In a world where "learning how to code" was the ideal narrative for success for people wanting to break into tech, enough people took that advice where now opposite is true. I'm more bullish than ever on learning the art sales and distribution first.

A thread

Before I start, I want to make it clear that coding is an extremely valuable skill to have, and I do think everyone should be somewhat technical in their field. So this is not a knock on coding. This is a observation on the market dynamics, and me sharing those observations.

The year was 2005. VCs funded MBAs and business minded people with long plans of how they would build giant companies. The market cared far more about if you could sell then if you could code. Programmers didn't matter that much compared to MBA, in the VC world.

Then @jesslivingston & @paulg enter the picture with a somewhat contrarian thesis for @ycombinator. They thought that if you funded hackers working together, they could learn the business side on the way. This was weird at the time, and YC was a "toy" for a little while.

As people mocked YC from afar, they were attracting world class developers and funding them. After a few years, it was apparent YC was doing something right. Reddit, Airbnb Dropbox, Twitch, Stripe, amongst others, were companies in the early batch. Others started to take notice.

Slowly but surely, YC grew in dominance. These initial companies were getting big. All of a sudden, VCs realized that YC was actually right. If you fund hackers, they can figure out the business side. So the market corrected itself. VCs started funding more developers.

And as YC grew and grew in dominance, more and more companies founded were from founders that were technical. VCs just seemed to buy into this thesis from Jessica and PG that hackers could build big companies, and everyone just looked for those type of founders. Pattern matching.

This was good for a while. Founders who could code were able to building and ship code faster, they had tighter feedback loops, and they required less resources to get something off of the ground. So this theis was logical once proven.

And this thesis still stands tall today. I would bet on a founder that can build over a founder than can sell any day of the week. But in the last 3 years, something has happened that threatens this original thesis from PG. What happened is that building became easier.

Tools like @airtable and @zapier slowly replace old more technical tools. Xcode is being replaces by @AdaloHQ or @bubble. The barrier to ship code has actually fallen significantly. Those tight feedback loops are attainable for almost anyone.

If shipping code has gotten so easy, what's the difference between a custom app and a no code app to a customer? Nothing. Customers care about problems you solve for them, not how you solve them. If this is true, the power of being a technical founder diminishes.

Because we are at a place where anyone can be a technical founder by learning one of these tools. Building products is so damn easy, that almost anyone can do it. And if anyone can build a product, noise get louder. If noise gets louder, who succeeds? The marketers.

Which leads me to my hunch that if you want to be a founder, you should learn to sell, not learn how to code. No code tools are only getting better, and you will always need a distribution strategy. Because if you know no code, so does someone else.

And if everyone know's these tools, it's a game of getting more users/customers the fastest. So if I were you, i'd learn how to sell and start with a less than perfect product, then hire product team once you find success. Vs. starting w/ product-first strategy.

If @paulg can become a billionaire by betting that hackers can learn to sell/build a business, i'd bet that the opposite is true 15 years later. I think that great marketers can learn to ship code well enough to build great companies. Only time will tell!