Teague Hopkins ’06: Hackers, Hustlers, and Designers

Founder of the Teague Hopkins Group, which focuses on lean product development for startups, Teague Hopkins ’06 profiles the “the holy trinity of startup founders” for the company blog.

“Dave McClure of 500 Startups calls it the holy trinity of startup founders. The frequent mantra in the startup space is that there are three primary types of founders: hackers, hustlers, and designers. The prevailing wisdom is that you should have one of each of these on your founding team. But we don’t often talk about what constitutes each of these archetypes.

“Hackers are not simply code monkeys. They need to be able to do more than just code well. Comfort with ambiguity and an understanding for coding in that context is invaluable for the hacker-founder. Many programmers are happier simply building what they’ve been told to build, but the good entrepreneurs are those who think about what happens when the requirements change—and code as if they will. This means building some things quick and dirty, and accepting that there will be some technical debt incurred in favor of rapid iteration.”

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Image: via Teague Hopkins.

Friendly URL: wesconnect.wesleyan.edu/news-20121116-teague-hopkins

Related links

• Lean Startup For Nonprofits
• Teague Hopkins's website
• On Quora
• On LinkedIn

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