I have a blog post I've been meaning to write called "What do you REALLY want to do for a living, aspiring entrepreneur?" inspired by a comment reply here where someone effectively said, "I'm not really that into growing a company, I just want to do a startup 'cause I love to build things and hate stupid managers". If your startup is successful, you generally grow (at least a bit). Before long, your job is hiring, BEING the stupid manager everyone gripes about, customer service, working with vendors and service providers, and doing sales/bizdev.
As a whole it is not great advice. It has two parts: the good one is "Thinking About Starting a Business? Try a Sales Job" and the evil one is an advertising of Cutco Cutlery and similar businesses.
"Sales reps may have to buy their own demonstration equipment." It is a signature of a pyramid scheme. Encouraging young adults to participate in such scheme is evil.
The advice I'm referring to is that in the headline. At no point in the article did it say, "you really ought to work for CutCo"... It was just an example.
I don't know a damn thing about CutCo, but having people buy their own equipment isn't just the signature of a pyramid scheme... It's the signature of franchising as well. Hrm. Is McDonalds a pyramid scheme?
Either way, high commission "eat what you kill and pay your own expenses" aren't inherently evil.
You're right. I haven't completely settled on this yet, but I may want to take just the founder->CTO route, rather than founder->CEO. A CTO would have to deal with a lot less in sales/customer-service/etc. (I find a small dose of these fun, but couldn't tolerate them as >50% of my job.)
The extreme example of this is Steve Wozniak I think, who didn't even want to be top technical guy in his company; he just wanted to be an engineer.
A CTO would have to deal with a lot less in sales/customer-service/etc.
Not really. In fact in many cases it's the opposite.
CTO's of highly technical startups are sometimes the company's best salesman, since no one understands the technology better than them, and they are out evangelizing their product, meeting a lot of prospects.
There are quite a few companies where CTO's are glorified sales reps, but this typically happens in larger companies and not startups.
Hackers/engineers come in various flavors, some are super smart &fun, some are clueless, some suffer from NIH (not invented here), some would think its easy to build what you have, etc.
Ultimately, you have to evangelize to folks that will buy your product, that is the key :-)
I have a blog post I've been meaning to write called "What do you REALLY want to do for a living, aspiring entrepreneur?" inspired by a comment reply here where someone effectively said, "I'm not really that into growing a company, I just want to do a startup 'cause I love to build things and hate stupid managers". If your startup is successful, you generally grow (at least a bit). Before long, your job is hiring, BEING the stupid manager everyone gripes about, customer service, working with vendors and service providers, and doing sales/bizdev.