My name is Matt and I just joined the Baydin team here in Mountain View—so yes, expect to hear a lot more from me! I recently graduated from UCLA with a degree in Business Economics and Accounting, which originally pushed me toward a career in finance before I realized what I was missing out on here in the startup scene.
To kick-start my new network and hear from some of the Bay Area’s best, I attended a Startup Roots session last week in San Francisco. In only my second week I was lucky enough to hear from one of the startup worlds’ most infamous figures: Hiten Shah (CEO/Co-founder of KISSmetrics). The wisdom he shared resonated particularly hard with me because, like me, he doesn’t have a technical background. But through a series of blunders and successes, he learned what it takes to run a technical company without technical skills—what he likes to call ‘building something out of nothing’.
Among other advice, he gave the following two tips to non-techies like myself:
Be technically conscious, non-technical people. Even without a formal programming education, non-technical people can learn the lingo and gain a basic understanding of the uses and limitations associated with the various languages. For entrepreneurs, having this basic understanding is critical to create prototypes in the early stages and ensure solid communication with the real engineers during later development.
‘Get dangerous’ with code and start experimenting. Like the guys over at StartupDigest say: learning to code isn’t impossible, so pick up a book and see what you can learn. Hiten suggests first experimenting with languages like HTML, CSS, and jQuery. He believes, as many veterans would attest, that you learn the most when you are actually trying to build something. So start simple—maybe make your own blog, install WordPress, mess around with plugins and themes. And when you get some experience under your belt, don’t be afraid to hop on your startup’s test server and see what you can do. As Hiten put it: get dangerous!
As part of the Baydin team, I’m certainly poised to learn from some of the best coders around town (Alex Moore, Mike Chin, and Aye Moah). To keep up, I’m going to try and tackle Zed Shaw’s free PDF book called “Learn Python the Hard Way”. It was designed specifically to provide non-technical people with a crash course in Python, which would be extremely useful to me because we use Python heavily for the backend here at Baydin.
We’ll see where that takes me—follow me on Twitter for updates on my coding progress and please share your own experiments and triumphs!
I’m an accountant and I feel exactly the way you do about getting involved in all the exciting stuff in the tech world. What I’ve done to that end so far includes (in chronological order): creating a few websites in Google Sites, starting a few blogs on Blogger (with customized widgets of course), a blog on wordpress.com and finally two websites using wordpress with multiple plugins and social integration.
After all this though I realized that it’s time for me to get some formal learning – even if it’s only reading a book – because trial and error will only get you so far.
Thanks for the post.
Hey Eli,
Glad someone knows where I’m coming from.
I scrapped together some Javascript today to do a mail merge and it ended up working so that was awesome. You should check out the other posts on Google Code, there is some really good stuff on there.
Thanks for the comment!
I’m a Lawyer by training and found myself in the ecommerce sector in Nigeria. I had to learn bit of ruby, css and html.
I hope to be good in these then I move to other bigger ones.