Thinking about joining a small founder team and feel like my background in DS and analytics is useless. SWE, Design, Sales are essential. PM not really either. Does DS matter at all in start ups? Seems only relevant in Series C >.
Only SWE and Sales matter for initial period. That’s why a three person startup where CTO is tech, COO is operations (sales) and CEO who is responsible for funding is the best way to build a company.
So nobody owns product in this setup?
Product is everyone’s responsibility. How can you have sales if you don’t participate in product building. How can you engineer a product that you don’t understand? PMs just document stuff and take care of collaboration. You are in gross mid understanding if you think they have anything to do with product. They are meant to reduce grunt work for core team. When you are a startup you don’t have those communications barriers. Any company with less than 100 people don’t hire PMs because they are useless
Was also thinking about the background. IE Data Scientists could make good founders by the way DS thinks
Maaaaybe, but probably only in a data-first company.
Totally agree. At that phase a versatile UX researcher is a much better fit. And DE of course
DS and analytics is only for very large enterprise/ tech giants. DE is still relevant though for most startups
Unless the startup is doing work on someone else’s data.
ML Research Scientist are needed in startups
tbh even series C is a stretch. other roles can do their own basic analysis for a while.
Couldn't agree more
A DS will be needed later when the SWEs have set up pipelines and telemetries. Till then there is no data for doing any DS work. But if the startup itself is an AI company banking on publicly available data for building models, then you will need a DS from the beginning.
There isn't much D to do any S. Basic analytics also can be handled by SWEs
Basic ML can be also handled by SWE
Basic coding can be handled by MLE