from Hacker News

Small Teams Need Redundant Skills

by acl on 5/27/10, 5:52 PM with 7 comments

• by abstractbill on 5/27/10, 6:58 PM

  In the early days of justin.tv (I was employee #6 if you include the 4 founders) there was almost no overlap in skill-sets. Everything in the company had a bus-count of exactly 1, we were permanently on-call, and I don't think anyone had a vacation for a very long time. It probably sounds painful (and it was!), but it meant we got an incredible amount of work done.

  Of course there's often more than one way to skin a cat, and YMMV ;)

• by marcus on 5/27/10, 6:50 PM

  If you are trying to build a long haul business one of your key tasks is getting your Bus Factor above one.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

• by kiba on 5/27/10, 6:43 PM

  A team entirely composed of E.coli experts will nonetheless will be slower than a team composed of physicist, biologists, etc in finding solutions because of the low diversity in ideas.

  A programmer often have domain expertise in many area but they can still specialize by developing different domain knowledge, while retaining a wide range of knowledge.

  A "business" guy, I presumed, not only know just how to run a business, but have domain knowledge in various area that a programmer would not normally know about?

  So yeah, one guy can be on vacation, while another work and switch in between. However, you lose that creative edge and perspectives.

  So there's no such thing as a free lunch in gaining redundancy in programming expertise.

• by fjabre on 5/27/10, 6:51 PM

  What about complementary skill sets? The 2 Steve's of Apple fame or example?

  I think while it's just fine to have 2 technical cofounders it's also fine to have 2 founders where one is primarily business/design oriented while the other is more engineering/backend oriented [Frontend + Backend].

  It's mostly about being able to maintain perspective on different parts of the startup even if both founders are technical and are capable programmers.

  I think you'd always want one of the founders to be more marketing/biz oriented while the other stays in the scalability/performance arena. Why? Because going too deep into either domain forces you to lose perspective in the other. It's the same old not being able to see the forest through the trees problem.

  Two heads are better than one precisely because they can complement each other - not because they can imitate one another.

• by delano on 5/27/10, 6:42 PM

  I agree! Having overlap between skill sets also helps communication about problems and solutions.

• by JoeAltmaier on 5/27/10, 7:32 PM

  Great if you can find several multi-skilled people. obviously got to be better than having the same people, but take some skills away from some of them. But good luck finding more than one engineer-marketeer-manager.