Gustaf Alströmer: belief

Transcript context

…Have you ever seen a startup work out if they had a contracting firm, like engineering firm build a product? Does that ever work or were you just like, "No, do not ever do this"? Gustaf Alströmer Basically, I can't recall any specific ones where people have a contracting firm but I've recalled founders where let's say you had two non-technical founders, but they valued engineering and they had an ability to build a team of great people that were not co-founders and they gave them equity and they become successful. There are many examples of that I would say, but I don't remember any specific examples where you had a contracting team building the whole thing. I think the reason for that is it takes more than just sort of riding a spec to build a product. You can't actually spec yourself to a great product. You have to just be part of the iterations yourself. That's why I think someone being the engineer, having the idea of what iteration looks like and just doing it is how you do things. I think that the cases where I've seen non-technical founders make this work is that they have really good engineering teams who feel like they're founding team. It might not be co-founders per YC-7 definition of having 10%, but they feel like they're the bonding team. This reminds me of a story of just the recent podcast interview I did with the CPO of Calendly. She talked about how when Calendly started, they actually had a Ukrainian dev team built the first product. Not only did they help them build the first product, they actually ended up driving all the growth initially because they saw Calendly and started using it within their firm.…

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