It's not a problem for Billy, software gets built by itself if you have the right ideas. Just throw some dollars at an over-seas team. Execution is never a problem.
/s
/s
I think it comes from the fact non-technical people don't necessarely understand what building software is. All they see is some nerds doing arcane magic with keyboards.
The question is, can we do anything to make things better?
Such a startup weekend would be a wonderful occasion. Why organizers do not draw up a simple legal checklist is beyond me.
Just drafting a paper signed by the whole team at the beginning of the event stating "I am going to put ~30 to 40 hours at my hourly rate of $X and thus my contributions can be bought for $Y", or whatever stock terms float your boat, would set clear expectations. They actually were less naive than most since they had that "handshake deal", but they should have gotten it in writing.
That, and realizing "Applicant tracking system in an original niche" is not a revolutionary idea. They owed that Billy guy absolutely nothing and should probably have kicked him out.
They see SW's (in general) as a way to get free labour, they've just learnt enough nerd-speak to bamboozle them into providing that labour.
I've been in the receiving end of "You know this'll be a commodity soon enough" from a guy who's product still relies on a database from 1992, renormalized of course, and who stores dates in packed 16bit numbers.
My advice is to reply with "Great. Best of luck, but you can't use my IP." Better yet retain operational control at all times - don't give out Heroku credentials, etc.
They usually go quiet when you finally show your cards and it's a straight flush.
What would suck is doing everything to protect yourself, and then need to waste money (if you can even afford it) on a lawyer if the idiot tries to sue you.
1. Nerds should run companies. The core problem is this assumption the CEO needs to be a "biz guy" like this seeming frat boy. I don't know why nerds think this, I think it may be some high school trauma.
But being the CEO is a lot easier for a nerd than it is for a biz guy-- biz guys at best are going to not touch the product development side, and more likely are going to undermine it... while nerds can easily manage a VP of sales, a VP of marketing, etc.
So first solution- don't work for biz guys. Only work for nerds. (and for purposes of this discussion, I consider Tim Cook to be a nerd- his nerd area is global manufacturing, but he's not a "guy who owns a restaurant" and thus has no relevant skills for a tech startup.)
2. Biz guy ideas are not better than nerd ideas. I don't know if SW doesn't allow it, but they should have come up with an idea that they, as engineers, were passionate about and worked on that. I think the results would have been better.
3. Focus on bootstrapping. The way biz guys get in is that they have connection to money or money and they use that money to take over and exploit the nerds (VCs and the bad angels are nothing other than these exact same biz guys--only VCs are incentivized to get you to bet it all on a longshot to be a unicorn because it's better for their portfolio, even though it diminishes the likelihood your company will be a success. )
Now, that doesn't mean they'd make a good CEO, just a better sales person, which is also a critical skill for most startups (although I do like the "growth engineer" movement, which puts some of this power back into the hands of engineers, in marketing if not in sales).
Diving in a bit better: a tech person may well obsess over implementation details (because they understand, or think they understand) them better than whoever is on the dev team. They may rabbithole working on a rewarding intellectual work that has nothing to do with the success of the business.
They may not even know how to deal with a veep of sales or marketing, because they may not have any idea how that world works. I have a friend who is a CEO that, for the longest time, thought marketing was basically lies, and so saw no reason to invest time in it. They've since reconsidered their position as their business intelligence has caught up with their technical intelligence.
As developers, especially ones who haven't really built and scaled a business, we always love to think "Hey, I build the product--how hard could the rest be?"
We're usually wrong.
Sales, marketing, legal, taxes, accounting, organization, etc., are hardly things people automatically know how to do.
It's a sometimes useful generalization, but it can also be a shortcut people use to trick themselves into thinking that they are part of some wise and good group of people (who coincidentally are just like them!) and gives them carte blanche for othering anyone they decide they don't like or don't want to work with.
It's almost impossible not to do this, it's kind of a necessary evil when you're constantly dealing with lots of different types of people and don't have much information about them to make more nuanced judgements. Not a problem as long as people don't start mistaking the mental shortcuts and generalizations we all employ for reality. Most of the time I behave as if pi is 3.14 because that usually works fine, but I never allow myself to start thinking that it actually is 3.14, which is the vibe I get whenever anyone starts talking about how everybody is either an "x person" or a "y person".
This method of founding a tech startup doesn't really work. Either learn to code yourself, or build a trusted long-term relationship with someone who can.
His goal is not to get customers with this code. His goal is to get investors. And, I wouldn't be surprised if he succeeds. He helped the team win Startup Weekend with a seemingly effective presentation, after all. Further, I wouldn't be surprised if his plan now (that it's become clear his developer team wants nothing to do with him) is to raise money with the prototype built at Startup Weekend, and then trash it and start over, so he believes he is free of the obligations he agreed to in order to get the code (that 0.4% stake everyone agreed to). Investors always ask who else you have equity and economic obligations to...and I'll wager he neglects to mention the situation with 8 devs owning a total of 3.2% of his company.
Regardless, dude's a douche hat, and I would hope nobody would fund him. Nobody smart would, since he's not gonna be able to deliver a product worth selling.
And for those that read everything in the literal sense: this is a joke because of the /s.
I've seen some really scary situations that started with throwing things over the wall- like having investors and board ready for the finished product in a few months, while it's just some wannabe CTO and maybe a family member helping holding the pile of shit code with some seriously rich and powerful people expecting that they will be in production soon, for large companies they've already talked with and planned to sell it to.
Steaming piles of shit become rolling tumbleweeds of shit doom become ticking plutonium-enriched time-bombs of every-kind-of-animal feces...
shudders
More like:
GOOD execution is one of the major problems.
This is why engineers should not be afraid to sell, or at least, not be afraid to be out in front. The power in any organization comes from who sells the product.
Good businesses understand that all their functional areas are important, and don't try to preference one over another. You may need to focus on one at first to make progress with it, though I'd argue that when you first get started, that one area should be none of the above (it should be customer development in the Lean Startup sense: talking to people to get a sense of what they need and how they do things).
The big challenge in enterprise software engineering is that your "customer" is the person who forks over money, not the person who uses the software. Pretty much all engineering effort is devoted to pleasing them. Engineering requirements for enterprise software are often insanely complex and sometimes even conflicting, and most of the engineering effort is devoted to satisfying them.
If you look at product/UX debacles like Taleo or Lotus Notes from the perspective of a department head buying them (rather than from the recruiter, job applicant, or ordinary worker who will be using them), a lot of enterprise software makes sense. There's a lot of effort devoted to reporting requirements, to making sure the buyer has visibility on what all of his department is doing and conversely can make that "productivity" visible to his boss, to covering one's ass with regulatory requirements, and not much effort devoted to making things pretty or productive for the end-users. That's because the end-users are not the buyer of the software.
Indeed, a lot of the investment thesis in consumer/smallbiz Internet is this idea that software should replace middle managers entirely, and so the end-users should be the actual buyer of the software who need it to make money, basically replacing management with markets.