The Dark Matter of a Startup

I've never had a positive experience with a co-worker or employee who "just kinda does stuff." I have had the pleasure to work with a number of people who do many things well, and adapt in rapid succession to the kinds of situations startups find themselves in. These are the people you want to be surrounded by when you're really fighting it out early on. Need a coder to wear a sysadmin hat for a few weeks? Done. Need a designer to crunch a spreadsheet? No problem. Need a technical founder to fix an HR problem? Handled.

Over the course of a day or a month or a year, a key person might do all sorts of tasks, with their variance in role inversely proportional to the age of the startup. But what they do in the short term is clearly identifiable. No dark matter to be found.

Hmmmm, i dont actually agree with this very much. In the early days its quite important that you know what everyone is doing. Maybe when things are 1-2 years along there is the position for the guy that does the job that everyone else kinda doesnt want to do (setup vanilla os's on machines so the unix admins can get to the real configuration, do different types of data entry for things that cant be automated basically mechanical tasks) that yes contributes to the success of the company.

But in early days there are 2-3 people and none of them can be dark matter otherwise this person evolves into a vortex or blackhole for your capital/profits.

The dark matter of a startup: mysteriously absorbs money without emitting product.

Well, I can run an IT startup (as I'm doing) only by myself. I do pretty good at everything (coding, HCI, Design, Management/Law, PR/HR, etc).

I think a employee like this can partially hurt an early-age startup (as also sid says).

Give me a fucking break, this is the kind of shit that led to the first dot com bubble.

You either sell or develop in a startup, if you're doing neither or these, you're useless. Pick one and do it.