dealing with people | Good with dealing with computers |
| Dumb as hell | Genius |
It may seem like I'm ragging on CEOs in my above chart, but that is not the case at all. CEO's are just as important to the startup as the engineer.
When I was growing up, there was this cartoon called Pink and the Brain. It was about these two mice who would go on adventures together. One of the mice was named Pinky and the other one was named Brain. Pinky was a very optimistic, easy-to-get-along-with moron, and Brain was a neurotic anti-social genius. The two mice were as opposite as could be, which is what made the show so entertaining.
Here is why I bring this up. Startup company founders should take after Pink and the Brain. The business guy founder needs to be Pinky. The Engineer needs to be brain. If your startup company has two Pinkys or two Brains, it will fail.
The best business guy I ever worked for was a dude named Bill. He was the typical type-A personality. He always had a smile on his face, and was very personable. He's go into an investor meeting, and every time come out with a smile on his face, and an extra ten million dollars in investment money in his pocket. Even thought the company was drowning in technical debt (from my perspective), it didn't phase Bill. He was the best CEO a company could ask for. He reminded me a lot of Pinky. Ask him to add two and two together and he'd just stare at you. That didn't matter though, he had the money to hire smarter people to do that stuff for him.
The problem with that company, was the same problem that plagues almost every startup I've worked for. Type-A people prefer to work with other type-A people. Type-B people prefer to work with other typeB people. The only reason I had a job working at Bill's company is because I was friends with one of the other developers there.
Despite my awkwardness at the interview, I still was hired. But after 4 months, it had become obvious that I wasn't a cultural fit and my employment was terminated.
Throughout my professional software development career, I've come to learn that the best engineers all have a type-B personality. This is because computers do not have human brains. Charisma scores you no extra points when dealing with computers. You can intimidate a person. You can threaten a person. You can not threaten or intimidate a computer. You can't lie to a computer either. If you give a computer the wrong input, no amount of "FUCK YOU POSTGRES, GOD I HATE YOU" will magically make the right output appear.
Good engineers are pessimistic. When a good engineer is asked about his strengths, he should have nothing to say. When asked about his weaknesses, he should have an hours worth of things to say.
Think about how a UNIC command works. When you type in sudo /etc/init.d/apache restart, what happens when this command succeeds? Nothing. What happens when this command fails? It prints out an error message. Failure is the special condition, success is the normal condition. Good engineers don't spend all day celebrating what they are good at, the spend their days worrying about what they aren't good at. This attitude drives them to learn new technologies, and to build robust things.
Business people, on the other hand, are the exact opposite. When asked about his/her strengths, he should go on and on. When asked about his weaknesses, he should come up with a sneaky and brilliant way to say "I have no weaknesses"
Last week I traveled to San Francisco to interview with a startup. They had two employees, one an engineer, and the other a business guy. They both seemed to be type-A people. After they picked me up at the airport, they took me to my hotel where I would stay for the week while I was there. The moment I knew I wasn't going to be hired was when the engineer was making small talk with the guy at the hotel.
On the other hand, I can imagine there are companies that are the exact opposite out there too. Business people are good at picking a stick off the ground, and selling it for a million dollars. Engineers will spend all week building a project, and give it away for free as open source software. A company full of engineers is not likely to make money.
You need both personalities.