first-time tech founder's posterous

I'm much more excited about what's going to come out of Google+ than just Google vs. Facebook. What do you think?

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Developing markets are going to be the most interesting places to play in.

I've been living in Mexico City since 2009 and I'm still shocked by how underdeveloped the internet space is in Latin America. Databases are poor, making it difficult to do basic searches that we normally take for granted. In the US you have a host of city directories, but here, even trying to find the phone number or the opening hours of a store is a challenge. The mobile experience is even worse.

It's a chicken and an egg problem. People don't think to go online to find things because information is poor. At the same time, small (and even large) businesses don't spend time cleaning up their information, making it accessible or discoverable for users online because they don't see it as a reliable source of leads.

I think the key to cracking the Latin America market is accessibility and using technology that people already understand. Before I moved to Mexico City, I was living in Shanghai where I used an incredibly simple app called Guanxi. Guanxi, which translated means relationships (in the context of a concierge's relationships), is a restaurant directory that returns search results by SMS. You text the name of a restaurant to Guanxi and it texts back with results and details of the restaurant's address, opening hours and phone number. I never pay for anything but I happily paid Guanxi about USD 12 cents for each search (debited from my pay-as-you go phone balance).

In Latin America, internet connections are slow and often expensive. Meanwhile smartphones owners are still very much in the minority. The region is definitely developing but it's still a long way away. Social, location and mobile may be the most interesting spaces in the US, but for Latin America, the fastest growth potential is in using existing technologies like SMS and email to solve simple problems like directory search. Looking up a restaurant is only one of the many problems that needs solving here and that makes the entire region an interesting space to play in.

I'm trying out a new service AnyAsq. It's a simple service, and in the words of the site creators, it's where interesting people say: "Ask my anything."

There's a whole range of AnyAsq's, from "I've spent 5 years filming SWAT raids, homicide investigations and fugitive pursuits a a documentary producer. Ask me anything." to "I am a cancer survivor. Ask me anything." to "I have been blogging about bacon for over 7 years. Ask me anything." 

My tag line is "I quit my 100k a year job to learn programming from scratch. Ask me anything."

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Paul Graham prompted me to learn to code. Not personally, but through his essays. He writes in such a way that you find yourself nodding along, whether you like it or not. I rarely read things twice, but I found myself rereading the classics like "Why to Not Not Start a Startup," "18 Mistakes that Kill Startups" and "How to Start a Startup." Eventually, I bought his book "Hackers and Painters" and read it so many times that I convinced myself I HAD to start a startup! 

I was already a keen reader of technology news so I didn't have just one idea, I had a whole bag of them. But what I didn't have was a cofounder or any technical skills. And according to Paul, the absence of either is a sure way to kill your startup; in "How to Start a Startup" he writes: 

"In a technology startup, which most startups are, the founders should include technical people. During the Internet Bubble there were a number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for hackers to create their product for them. This doesn't work well. Business people are bad at deciding what to do with technology, because they don't know what the options are, or which kinds of problems are hard and which are easy. And when business people try to hire hackers, they can't tell which ones are good. Even other hackers have a hard time doing that. For business people it's roulette." 

If you're a business person who wants to start a technology startup but aren't technical, this paragraph really sums it up: you've got to learn to code. 

I'm never going to be a "10x programmer." I'm turning 26 in September, and at best, I'm already almost 8 years behind computer science grads, assuming they first started programming at 18 in college. That's a pretty scary fact if the goal is to catch up to an 8 year lead. Thankfully, that's not the goal; learning to code is about wanting to start a technology startup and hating roulette. 

References: 
Why to Not Not Start a Startup (http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html) 
How to Start a Startup (http://paulgraham.com/start.html) 
18 Mistakes that Kill Startups (http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html) 
Hackers and Painters (http://paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html)

Next week I’m trading all this to be the technical founder and sole employee at my unborn start-up.

People quit all the time but I’m also a first time programmer, so being the technical founder is like starting a band and deciding to be the lead guitarist, except I've never played guitar!

I stumbled upon technology blogs and startups while in Shanghai and have been hooked since. Working at the bank is fun but I’m much more passionate about technology and the internet. The problem is I’m a business guy and according to Paul Graham you can’t start a great technology company without technical founders. All my friends are business guys too so I have no choice but to be the technical founder myself.

Jumping into something new is scary but I’m willing to put in the investment. I recently read about a non-technical guy who taught himself to code and went on to found a company called Foursquare. He was also named to Fortune Magazine's list of 40 under 40 last year, so at least in his case learning to code has paid off.

Apparently good programming takes 10 year so I’m not looking to be one of those 10x programmers you read about on HackerNews or Quora, talented engineers who are 10x more productive than the average. The goal is to spend 12 months and get good enough to hack together a prototype and be able to recognize a 10x programmer when I meet one.

For some reason, business guys tend to think of technical learning as a domain only the selected are capable of; I want to dispel that here. Over the next year I’ll be writing about my start-up journey from hotshot banker to wannabe programmer and first time technical founder. I hope this blog can serve as a guide to show that with enough perspiration, even business guys with no technical backgrounds can learn to hack.

If you’re a creative guy looking for a rock star developer or a founder who can’t code, stays tuned, subscribe to my posts here and follow me on Twitter @fttechfounder.