Making a “Good” Tech Start-Up

Overview

An internal session for the Netmonk team at Telkom Indonesia. Netmonk is a network monitoring product sold to IT managers and operations teams, which is to say, sold to engineers. That detail turned out to be the whole argument of the talk.

Starting definition, from Wikipedia: a tech start-up is a company whose purpose is to bring technology products or services to market. Create the product, deliver it to the market. Simple enough, and not sufficient.

Key Takeaway

• Product, go-to-market, culture: you need all three.
  Teams over-index on the product because it is the part engineers control directly. The other two decide whether the product ever gets found or sustained.
• In a company that sells to engineers, your engineers are marketing.
  Experts trust experts. Every public post, talk, or answer from someone on the team becomes part of how the product is judged.
• The good/bad engineer difference is mostly framing, not skill.
  Almost every contrast in that list is the same person choosing between “my task” and “our goal”. It is a question of ownership, not seniority.

Summary

1. What makes a start-up “good”

   Borrowing from Vation Ventures: a good product is not enough, you need two other things to succeed, a good go-to-market and a good culture. Three legs, and most conversations only ever cover the first.

2. Engineers are the soul of a tech start-up

   Engineers are the products. No engineers, no product; good engineers, good products. The line I used to make it land: Jobs made you buy Apple, Wozniak made sure you only buy Apple.

3. What a good engineer looks like

   Four traits, borrowed from Koh Suwandi, CEO of Mekari: purpose-driven, fast problem-solving, resourceful, and taking ownership.

4. Good engineer, bad engineer

   Ben Horowitz's classic “Good PM / Bad PM” converted for engineers, as six paired quotes. “What is my task?” against “What are our goals?”. “As long as it works” against “Is it best practice?”. “Everyone else uses this” against “This stack fits our purpose”. “It works on my local” against “I'll find the workaround”. “Not my responsibility” against “How can I assist you?”. And “This is the best way” against “I think we can improve it somehow”.

5. Why this is specifically true at Netmonk

   Netmonk sells to IT managers and operations teams, which is to say engineers. And by nature, experts value the opinions of other experts. When an engineer from your company writes publicly about security, or AI, or scrum, the reader forms an impression of the whole product from that one person. Every engineer who shows up publicly is a surface of the product, whether or not anyone planned it that way.