One of the lasting legacies of YCombinator will be that it empowered engineers as company founders without the need for someone with a business background. At USV we have backed several all engineering teams out of YC and otherwise. These companies tend to have no issues delivering their product but face other challenges instead. A somewhat unfair summary is that they tend to believe too much in a build it and they will come view of the world. How so?

Many engineering led companies have a relatively deep distrust of sales, marketing and business development. While a healthy dose of skepticism is entirely appropriate here, even companies with extremely awesome technology tend to really grow only if they also get sales, marketing and business development right. Historically I might have added design and UX to this list, but I am happy to report that most engineering founders are embracing the importance of design and UX.

There seem to be a bunch of different sources for the frequent bias among engineering-led startups against marketing, sales and business development. First, many engineers don’t want to be marketed to or sold themselves so they often assume that everyone else feels the same way. Second, there is a mistaken perception that some big technology businesses got big without sales and marketing (including Google and Dropbox – ignoring that Google has a large salesforce and Dropbox a bunch of clever marketing programs). Third, most people who do sales and marketing tend to have quite different personalities from engineers so hiring and managing them seems like a chore.

I encourage engineers starting companies to challenge their own assumptions about the business side of the house and seek out advice from other engineers who have successfully built out sales, marketing or business development at their companies. If you can get these to work for you it will make a big difference in the outcome.

PS Having finished this post I realize it is kind of misplaced in the Tech Tuesdays series as that series is nominally aimed at non-engineers!