I perform best in proof-of-concept development, prototyping. What areas of responsibilities are best and how can I fit in as a team member in a startup?

There is no place for this on any development team I've ever worked with in twenty years of professional software development, be it shrink-wrap software, embedded software, enterprise software, any form of consulting, and especially not in a startup.

At one point when I was working at Excite, Inc during the .com boom in the nineties, my team faced a crisis situation which apparently demanded a week of painstaking and boring work to resolve. We spent an hour in a meeting trying to find an easier way -- mostly because nobody wanted to do the work. Finally the one guy on the team who hadn't graduated from a big name college, the guy who had worked his way up, and frankly in my opinion one of the best guys on the team, threw his notebook down and said in disgust, "None of you guys ever worked at McDonalds, did you? Because if you did, you'd know that sometimes you just have to go flip the burgers." His point was simply this: your training and degree don't entitle you to skim the fun parts of the job and avoid the hard parts. It's called work: creating something useful, something that people use and get value from and even cherish, doing that sometimes requires doing hard, inglorious, but necessary things.

Dare I say it? you may not fit in with a startup. Ultimately if you're in a startup you need to get something out of the door, this requires configuring apache/mysql/linux/whatever. In an environment where you might not find this stuff interesting or even be any good at it right now, if you're the best person for the job you need to knuckle down and do it. You also can't get away with cutting corners because you aren't interested in the effort to do a job properly.

Maybe you could do some proof of concept work and sell the idea to some initial customers. You could then hire people to do the drudgery of actually implementing it whilst you continue looking ahead to the future and working on more proof of concepts. Obviously if you want to do this and avoid some of the work which you could do yourself initially you'll need to hire someone to do that, which requires more money or dilution of your ownership of the company.

I agree with dondo ... unless you're working in an academic or research environment, there's probably not much need for a person who does nothing but POC-type activities. In my shop, while one part of the team is off learning from the customer, the dev-lead/senior devs are trying to figure out how to solve any of the non-standard parts of the app or are working on areas where we need to innovate for that project. Once we get into coding, the people who did that research are leading the team and help get the work done. I wouldn't want that knowledge lost by having some other entity do it ... I want my leads to do it ... it's why they are my leads.

Prototyping and analysis is something different. I'm working to get to a point where I have a person dedicated to prototyping ... someone who has a good feel of organizing apps and workflows, etc. But that person will not be involved in solving any technical issues. So maybe that's a track you can follow ... analysis, prototyping, etc. and drop the POC development. You might find someone to let you do it, but I think it will be tough and very very tough in a start-up env.

I started replying to this post but it ended up as a bit of an essay so I blogged my answer.

I hope this is OK site etiquette wise as it was genuinelly inspired by the OP.

http://blog.loyaltyspace.com/make-room-for-the-ideas-guy

In short, I respectfully disagree with some of the other respondents. I think there's lots of value someone like you can add in the right team and situation.

You need to be willing to suck it up for awhile. Make it a driving force to do your part in growing the business, so you can hire people to take over these duties.

Who goes into a startup thinking, "I like working 80 hours a week on tasks I hate where I'm taking a risk for no pay. My only hope is that this lasts forever." No, we go into these ventures knowing it will be a lot of hard work, but with some sort of eventual reward.

Unless you land a job as a systems analyst at a company with a large development team, you're going to be required to do some of these odious duties.

I know I'm late to the game on this one, but for posterity's sake I'd like to add my $0.02.

First, I do agree with what most people here are saying. Yes, you have to suck it up and do things you don't love. This is work, not happy fun time.

That being said, I've seen that there is often a strong need for smart people who understand problems and can whip up smart POC apps in sales - more specifically "pre-sales" (or "sales engineering"). To get even more specific, this is very true when you are talking about larger enterprise apps or bespoke software where a large solutions/consulting contract is part of the sale.

This job still requires some config and other drudgery, but a large part of it is cobbling together a bunch of off-the-shelf solutions with some glue, hard work, and a little bit of fairy dust to show the prospect that you can meet their needs.

Of course if there is too much fairy dust you'll get in trouble down the line ;)

You are EXACTLY what a software startup needs. Considering that a lot of wasted time and money is due to misunderstood requirements, a specialist such as yourself is invaluable. I will say this though - once the project is up and running you may be out of a job. If I were you, I would consult or work at a requirements company versus getting a full time job with a software startup. I started a big project and stumbled upon onespring.net - I didn't know that people like you existed :) Poke around Elance (or the like) for some jobs and become very good at using some of the popular tools like iRise, Axzure, JustInMind, Balsamiq, FlaiBuilder, etc. Are you currently looking for work? Shoot me a private note if you are.

All the best!