It's not the money itself that matters, it's the social proof. Since I personally have no brand, and nobody knows who I am, they won't take a chance on me. Even with lots of money, nobody is going to join a startup or give you the time of day. Admittedly you can do some marketing to change this, but that's not my area of expertise and not something I'm good at (I'm a technical person and a good natural leader).
It doesn't really matter that I've done well on my own, or that I've been privileged enough to work at a few successful companies. You need either a lot of Twitter followers or a big name VC backing you before anyone will take you seriously.
> Since I personally have no brand, and nobody knows who I am, they won't take a chance on me.
Who is "they" in this case? Customers? Investors? Recruiting candidates?
In any case, I don't think this is true.
Customers don't buy a product because of who created it (in the vast majority of cases). They buy because it provides them value. Build something valuable and you'll get customers.
Once you have customers via creating something valuable, you have revenue, growth, etc. With this you can win over investors, recruiting candidates, heck even other potential customers.
Social proof might help a little, but probably not as much as you think.
Marketing is probably the most important skill for a founder to have. You have to market to raise money. You have to market to hire employees. You have to market to get customers. It's especially hard at the beginning when you have to get the first of all of those things.
If you want to start a company, you should get good at it.
I think that's using a very broad definition of marketing.
Convincing founders to give you money, finding employees and convincing them to join you, marketing or selling to customers are very important skills. But they are fairly diverse and I don't think there is a lot of overlap in the skill sets.
Even just something like "market to customers" can require very different skills depending on your budget, target customer, market segment and could involve such diverse skills branding, networking, inside sales, outside sales.
I think you're right they're very important but I think devs tend to way overestimate the overlap and underestimate how deep and diverse the knowledge bases are.
I don't know if it's helpful or not for you to hear this, but as another serial startup person, I strongly second what he's saying. And marketing is a learnable skill, not a personality trait. It can even be engineered! It's also how you acquire social capital, and a "brand".
Another way to think about it is: by writing comments like the one you wrote above, about the unfairness of it all, you're already marketing. You're just doing it badly.
I don't want to sound like I'm picking on you, because this is an incredibly prevalent handicap among smart tech people.
I appreciate you taking the time to try and be helpful. Perhaps I'm just not cut out for being a startup entrepreneur when there are easier ways for me to make a living.
It doesn't really matter that I've done well on my own, or that I've been privileged enough to work at a few successful companies. You need either a lot of Twitter followers or a big name VC backing you before anyone will take you seriously.