High tech needs low tech and no tech
To solve the problems of the future, you need to be able to work with technologists, you need to be able to understand technology, but sometimes the broad vision comes not from the technology but from a deeper critical thinking.
A new analysis by our colleagues at Viola Ventures on the extraordinary growth in the number of Israeli unicorns shines new light on the structure of successful startups. Viola’s State-of-the-Unicorn report is required reading for anyone interested in the Startup Nation. It also highlights a growing and fascinating trend: the crucial importance of non-tech and liberal arts graduates in the tech economy.
Viola’s analysis of 57 Israeli unicorn founders who are still CEOs reveals that the typical image of the successful entrepreneur is not always correct. While more than half of the unicorn CEOs and founders are serial tech entrepreneurs and more than a third are graduates of Israel’s storied military intelligence and tech units, almost a third did not previously head a startup or emerge from a relevant army unit but “come from different backgrounds, including legal, marketing, or business endeavors.”
An analysis of more than 3,000 high-tech job vacancies on the OurCrowd Jobs Portal reported in the OurCrowd High-Tech Jobs Index Q2 2021 underlines the importance of non-tech recruitment among startups. While the highest single category most in demand was software engineers with 18% of all vacancies posted, tech vacancies account for only 45% of the total. More than half the job ads in Q2 were for employees with sales, business development, operations, marketing, HR and other not strictly technical disciplines.
One of the secrets of this high-tech hiring juggernaut is that increasing numbers of liberal arts students are being hired to senior positions at tech companies. People who can think, write, talk and have liberal arts skills are in demand for business development, marketing and other key roles in developing a company and its business. The high-tech hiring frenzy is not just affecting people with pure tech training and skills.
As our High-Tech Jobs Index shows, there are thousands of jobs at tech companies that require smart, thinking people of all backgrounds. Tech companies do not succeed solely because of their technology. They succeed because of the vision of their founders and the skills of their leaders in marketing, law, HR and many other fields that enable great technology to succeed as a business. Ultimately, it’s about people skills and the art of persuading people to work for you, invest in you, and to buy your product.
You do not need to be in advertising to create a successful advertising company. You do not need to be in insurance to build an insurance company, or have a background in healthcare to lead a medtech company. Far too many startups are so narrowly focused on their technology they ignore how it will be applied, or marketed, or whether it is needed at all. A successful startup requires not just a great product but a vision of where that product will find its place in the world.
Scott Hartley opens his book The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World with the story of Katelyn Gleason, a theater arts major who was selected for the vaunted Y Combinator program and raised $25 million to become the founder and CEO of Eligible, a healthtech company. She entered the health startup world through sales, and she attributes her sales skills to her student acting career. “Katelyn still knew relatively little about technology, but she did have a clear idea for a business,” Hartley observes. “She became a representative of how applicable the fuzzy skills developed by the liberal arts are, as well as how important they are as complements to technological expertise.”
Other examples cited by Hartley are Stewart Butterfield, the philosophy graduate who founded Slack; Reid Hoffman, another philosophy graduate who founded LinkedIn; Peter Thiel, the law and philosophy graduate who co-founded PayPal and then co-founded Palantir with Alex Carp, who graduated in law and then earned a doctorate in neoclassical social theory — and many more.
A great military general does not need to know how to mend a machine gun. A great movie director does not need to understand the inner workings of a camera — let alone how to build one. A leader needs to see the entire forest, not just the individual trees. A tech leader needs to see the whole picture, not just the individual pixels. A liberal arts education helps to develop that kind of vision and that is why we need more of those people in tech.
Feel frustrated
There are way too many non-techies who feel frustrated because they see all the big money in tech and it feels out of reach. Then you have the techies who think that if you can’t write code or deconstruct an algorithm then you don’t get it.
In fact, we need them all. To solve the problems of the future, you need to be able to work with technologists, you need to be able to understand technology, but sometimes the broad vision comes not from the technology but from a deeper critical thinking.
Here in Israel we need at least 10,000–20,000 additional engineers to keep our record-breaking growth on track. We need to increase the participation of various under-represented groups including women, the Arab community and the ultra-orthodox. We also need to bring in more people from abroad. But the biggest untapped source is everyone without a tech education. We need more frameworks to bring a broader cross-section of people into this environment.
The tech giants of today do not just write code — they write the future.
On the investment side, you do not need to have a tech background. My degree is in history. I estimate that at least half of OurCrowd’s employees are liberal arts graduates. We need people trained in critical thinking and have a deep, broad view of humanity and global society. They bring a different perspective than a brilliant technician trained in the minutiae of IT or physics or electronics or chemistry. It is the combination of these skills and the way they enhance each other’s talents that creates the informed, forward-looking vision that lies at the basis of any great project, including a potentially successful startup.
The notion of a big tech wall dividing the workforce is outdated. Today we are all tech enough because we live and breathe technology — especially the younger generation. My grandchildren are jumping into high tech at age three or four. It is in their DNA. Our parents marveled at television and jetplanes. For us they are banal normality. The wonders that our generation has witnessed — touch screens, Bluetooth, cloud computing and digital photography — are just part of the scenery for the rising generation. Every millennial is a right-swiping hacker.
The tech giants of today do not just write code — they write the future. The brilliance of Steve Jobs was in his design skills as much as his technology skills — and his ability to combine them seamlessly into some of the finest consumer products ever made. The brilliance of Bill Gates was in the development of the Microsoft business model as much as Windows technology, and we have seen in his post-Microsoft career in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just how far his vision extends into areas of human experience far removed from C++.
When I look for inspirational startup leaders, I look for people with skills and vision. If you are going to invent the future you must be someone who is able to re-invent yourself.
