People my age like to remind me that I’m not getting old but as I near 40 I can’t say that I’m necessarily feeling young 
Oh sure, I know that 40 is supposed to be the “new 30″ and 30 is the “new 20″ blah blah blah. Anyway, all I know is that I feel like it was just a few years since I graduated from college and I’d really rather not take even a moment to reflect on the fact that it’s been well over a decade and on the way to two since those carefree days.
Anyway, for better or worse I feel that I’m getting to a point where I can leverage this small bit of experience to help others working in the web & technology industry. I was trying to decide over the weekend what makes the really great tech workers out there. What characteristics are shared by the best tech entrepreneurs? I realized that there surely must be dozens…even hundreds of reasonable responses to this consideration. But I kept coming back to one thought and each time I thought about I believed that all of the best tech entrepreneurs I know share this quality. The “killer combination” so to speak…
The best tech entrepreneurs - the really successful ones - have taken the time to learn technology more deeply than their peers but they balance that knowledge with an uncanny marketing ability that isn’t easy to teach.
There are a lot of people who work in the web industry who don’t really understand technology all that well. Rarely are those people the most successful. Certainly, if you work in the media business it probably isn’t all that important to know the gritty details of how search engines rank one site as being more popular than another. Still, the web is nothing if not a beautiful collision of media and technology. Think about the kinds of technology questions many managers cannot honestly answer:
- “I have an idea for our company. How hard would it be to build that?”
- “Our competitors are gaining ground. Why is their product so much faster and more powerful than ours?”
- “Search engines always rank our competitors site higher than ours. What is going on?”
- “Hey, that new application our competitor just launched does this really cool thing that ours does not. Wonder how that was done?”
- “Our company needs to get this product feature shipped. Dev is telling me it will take 6 months to build. How can I know if what they are telling me really reflects the challenge?”
What you’ll typically hear from anyone who is not a dev is that it is not important to understand this stuff. Forget that. Your brain knows no limit for learning. You can’t “over pack it” with information. Develop an appetite for this stuff and you’ll amaze yourself at how much more effective you’ll become. Consider this - can you imagine how many people log onto a web browser ever day they show up at work? Hundreds of millions? How many of those do you think even understand how a browser works at even a high level? Why is a header font bigger than a paragraph font and how the heck does the browser know to render them differently? The more inquisitive you become about these issues the more successful you’ll become. I’m not saying you should learn how to write CSS because there aren’t enough days in life to know how to master everything. But, at a high level I guarantee you that Mark Zuckerburg at Facebook knows what the box model is. So does Philip Rosedale at Second Life. So does Rob Glaser at RealNetworks. So does Bill Gates at Microsoft. They all know it. Why? Because they know they need to understand the technology foundational elements upon which web businesses are built.
These kinds of people nearly finish with their beta builds before other aspiring entrepreneurs finish their Powerpoint presentations and executive summaries. Why? Because they know what they need to do, they know why and they don’t spend time spinning their wheels. Again, I don’t want to argue that you need to know how to actually write the worlds best javascript. I’m certain that Rich Barton at Zillow doesn’t do that. But, when his tech team briefs him on status updates I guarantee you that he’s not sitting there lost with a blank stare on his face. All you have to do is read Mike Davidson’s blog over at Newsvine to figure out that this guy is BUILDING stuff. Sure, he directs some traffic but for the most part he’s in the trenches.
If you’re not in the trenches, you don’t know what you’re asking your team to do. You don’t know what real costs are or what your budget should be. You don’t know when vendors are screwing you over. You don’t know what you can build and what you cannot. You don’t know what is a good tech feature to build in and what isn’t. If you don’t have a natural desire to consume this stuff then there will eventually be some ceiling you’ll bump up against. The best entrepreneurs out there don’t bookmark geeky blogs because they think its cool - they do it because they have an insatiable appetite for information which they can turn into competitive weapons.
On the marketing side, it’s certainly important to understand the basics. Successful folks in this business know what an MRD is. They know what a PRD is. Would you believe most people think marketing is PR? That’s a small part of it (and an important part) but it isn’t marketing. Having said that, really good product managers are usually REALLY bad at marketing. Great marketers, in fact, are pretty hard to find. Most people don’t have the sense for it. They work the marketing mechanics but they can’t paint the art. Good marketers are like good musicians. They know the notes but they have a special “6th sense” that makes for unexpected goodness. I have a good friend, Mika Salmi, over at MTV who is like that. He’s a smart guy. He knows the mechanics of building great online web properties. But he moves through the business with such apparent ease that people think maybe he isn’t even working all that hard. I assure he you is. But he’s a great marketer. He knows what partnership deals are going to give his efforts the biggest bang for the buck. Philip Rosedale of Second Life is another great example. I mentioned him earlier and worked with him at RealNetworks where he was CTO. Ever notice how much press this guy gets? Yet, he still largely drives the technology at Second Life I’m sure. He knows what kind of elevator pitch is appropriate for different audiences. He knows how to distill a business idea incubated through years of toiling into a bursty 30 second cocktail party pitch that captures people’s imaginations.
When you’re trying to start a company, there are a myriad of marketing options, partnerships, deals etc to try to prioritize. The best people have a knack for taking those thousands of possibilities and quickly arranging them as necessary marketing opportunities (or not). A lot of this can be learned. But a lot of it has to do with a more human element that is hard to teach. I suppose it might be like trying to teach someone to be “more funny”. Certainly possible but unlikely to result in the next Jerry Seinfeld.
When I see companies like iLike come out, seemingly out of nowhere, I’m no longer surprised once I began to understand the teams behind these companies. They have the killer combination of being great technologists and marketing artisans. Marketing artists. Not great program managers. Great, creative humanists who also happen to have mastered the mechanics of technology. That killer combination is more rare than it probably seems…
