{"id":77476,"date":"2022-10-28T03:00:50","date_gmt":"2022-10-28T07:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=77476"},"modified":"2022-11-30T18:01:44","modified_gmt":"2022-11-30T23:01:44","slug":"the-real-tech-startup-lifecycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/10\/28\/the-real-tech-startup-lifecycle\/","title":{"rendered":"The <em>real<\/em> tech startup lifecycle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/threadreaderapp.com\/thread\/1585634691301879809.html\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Dave Burge<\/a> (aka @Iowahawk on the Twits) beautifully encapsulates the lifecycle of most successful tech startups:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Elons-free-speech-time-at-Twitter.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right; padding: 0px 0px 10px 25px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Elons-free-speech-time-at-Twitter.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"475\" height=\"520\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-73407\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Elons-free-speech-time-at-Twitter.jpg 475w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Elons-free-speech-time-at-Twitter-137x150.jpg 137w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 475px) 100vw, 475px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I like the thing where people assume everybody working at Twitter is a computer science PhD slinging 5000 lines of code daily with stacks of job offers for Silicon Valley headhunters, and not a small army of 27-year old cat lady hall monitors <\/p>\n<p>Successful social media companies begin in a shed with 12 coders, and end up in a sumptuous glass tower with 1200 HR staffers, 2000 product managers, 5000 salespeople, 20 gourmet chefs, and 12 coders <\/p>\n<p>True story, I was in SV a few weeks ago and visited a startup that&#8217;s gone from $4MM to $100+MM rev in 2 years. HQ currently cramped office with 30-40 coders in a strip mall, but moving to office tower soon. I&#8217;m like, man, you&#8217;ll eventually be missing this. <\/p>\n<p>Why do successful tech companies have so many seemingly useless employees? For the same reason recording stars have entourages <\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the sociology: 5 coders form startup. Least embarrassing one becomes CEO. The other ones, CFO, COO, CMO, and best coder becomes CTO.<\/p>\n<p>Company gets big; CFO, COO CMO hold a dick measuring contest to hire the biggest dept.<\/p>\n<p>CTO still wants to be the only coder. <\/p>\n<p>I suspect it really does takes 1000 or more developers to keep Twitter running; backend, DB, security, adtech\/martech etc. But I&#8217;d guess a significant # of Twitter devs are basically translating what triggers the cat ladies into AI algorithms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dave Burge (aka @Iowahawk on the Twits) beautifully encapsulates the lifecycle of most successful tech startups: I like the thing where people assume everybody working at Twitter is a computer science PhD slinging 5000 lines of code daily with stacks of job offers for Silicon Valley headhunters, and not a small army of 27-year old [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,57,15,13],"tags":[1498,95,261,92,310],"class_list":["post-77476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-humour","category-technology","category-usa","tag-iowahawk","tag-jobs","tag-management","tag-software","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-k9C","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77476"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77478,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77476\/revisions\/77478"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}