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I spent a day in Los Angeles last week with an engineer who founded and sold a successful high tech company. He now devotes himself full-time to philanthropy for children and engineering education. In preparation for my fall course in entrepreneurship for graduate level engineers, I asked him what were the most important points that engineers did not understand about entrepreneurship. He said engineers needed to understand two points.
- Products need to be matched to customer needs. Engineers are trained to focus on designing and developing products. They need to realize that a more profound understanding of the customer and their motivations leads to better products that are more saleable.
- Focus on the value exchange. Engineers tend to ignore the pricing of a product and the sales process. Most important thing is to find out if anyone will buy the product and at what price.
He also strongly recommended launching products with a limited feature set rather than perfecting the feature set initially. He said it always takes longer than planned to complete the new features and that you risk the market moving away from you (with a competitor) if you are not in the market.
Last point. He described himself as a salesman and not an engineer.
