sunahsuh

Just a personal viewpoint based on the limited information available (and not meant as a personal knock on the OP since I don't know him or his particular situation in detail):

I would be extremely wary about joining a tech start-up that has to go through an open job application process for a CTO. If the founder can't make enough of a believer out of someone within his or her own network to join, I would see that as a bad sign -- not just in terms of the start-up's idea but also the founder's ability to sell his or her idea. If it's the case that the founder doesn't know viable candidates in his or her own network, then I'd be doubly concerned: it's a tech start-up and a strong network within tech circles will be necessary for other resources down the line (future engineering hires, advice, potential investors that add value to the company, etc). Additionally, if s/he isn't really plugged in to the tech community, I'd worry that s/he doesn't truly understand the business, my skills as it relates to the business, and the value that I bring to the table. And in this particular case, I'd also be concerned that social networking is what this start-up revolves around and the founder (again, from my limited view on the outside) doesn't appear to be able to network effectively enough to at least get introductions to suitable CTO candidates through secondary connections.

I'm not saying that this is necessarily the situation here but that's my thought process just based on the information available. I consider things like sales ability, existing network and hiring ability to be essential things for a non-technical founder to bring to the table before I would consider working for him or her -- otherwise, I'm almost as well-off starting my own thing and own a hell of a lot more equity.

There are a handful of non-technical people I know that I would join in short order if one of them ever called to talk about a job at his or her start-up. And if I declined I would refer them to other people I know that might be interested because I know no matter what he or she is doing, s/he has a great chance of succeeding. If you're not the kind of person that inspires that level of loyalty, being a lone non-technical founder at a tech start-up seems like it would make an already arduous journey incredibly difficult.

It's a fascinating complement to the "apple supply chain" articles that were making the front page a while back. None of the articles I read mentioned China's rare-earth mineral export policies as one of the factors that led to its virtual lock on electronics manufacturing - most of them rather characterized it as a snowball effect. If this was as important to the erosion of US manufacturing as it seems, this could be an important missing piece for hardware manufacturing (and its jobs) to come back to the States.

(Not that semiconductor manufacturing jobs are the kinds of "good" jobs we're so desperate to grow here, c.f. Karen Hossfeld's ethnographic study of the immigrant women who made up the bulk of silicon valley's manufacturing workforce)

Definitely agree: they have everything in place for this. Having a personal relationship with that many small business owners around the country is huge and there's so much low-hanging fruit in the "MIS for small biz" space. There's a lot of startups that are making headway here (Square, etc) but they don't nearly have the resources (the biggest being the massive sales org) that Groupon does. As soon as Grpn ships a new product along these lines, they can call hundreds of thousands of potential customers that already know the sales rep on the phone and are possibly already paying a competitor for a sub-par product.

If I were Andrew Mason, I'd be looking to acquire a small-biz focused product company at this point to accelerate the process and start shipping asap.

(Yes, I'm aware I'm totally armchair CEO-ing here.)

They do -- when I was an undergrad there was a zip file that made the rounds with textbooks and old exams for many of the core courses.

Haha, nope, lots of PhD students and junior profs that have their act together.

Seconded. Some of the most successful academics I know keep regular 9-5 hours and leave their work at the office, have spouses and children, etc. I've noticed a lot of them are fantastic at time-boxing and that some of my less successful colleagues aren't so much, and the freedom the academic schedule gives them ends up being more of a hindrance than a help.

I can't speak to that, except what my British advisor said =)

Just for full disclosure, I did the same, in that I did research and publication as an undergrad, worked in industry briefly and then went back to do a PhD (in my case, I had gotten in before I finished undergrad and deferred my admission to work for a bit.)

Personally, I'm not bashing academia per se -- I think it's great for people with the right mix of temperament and motivation. The travesty is that so many people that start PhDs go in without a clear understanding of what the degree entails and what characteristics are necessary for success in their programs and the tenure race. I could go on for a long time about the reasons but I think a lot of it boils down to the way schools work up to undergrad -- the kinds of qualities that get you good grades up through college are not well correlated with the things that make you a great researcher. The worst is in fields where the norm is for undergrads to go straight into PhD programs.

And please note I'm not at all saying this as a comment on your situation. I suspect the fact that you've done research as an undergrad probably means you have a good handle on what you're getting yourself into =)