Sounding Off: As a founder, don't be an arrogant technologist

Each Friday, PhocusWire dissects and debates an industry trend or new development covered on our site that week.

The trappings of the common startup founder are plentiful.

These can range from not truly understanding the scope of the problem that needs to be solved to trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

Or, perhaps, assuming that growth is easier than was anticipated, or taking on capital from those with too high of expectations of what can be achieved in a short period of time.

And, then, there's a tendency to assume there is no competition (oops, as many have discovered to their cost).

Or... Or... Too many to mention.

Gareth Williams summarized his own situation in the early days of Skyscanner through a different lens.

He assumed that, well, the boring stuff that doesn't typically interest a technologist usually sorts itself out and is just part of the progress and process of building a company.

Marketing in the basement; technology on the top floor; we don't need an HR department.

Luckily for Williams and Skyscanner, the company came through whatever prejudices he may have had, which had the potential to hinder its growth, extremely successfully.

But, as many founders know (or now realize), a lot companies do not.

Perhaps one of the most important elements in the growth of a company is, indeed, the role of the HR team.

Believing that the hiring process and other career management duties can be carried out whilst running the business during its growth phase is wrong.

Countless businesses, with their high churn rates of staff, are testament to the inability of leadership teams to shift important functions such as HR to those that are able to do it at scale and professionally.

Larger teams mean that tweaks are required both to the culture and hiring/training processes that perhaps fall outside of the original idea of how a business should be run.

The process of "letting go" is an important one for founders and, therefore, perhaps the stories that emerge from startups in travel and in other sectors around such growing pains would be fewer if seeing the bigger picture came earlier in the trajectory of a company's strategy.

Listen to the full episode of the How I Got Here podcast with Gareth Williams here: