A technical cofounder manifesto and protest

( to "business people/consultants/sales /...)

A friend that is now a startup founder (and was a well paid ivy league consultant in their previous life) asked me.... what things I feel she didnt learn well from her previous experiences.

I  responded to the question with a tirade that I titled after the fact a technical cofounder manifesto.

• You have not learned to be patient
• You have not learned to trully think long term (5-10yr out)
• You have not learned to build from sctratch (you have learned to find existing state and change/improve)
• You have learned to be pragmatist - you have not not learned to have faith - you have not learned to dream
• You have learn to change and abandon - we have learn fail and retry - perseverance is not sth you have learned
• You have not learned to look at less quantitive aspects - 2nd and 3rd order effects, pay it forward, do no evil, none of these , none of these had a place in your learning
• You have not learned to be engineering minded - building better than needed, expect scale before you see it
• You have not worked close with engineers - how to avoid the typical eng- consultant interface pitfalls
• You have not worked in an environment where you high prestige background is considered a drawback/disadvantage (thats how engineering orgs see ivy-league consultants)
• You like meetings - eng orgs hate meeting
• You like 1-1 - and friendly talk - eng like straight talk
• You like EQ we like IQ
• You like PPTs - eng hate ppts- the only office tool that would be cool would spreadsheet
• You like MSFT bay area hates msft - we like open source aws and google
• You like talk - we call it bs - we like action
• You talk - we code
• You like patents we hate patent trolls
• You like email blasts - we hate spam and respect privacy
• You write your prpoposals with curly fonts on white background - we write our code with fixed fonts on dark background
• You like word processors - we like editors
• You like to work in the day - we like to work at night
• You like to drink beer or wine - we like coffee
• You get attracted by harvard, yale and ivy league - we dream stanford/mit/cmu/caltech but we just as well learn on your own without prestigous institutions
• You like fancy and sport cars we like electric cars and self driving cars
• You like money and fame - we like respect from our peers
• You like big salaries and $bonuses - we like a part of the equity
• You like to manage - we we would prefer a world where mgr are not needed
• You read wsj and economist we read hackernews and reddit
• You are always well dressed we like/are misfits - literally and metaphorically

and if someone feels that they dont fit the stereotype perfectly the last line really says stereotype misfits are cool this side of the fence.