Rich Barton argues that tech companies need more than just engineers to succeed. He discusses why diverse roles matter and how startups can compete against the giants dominating the industry.
There actually is a class of tech company where the engineers kind of rule the roost. And that may sound appealing to you because you're an engineer. And by rule of the roost, I've been in these companies before. And by rule the roost, I mean, look down their noses at and kind of disrespect other functions at the company like sales or marketing or operations or IT hr. These are all just around to support me, the engineer. I'm the God engineer. I'm exaggerating here, all right? But having a company where there is a explicit or implicit class system amongst employees is no bueno. Okay? That is absolutely not good. It can work for some companies for a while, but it ain't a happy place to work. All right? And it's sub optimal now. It's sub optimal. I think about it as spokes in a wheel. A wheel is true and spins beautifully with very little friction when all the spokes are tightened to the same strength and then the wheel turns. It doesn't turn if spokes are missing or they're shorter or what have you. And that's kind of how I feel about all of these different functions at a company. They have to all be firing on all cylinders to make the machine really work. And I believe as we enter this kind of next phase of technology oriented company and startup that's being created, I believe that the the two geeks in a garage story are going to become fewer and fewer suffer. Me at the beginning of the web, the web was a flat, open, egalitarian space. Two geeks in a garage really could start anything. And as long as they were discovered by Yahoo and later Google, you know, both Stanford startups, magic things can happen. All right, is that how you feel about the web and opportunity today? Is that the landscape we see today out there? Is it this great open, flat, web of opportunity? It's really not. It's really not. There are these massive companies that control masses of eyeballs and traffic, have huge influence over what people see and what people do and what ads people see. And they get to decide by and large what companies become successful and what don't. And so when you go into, if you're going into a startup, my advice now would be make sure that, you know, marry a marketer. If you're an engineer, marry a marketer. Have a marketer as a boyfriend or a girlfriend, okay? Have that marketer be part of your company because you're going to need to be super clever about how to get your product in front of people and Then the next person you should get to know is the money person, and the next person you should get to know is the operations person. Anyway, you need a full team to be discovered. It's much, much harder these days, I believe, to break through the clutter and the noise than it was back when I started Expedia, which is too bad. Now that'll be the case until something new comes along. You know, maybe there will be a new web. I can't really envision it. Some people think blockchain, that's what blockchain is going to be the basis of a new wide open web. And maybe, maybe, I think more likely Alexa and Google Home and these voice intelligences that are proliferating right now, more likely those are going to succeed. And as those succeed, the choke point gets even narrower. For companies to fit through consumer oriented companies, you've got to come through the voice. And the voice is not a full screen with lots of links on it. The voice is one answer, probably, okay, where should I go for dinner? What movies should I see? Get me airline tickets, find me a house. You get one answer in these things. So I actually think about this a lot. I think power is actually concentrating in the hands of these mega global distributors now, not dispersing.
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