SO – I have a great idea, for a multi-million dollar business. I know nothing about programming, so I’m going to outsource an army of Indians to act as my engineering team. I don’t have much experience running successful companies, but at least I have some good ideas!

While I enjoy making up quotes that describe the people I often poke fun at, I once embodied the ignorant entrepreneur who would say such a stupid thing. I started my first “company” when I was in 5th grade… only that it was nowhere close to being a company. I had what I thought was a brilliant idea for a website that would directly compete with gamefaqs.com and make it more community-centric. I barely knew HTML, I didn’t know where or how to host a website, and I didn’t understand that real programming skills were required to make such a site scale.

Which meant that I had to resort to plan B: My master plan was to outsource a massive army of Indian programmers to do the entire job for me. (and no, I’m not being racist!) Since I was still in school, I’d be able to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride to newfound fame and wealth.

… except my pathetic ideas totally didn’t work. As the school year went by, most my peers realized that I was an abysmal failure. I went from being the popular smart kid down to the pathetic soul who wish she knew more. And now I do.

Several days ago, I was mentioned in TechCrunch for being a serial entrepreneur. Me, a serial entrepreneur? HAH! Give me credit when I actually exit with a few million dollars in hand. Since getting the mention on TechCrunch, I’ve gotten dozens of emails from “entrepreneurs” asking me to be their partner in crime. While I find that flattering, it pains me to see that some people think running a successful company is easy. It’s as if these people trust ME, a serial failed entrepreneur, to help them as a technical co-founder in a business project that I don’t even have time for. It’s as if people enjoy looking blindly into the world of entrepreneurship, hoping that they’d achieve success as long as they remain dedicated and ignore the naysayers.

Unfortunately, the opposite is quite often the truth. By being overly dedicated to an idea or company, one might waste more time testing the concept before failing. Now if these people were engineers, their business concept could be tested in a much shorter time period.

At a lot of these meetups and conferences, I often hear people motivating each other: “Never give up! Ignore all the naysayers…” only problem being, naysayers often have good advice as to why your business will fail. People ask me what I think of their business idea. If I like it, all is good. If I criticize it, my advice is ignored, and my reputation drops because I’m then considered a naysayer. So no matter what happens, my “professional expertise” is often worthless to these people. Pity.

In a nutshell, here’s the timeline of a business run by a non-technical entrepreneur:

Months 1-4: Brainstorm idea.
Months 5-12: Hire army of Croatian programmers
Month 16: Fail.

Hre’s the timeline of a business run by the technical entrepreneur:

Hours 1-5: Work on and launch alpha site.
Day 2: while(idea==crap) start new company;

You might notice a slight difference between the two… I often hear from non-technical co-founders that they don’t have the time to learn how to make things. At one point, I was one of them. But I saw the light! I realized that it’d be cheaper and MORE FUN to just make things on my own. Not to mention, you get props for being a girl in tech, even if you totally don’t deserve it.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh… running a company as a non-technical entrepreneur does not necessarily mean that you’ll fail. It just means that it’ll take longer to fail if you’re meant to fail, which means that it’ll be longer until you get to move on. Some people see themselves in the middle: They understand technology, yet they don’t know how to code. Knowing how technology works certainly doesn’t hurt!

But the point is, recruiting an army of engineers does not necessarily mean fast development cycles. As one of my favorite mentors would put it,

“It’s kind of hard to run a technology company if you don’t understand technology…”

And I believe it was Einstein who once said:

Genius is 1 % inspiration and 99 % transpiration.

With that said, ignore my advice and hire an army of Chinese code monkeys to make you rich. Good luck!