Marcelo Calbucci

What a motivational title, huh? Just sit under a tree and don’t do anything and you’ll never screw up. Well, that’s not what this post is about, so continue reading.

Yesterday I was having a conversation with Jenny Lam, the great designer from Jackson Fish Market. We were talking about the lack of designers working early on or founding startups. During our conversation, I mentioned to her how design was a bottleneck for me when I’m doing my own projects. After creating severe design pain in the world (and being criticized for doing so) I came to a conclusion that I should do minimalist design because it reduces the chances of mistakes, and I turned to Jenny and said…

I honestly feel like that. I can’t be a designer. I won’t ever be a designer. At best, I’ll be able to design non-awful things. But that’s going to take time and energy for me to get to that point, and spending energy and time to be barely OK is not a great investment for me.

Now, let’s extrapolate the same line of thought to other professions. You can say that if you are not a great developer, the least amount of code you write the better it is. If you are not a good writer, the least amount of copy writing you do the better it is. You can go on and on with this line of thought: marketing, sales, pitches, feature design, user experience, strategy, cooking, etc.

The first thing to do is to be aware of your shortcomings and not feel threatened by knowing what you don’t know. If you get upset when people tell you don’t know something, you should seek therapy. It’s impossible to know everything.

The second step is to decide if that specific skill/work is something you’d like to have and you are capable of having it, or if you should skip becoming better at it and just find a more qualified person to do that for you. Simple.

Conceivian is hiring! Over the next several weeks we’ll be posting many new job openings. The first person we are looking for is a Ruby on Rails Architect. We are looking for someone who will be taking a CTO & VPE-like role. Conceivian is a Startup Lab and the startups we operate are (mostly) employee-less. In other words, you work for Conceivian and Conceivian provides specific services for our own startups.

Basically, this is the exact same role as if you were the CTO and first developer at a Startup. You’ll define the architecture, develop the code, define and work on the features and user experience, manage the project and work with other people on the team.

Check out the job post our website and tell your friends who are qualified to do this job.