CppCon 2017

Many programmers think about starting a company. It’s often not about getting rich so much as to pursue a vision for a computer program that is much bigger than one person could do alone. Like most programmers who start up, I had no formal training and little experience outside of software development. I was naively confident, and didn’t know what I didn’t know (it turned out that that was a LOT!)

In this talk I’ll present some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way, many of which were a complete surprise to me. I’ll cover getting investment, building the product, building a team, and getting and keeping customers. Little of this talk is directly about programming, but it is aimed at programmers who want to create code in order to create a business, or who want to create a business so that they can create the code they want.

Much of the content is also relevant for programmers who find themselves doing non-programming tasks, such as managing people or customer-facing roles. This talk contains candid, warts-and-all war stories, and because it’s for programmers, comes with a no adverts and no business-talk BS guarantee.