Harvard Business Publishing

This blog chronicles the trials and tribulations of three longtime friends who are trying to start an Internet music company called Jamseed. All three have day jobs, all have failed in the past with new ventures, and all hope that this company will bring them entrepreneurial redemption.

"When," I asked the dean of computer science at my alma mater, who had offered to build the beta Jamseed site and Facebook app with two of his students, "were you going to tell me they've never programmed?"

"They're my two brightest students," he said, "I thought it would be better to have them rather than students who been through programming courses but weren't as smart."

Fair enough.

When I was a kid in upstate NY, I had seen a posting at the local library. "Wanted: programmer to build accounting system." This was 1979 and I had recent obtained a Radio Shack Color Computer, complete with 8K memory expansion, cassette tape adapter, and the first half of a the "Color Computer BASIC Programming Language." (The second half wouldn't be published for six months, leaving me to guess at the function of commands starting with letters R through Z.)

I called the man up.

"What accounting experience do you have?"

None.

"Do you know what a debit and credit is?"

I'm sure I can figure it out.

"What programming experience do you have?"

I had completed several highly interactive Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion programs.

"How old are you?"

Twelve.

He hung up.

My mother said, "What were you thinking? You can't just do things like that." She was, I tried to explain, a defeatist, and that I was more than smart enough to write an accounting program. I mean, it was just adding and subtracting, right?

Looking back from the age of 40, I can better understand my mother's perspective. When trying to fill job openings at World Wide Wicket (my corporate day job), we only consider precisely square pegs for square jobs. The idea of simply hiring someone because they are blindingly brilliant seems not just wrong but career suicidal.

But for Jamseed, where our budget consists of my savings account, and where I am trying to unlearn some of the rigidity of World Wide, maybe the time has come to consider letting the smart student (and, by extension, the 12-year-old with chutzpah) have a go at proving themselves.

Tomorrow, I'll meet with the students for the first time in person. We'll see then if they've gone and learned at least a little something about PHP and MySQL--I told them they should buy a book, which they promised to do--and if, maybe, youth and intelligence can do as well as age and experience.

What do you think? Have you ever given someone smart a chance? Do you think experience cannot be compromised on? Have you gotten burned by either choice?