For the longest time, I’ve always wondered if I should focus on being a better founder (aka being good at “business”) or improving my technical skills because that’s what I am good at. I think I have finally come to terms with what makes the most sense for me moving forward.
Last week, I was at the Africa Tech Summit (ATS) in Nairobi and it was a very fun experience. It was my first tech conference since the start of the pandemic. I met a lot of likeminded people, made great friends and met some twitter folks in person. By all counts, it was eye-opening and enriching as it pushed me to reconsider a few things — mainly a solution to my long standing dilemma: Should I focus on my technical skills and become good at building products or should I focus more on founder-like skills (sales, networking, fundraising and so on.)?
I love building products. I love thinking through problems and being absolutely laser focused at solving said problems. Technical challenges create a sort of intense excitement in me that’s akin to incredible delight. Programming, problem solving, product thinking all spark joy for me. When I think of fundraising, network, sales I don’t feel the same. It feels forced, unnecessary and I don’t associate joy to those activities. When I attended the networking events during the ATS, it became clear to me that I couldn’t see myself doing those activities out of sheer joy, I wouldn’t enjoy it at all. I strongly believe that one can only be good at things they genuinely enjoy doing. It doesn’t feel like work and you don’t need extra motivation to get out of bed every morning because the work in itself is enough motivation. I would choose discussing a technical problem on a whiteboard or refactoring a piece of code over talking to people about potential partnerships or the future trends in my industry every single time (no doubt).
I have to come to terms with the fact that I’m a builder and although that doesn’t fit the CEO mould, I could still be an excellent product/technical founder. Every position in a company holds its importance and it is best to leave each position to those who enjoy doing what the job description requires.
For the past few years, I optimised for being a better founder. I tried to launch as many companies as possible, aiming for that CEO title. I always told myself that I didn’t want to be the best engineer but the best founder in my industry however the truth is that I don’t really enjoy the CEO’s job. I excel at product work, it makes me happy and I will start optimising for that. I will work on being a stronger engineer both from a technical and a managerial perspective.
I am not remotely as good I would like to be and I don’t have enough technical depth because I spent a lot of time being a generalist. I didn’t have a lot of exposure to important yet common technical problems like reliability, architecture design, scalability just to name a few. I will spend the next few years of my career focusing on growing into an exceptional engineer and later on incredible engineering leader. Consequently, that would mean working in environments that value engineering excellence, quality and growth.
Be at peace with who you are and celebrate your genuine and authentic self.