One of the perks of working at Wednesdays.com is that I get
to go to the lunches I organize for free.
Last week, I decided to attend a lunch run by Hackers & Founders (H&F),
a startup club with a huge membership in the Valley. H&F lunches usually draw a predominantly
developer crowd, meaning that I get lost in most of the conversations.
However, that week in Berkeley it seemed everybody had a
very different backgrounds. At the table
was an owner of a co-working space, a financial advisor from Merrill-Lynch, a
German who had just come to SF three days ago after working in Shanghai for
five years, a founder of an early stage startup, a recent TechStars admit and
me the Galactic Emperor/Ops guy from Wednesdays.com.
This diverse crowd had some of the most insightful conversations about
startups that I have ever been part of.
Too many topics were covered for this blog post, so I will limit it to
the two things that stood out.
How to hire a
developer
It is no secret that the Valley has a huge shortage of
developers/coders. I have heard much
about the high salaries and extravagant perks that companies have been offering
to bring in talent. As of last
Wednesday, I did not think there was a way out of the status quo, besides
perhaps dramatically increasing the amount of developers via education or
immigration. Enter Kyle the tech stars
admit. As a talented developer himself, Kyle
had a fresh and most important of all, a credible solution to the problem.
Kyle’s solution was to hire developers to work part
time. He explained that developers love
side projects, and are willing to work on them if given the chance. The problem is that no company is giving them
that chance because they only want the developer full time via a 40+ hour work
week. Kyle believes that employers
should settle to hire developers for 10-15 hours a week rather than try to
monopolize all their time. He admits
that this does have limitations, but to him it is the difference between having
some talent to build product versus none at all.
I can think of a couple of pitfalls to his idea, but none
that could not be resolved given time.
The idea of more using part time developers is very interesting to me
and I hope it will be further explored.
God knows, there are a lot of great ideas out there that are simply not
able to be built due to a lack of technical expertise.
Silicon Valley Lingo
The Valley’s lingo was on full display at the H&F
lunch. After six months on the job at
Wednesdays.com and spending countless hours on startup blogs, I finally have
gotten a hang on the startup lingo.
At lunch, I felt like I was in the “in” crowd, throwing
around technical terms like NFC (Near Field Communication), GUI (pronounced:
Gooey) as well as name dropping luminaries and accelerators such as Eric Ries,
Brad Feld, and YC. Glad to know that
after leaving the Valley for three months, that I had not missed a beat.
At times, the German from Shanghai had trouble understanding
us. Whenever he asked us to clarify a
term or name, it just reminded me of how much of a bubble Silicon Valley can
be. And I have to say it is a great
bubble.
Closing Thoughts
The quality of these lunches just keep increasing and I was thankful I got a chance to attend one, while I was on vacation. Here's to the new year and may there be many more enlightening lunches for this group of Hackers & Founders.
