When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak teamed up in the early years of Apple they had between them both engineering talent from Wozniak and marketing and aesthetic talent of Jobs. Between the both of them they birthed the personal computer that we have today, reports The Business Insider.
Today, or in the very recent past, startups have been rooted heavily in engineer talent rather than the marketing and ‘business-model’ like tendencies Jobs had. The article sites that Mark Zuckerburg, CEO of Facebook, is primarily a coder and has uber-COO Sheryl Sandberg on his side as his business savvy, marketing counterpart. It was his raw coding talent that set everything in motion and allowed for his startup, Facebook, to soar to where it is now. According to William Quigley of the Insider, this idea of startups being created by people with raw engineering talent will soon transition into future startups that are driven more by ideas and business models like instead.
As he writes, the world is becoming increasingly globalized and outsourced making it much easier for people who have inventive and revolutionary concepts to turn those ideas into reality – even if they lack the coding or engineering talent needed. Quigley writes, “I think we’re going to see an interesting trend in the next decade: as the world becomes increasingly flat, globalized and outsourced, our great startups – as Apple, Facebook and Google were all once were – will be driven more by the genius of ideas and inventive new business models, as Apple created in the last decade under Jobs as a multinational giant, rather than its early-stage engineering talent or coders.”
Quigley goes on to note that it is extremely easy for startups to expand internationally at a low cost. At the same time, the rise of global engineers is exponential as China and India alone doubled the amount of engineering graduates they had. As greatly skilled engineers become more abundant and globalization more profound, the team up of genius ideas and raw engineering talent is inevitable. With that, people who have groundbreaking ideas and concepts but are lacking in computer science skills can easily turn to an engineer and create the startup they dreamed of. “Given how cheaply engineering talent can be had in places like India and China, and how easy it is to now communicate with and do business in those parts of the world, startups will be able to outsource this resource more easily. Genius, however, will remain always impossible to outsource.”
Some people like Fred Wilson, VC and principal of Union Square Ventures, disagree with this idea and says that he would never invest in a company that hired someone else to do their coding for them. There may be differing opinions, as with anything, but one can’t ignore that the spike in engineering talent is sure to ignite a fire within the startup scene when paired with those who have great business models and concepts. According to Quigley, they are bound to disrupt the market and “are the ones that, like Steve Jobs before them, know how to hit a target we can’t even see yet.”
SOURCE: The Business Insider
IMAGE: Photo of Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin courtesy of Business Insider
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