There's a full generation of talented women software engineers who do not have computer science degrees.
I just happen to be one of them, and I worked my way into the top 1% of software engineers (by salary) in Silicon Valley. I've spent a lot of time wondering: how did this happen? How many more people out there just like me, and how do I invest in them NOW?
Here's a podcast that does a great job of explaining how PC advertising in the 80s/90s and onwards resulted in the current abysmal number of women CS graduates (in the US / English-speaking countries especially).
"There's a full generation of talented women software engineers who do not have computer science degrees."
Yes?
"I just happen to be one of them, and I worked my way into the top 1% of software engineers (by salary) in Silicon Valley. I've spent a lot of time wondering: how did this happen? How many more people out there just like me, and how do I invest in them NOW?"
My wife is an IT consultant (frontend), the most recent customer actively asked for women developers so both of the women in the company got the job directly without any interviews (they had other gigs at the time).
The IT consultant company is making bank, she is not (happened to me too so I switched industry).
So maybe start an IT consultant company? Seems to be quite the market for it.
Hey, I appreciate that you're trying to be helpful - but a service business doesn't produce the return on time investment I want. It's kind of like recommending I buy franchises near an airport. i.e. super time intensive, but can be very rewarding in the right conditions!
I used to run a WordPress services business before SquareSpace/Wix commoditized the space.
If your wife decides to start an IT consulting company, tell her to shoot me an email.
In a year or two, I'll probably be able to build a production micro-service by dictating to an LLM. That'll be the execution tool of choice for a Founder doesn't have much coding exp, but has 10-15+ years of line of business experience.
I say all this as someone who thought they'd be a CTO and has depended on software to put food on the table for 15 years.
I wouldn't call it rolling the dice though. Starting a business
is a calculated way to continue compounding my wealth all while doing something that I love and that I believe will be important in my lifetime.
I'm curious though about the business plan going forward though (after the beta). My assumption would be that PrintNanny is currently targeting hobbyists and smaller 3d printing services.
I say smaller, because I assume that companies like Shapeways either already have something similar or would build their own if you tried to charge enough. (E.g., for $XM/yr they could hire multiple engineers to work on it full time).
Is the angle to expand laterally into more manual monitoring opportunities? (ShopNanny?) Go deeper? Is this market bigger than people think?
My target market is SMB manufacturers in the US and Germany. My ideal SaaS customer has 10-15 employees and 5M in annual revenue, around 50% coming from a mix of services and government contracts.
The United States is ramping up domestic manufacturing, since the pandemic revealed weakness in "just in time" supply chains.
Automation/AI-assisted production is the only way to make the unit economics work though. Picture Zapier, but laser-focused on automating service/production tasks.
The second line of business I want to add in 2023 is a white-labeled PrintNanny appliance, with a SaaS sub. A few 3D printer manufacturers have reached out to me and are interested in white-labeling PrintNanny for their large format printers, which retail for 5-10k/unit. This will give me access to trusted/mature distribution networks while I'm building the business's credibility.
I've talked to 3D printer manufacturers who've tried to build their own stuff in house, since the margins of software (90%+) are VERY attractive to a hardware biz with margins around 30%. The tl;dr is:
1) 3D printer manufacturers are only willing to invest in in-house software for their hardware, but most manufacturing shops use like 10-20 different pieces of hardware from 5+ vendors. No one wants to spend money supporting their competitor's hardware.
2) Shapeways (consumer and pro-sumer on-demand printing) is not where the money is.
Compare to 2D printing: the overhead of print-on-demand t-shirts is not an attractive investment. Shapeways is the Rush Order Tees Dot Com of 3D printing.
The REAL money in 3D printing comes from companies who are manufacturing drone parts for the US gov, misc plastics for OEM and after-market automotive industry, satellites, commercial plumbing, Ag Tech. Ask someone who works at John Deere their ballpark budget for domestic manufactured parts.
The next 10 years of plastics and metal additive manufacturing on US soil are going to be important, and the stuff sci fi nerds like me used to dream electric dreams about
Good to know! The diversity on the shop floor is an excellent point.
I'm curious if you perceive white-labeling as a stepping stone or a reasonable destination. That is, it seems like you'd prefer for customers to buy directly from you, once you're ready for it. Precisely because of the diversity of vendors problem: you don't want them to think of the PrintNanny appliance/service as being from FormLabs or Inkbit or anybody else, you want them to know "We have our printers and then we have our PrintNanny". Right?
YC is NOT representative of CS, or most faang employees even. It’s extremely stressful, high stakes and high risk. I wouldn’t do it, and most people I know in tech wouldn’t either.
Out of extremely high stakes games, my understanding is this has always been male dominated. So you’d have to first take the prerequisite ratio (for instance if CS degree, it’d be ~19% women, in the US) and then multiply by some risk taking factor, perhaps by comparing to other ventures in domains with 50-50 to get some form of baseline.
I mean hell, we don’t even know the ratio of applicants.
Given that YC companies in general have a tech (as in software/computing technology) focus, and given the large number of technical founders, it is not unreasonable to assume that there will be a correlation with CS graduates.
It seems quite reductive to make some polarising statements based on seeing male faces in a founders directory.