Not a joke--am looking to meet talented programmers in NYC to get a better understanding of the startup scene. Anyone have advice as to how this is done besides hanging out at Columbia/NYU graduate programs?
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NYC isn't the place to look. Columbia and NYU both have OK- but not amazing- programs. I'd drive on down to Maryland-College Park, CMU, or up to MIT. That's where the smart programmers are going to be.
You will find a lot of smart programmers working as quants in Manhattan at banks, Bloomberg, and Google Finance, but they aren't all that interested in start-ups. Aside from TheLadders, the real start up scene is going to be in Boston, Chicago, and the West Coast.
If you're in the primary stages of setting up a start-up, there's absolutely nothing wrong with recruiting your early talent as sophomores and juniors at Baruch or Rutgers. You can probably find some fairly competent folks for $15-18/hour without giving up any equity.
Bear in mind that if you want to pay folks with equity, there's generally a huge conflict between folks generating the business ideas and doing the programming. Programming is tough, grinding work- like solving a calculus problem every few lines of code. A lot of folks get into programming because they want their own ways of expressing their own good ideas, which they think are basically free. The developer is going to say he's doing 80% of the hard work so he deserves 80% of the equity. But he's also going to say his work is only worth $30/hour.
Is it possible to work with someone remotely if you are looking for serious talent? I would think that's a bad idea....
Also, at what point do you need to upgrade from an undergrad at a place like Baruch?
Thanks a lot!
oh and what about outsourcing the product development. this is probably a no-no too right?
Yes, you can outsource your programming. But the fact is that a competent developer from India who graduated from IIT or the like is going to probably cost just as much or more than a kid that you select out of one of the state engineering schools, and there will be language, culture, and time gaps on top of that. Finally, there will be a firm collecting a 20% commission sitting between you and him.
IMHO, it's better to bite the bullet, find one developer with two or three years of experience, find a top-ten CS school- ideally a state school with low tuition, and start having that developer interview kids out of there and hire the very best ones. If you're a tech startup, this is going to keep personnel costs lower than adding another layer of management after about two or three programmers- and you've got these guys actually working on-site rather than having to get up at 8 AM for a conference call with Mumbai.
if you don't develop products or code, then what are you contributing to the startup?
by product i mean writing the code/doing the technical piece.
>Is it possible to work with someone remotely if you are looking for serious talent? I would think that's a bad idea.... Well, you're doing a start-up, right? Working from New York, you're at a comparative disadvantage to a college campus or the west coast. You're paying out the wazoo for cost of living and there's some decent CS schools here, but they aren't quite top-tier. So by relocating to Maryland College Park and having a strong recruiting process, you can cut the cost of a good junior developer from $100K to $65-70K. I mean, why would you run a start-up out of New York City unless you absolutely had to.
There is some great programming talent at Baruch, but Maryland College Park is a top ten program while Baruch is a top 30. At a top-ten program, you'll see students taking a third algorithms course, a separate data structures course that covers more, a separate course on synchronization/threading, and a whole lot more theories, ideas, and required coursework. Basically, the kind of programmer who survives through Senior year at a top ten program looks a lot different than the kind at a top 30 program like the schools in NYC.
>Also, at what point do you need to upgrade from an undergrad at a place like Baruch? Well, an undergrad at Baruch can probably flesh out a lot of your ideas and give you a working prototype. But the problem is scalability and professionalism. I'm not sure what kind of a service you're running, but a big concept in CS that gets driven home at a school like MIT, CMU, or College Park but less so at Baruch or Columbia is order-of-complexity and synchronization.
Let me give you an example. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of programming can mock up a system where a user logs in, you look up that users account from a file- spending 25 milliseconds on each entry to find the right username, check that the password matches, and authenticate him. That might work great if you have 40 users, but everyone will be waiting for a minute to get in if you have 5000. A smart programmer- the kind you would be more likely to find at MIT, CMU, College Park or Va. Tech, is going to think ahead a little bit and maybe keep it in a cache which guarantees that the lookup happens in 50 milliseconds no matter how many users there are.
So if you're still in New York and just want to build a basic prototype to show to investors, I'd go to Baruch, hire a kid for $18/hour to put it together, and then completely rewrite it with someone who knows how to scale it for 5000 or 500,000 customers up at MIT or down at College Park- ideally find a senior developer with a few years of programming experience at a tech firm like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, or perhaps a solid Wall Street algo guy, and then have him help you find developers. You will probably want to relocate out of NYC to reduce costs and improve talent acquisition prospects.
this is super helpful. thanks so much. have to stay put in nyc for now unfortunately.
sounds like i should get someone from baruch, develop a prototype, raise money and then hire top talent to drive the thing from there.
Yes. But I'd also give your programmer at Baruch a long, hard, look, too for the long-term program if you raise the capital for it. If he's made a good prototype and seems to know what he's talking about, I'd keep him on. You'll need to worry about that conversation if/when you get to that point, but it will basically involve you saying that he's done a great job so far and he's going to have a key role going forward, but for an enterprise system, you want to hire on a guy with five or six years of experience. (This will cost you $100K/year + health insurance outside NYC; $150-180K/year +health insurance inside NYC).
Get some sort of intellectual property rights before you go to the VCs.
I would not get too dependent on a prototype made by a college kid to run a business and releasing it too early to too wide an audience. A lot of the time, you only get one chance to execute an idea on a technical level, so you have to make it count. It might be good news to get 500 users and some revenue going into the VCs, but if you get to 50K shortly after getting to 500 and the system can't handle it, the idea might have run away from you.
Rochester, RPI, Cooper Union, MIT, WPI, just to name a few nearby schools...
The schools Solidarity mentions are all good, but there is a noticeable quality gap between the quality of an average Senior at College Park or Va. Tech and the non-MIT schools Solidarity mentioned. In fact, I'd call MIT a 9.8, RPI, Cooper Union, and Rochester probably 7.0s-7.5s overall- very good schools- better than some Ivy Leagues, but I'd put Va. Tech and College Park- certainly for the kids with some project experience in ACM- at about a 9.2-9.3 for Comp. Sci and Comp. E; Berkeley at a 9.7, Illinois at a 9.4-9.5. The New York private schools are great, you find plenty of brilliant developers there, but overall, you're going to find probably find more at a higher-ranked US News school.
There's just such a good value at the public engineering Ivies, especially with the recession right now. The secret of the engineering world right now is that outsourcing to the rural or suburban college campus of a public engineering Ivy- like Ga Tech, Va. Tech, Maryland College, Park, Berkeley, UT Austin, or perhaps Illinois (my alma mater- trying to avoid bias)- is the new form of outsourcing. Run down the top 15-or-so state schools with classes of more than 200 CS students in US News, establish your business near one of those campuses, and enjoy high quality programming skill that comes with a 20% discount on labor costs.
can you work with kids from those schools remotely? ie if im in nyc, could i hire someone to help develop a prototype or is that too dangerous?
I guess the question is what do you contribute and why do you control the start-up when you're not even on the premises? What is it that you do that the VCs or the on-site manager can't do?
I was going for proximity, as he doesn't really have access to CMU, Berkeley, Duke, or Case Western kids
College Park might actually be closer than Rochester. It's only a four hour drive away from Manhattan. Top ten CS school beating every Ivy except Cornell, average salary coming out is probably $65K vs $75K for a competent developer at many private schools. I'd give it a long, hard look.
am just talking about getting someone to design a prototype. a partner and i conceived the idea, put the plan in place, handling marketing/distribution/development and have access to good network of funding. if we have a successful prototype then would raise series A money etc, manage the thing full time. does that make sense? obviously if/when theres a need for a team of programmers we'd relocate or bring in good people to nyc.
The prototype is really just a marketing device for an idea- a tangible adjunct to a powerpoint presentation. It's proof that it can be done and it's something tangible for the VCs to look at. It is something that will have to get torn apart and have the business practically get restarted by the time you're done. It's not really something to call a major accomplishment in the same way that a coal/steam-engine powered "automobile" which can run for five miles before it breaks down permanently was not really an auspicious start to many automotive businesses which failed before they'd even made their 100th car.
The idea is worth something- maybe 1% but managing the idea, executing it, getting it to market, and making it succeed where similar ideas haven't is probably worth 20%. The other 80% goes to the capital and labor costs of setting up the business.
So what are you contributing that your on-site manager isn't if you are in New York but your business is hundreds of miles away? You can maybe develop an idea part-time and spec it out part time, but you cannot start a business part time. 5% of the value in that business is the idea which any number of smart people can come up with. 95% of it is the execution and the recurring insight and vision to get the darned thing working. There's a huge correlation between people who come up with ideas and folks who've got the vision and execution to keep the business running, but how can you add that value when you're separated from the business by hundreds of miles and you've got a tech guy running everything? Guess who's going to get most of the credit for setting it up if he succeeds?
I've met a lot of competent engineers from Duke/Case Western who are cross-disciplined in CS but I agree with College Park being a good comp sci feeder if you're just looking for coders
You don't necessarily need a world-class programmer when you're starting out. What you need is someone reliable and cheap who gets your vision. I've been involved in three start-ups, all based in NYC. One of them currently has a valuation around $20mm, and we literally paid our programmer (and our lawyers) with alcohol for the first few months. For the other two, programmers were coming in about $10-15k iirc.
You might want to check out this event if you really are set on NYC though http://nyc.startupweekend.org/
If this is a really good idea that you're serious about, you want to be careful about going to the full market on code developed by an 18-year-old kid. You want to scale it out slowly and carefully if you even choose to go live on that code. And you want to have a really competent developer on call when you start to discover the design limits. If you exceed the design limits, the system crashes, someone sometimes comes out with the same idea if you don't have a patent protecting it- just executed better- and the concept runs away from you without you getting any credit for it.
Yes, but there's a middle ground between an 18 year old kid and a $100k full timer. When I've been in involved in start-ups, we've been able to contract it out to solid programmers who we aren't going to need on a full time basis until after we've launched. It really depends on what you're building though, and how you envision it scaling.
The number one thing to do when running a start-up is to watch costs; Color might have just landed $41mm in funding, but you're not going to, and for every dollar you take from a VC now you are potentially leaving hundreds on the table later. Bring in VC's or angels on your terms, and because you want their specific operational expertise, not because you've bankrupted yourself hiring programmers you don't need to; you never know when you're going to pivot from podcast publishing to group messaging, and all that programming will be for naught.
Well obviously Wall Street Oasis would be best the place to start.
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