Please let me know all the creative ways that you might know of for finding this kind of people, I know it could be very difficult but not impossible.
This is not to say that if you should happen to be lucky enough to find such a person that you should not hire them, but actively looking is not wise. Division of labor is a very powerful tool and should not be discarded lightly. You're much more likely to succeed if you get investors to invest and hackers to hack and not try to fram these two disparate skills into one brain.
IMHO, YMMV, etc.
ideas are cheap... and more likely than not they change overtime...
But the "experienced" entrepreneur in me say this is totally right.
FOUNDERS are founders and are with the idea from the start to the end. Founders may be entrepreneurs, hackers, painters, lawyers, etc... But once the company has started, the idea is theirs. Any further development on it from outsiders is only of value to them once there is a semi immediate upside.
No One I have meet is willing to invest in someone else's Idea, until they know the money is there.
I ALSO recommend that you do not pay other people full time until you are paying your own rent with the business. Paid employees work 9-5 for a paycheck, not to save your business. I was burned on this before.
AND consultants work only the hours you pay them, unless you can get them to agree to a project fee, at which point the project may never get done.
Dead on.
I heard this observation from a designer who had been asked to take on a contract for stock. From his point of view it was the same as being paid cash, then turning around and investing all that money in that company. And, base on what (little) he knew, there was no clear reason to think it would be a sound investment; it was pretty much a crap shoot.
Put another way, if you simply had that cash lying around, would you invest it in that start-up?
I started a casual think tank, Fireseedgroup.net to help focus the community on tech related projects. When barcamps started up, well the Fireseedgroup was there to throw one in Milwaukee. I helped get other communities going. Now we have a lot of interesting things going on.
MilwaukeeDevHouse is next weekend, it starts on friday, and its a code party. We have also thought about throwing hackerweekends, and startupweekends. We have a great place to use, bucketworks.org for these events in exchange for helping others with their technology needs.
Through the Fireseedgroup name I am always trying to raise money for incubator projects like yCombinator, we would call ours (startupMilwaukee, or M7combinator); and other systems of change. One platform i like is called prize economics. In this system we would use prize money awarded to a themed challenge, like darpa, and the xprize foundation have done.
An example is when Milwaukee was trying to get muni-wifi setup, i proposed an option to award a prize for the best ubiquitous web application. I felt that if the prize was $250k or more that hackers would flock to MKE to compete. Have been able to talk to a number of people in MKE about my ideas and have meet with the visitors bureau, the mayor and other law makers. In many cases they get excited but it doesn't go much further. I however get on their call list for ideas and technology. I puts me in an expert position, not from success, but from effort, and powerful people always need someone they can turn to, kinda, like you are looking now. Those network connections are well worth the effort to me to support the community.
I have been able to build bridges to our community to companies like MS, Adobe, Google, Yahoo, and nVidia that were not there before. That is powerful stuff.
I went back to school, picked up some books and started learning how to hack. 5 years later, I'm almost done with my degree, there's still a market for startups and I realize how incredibly large the knowledge chasm is between hackers and non-hackers.
I have 3 ideas a day that would make decent, viable startups. Putting those ideas into practice, coding them up, designing the layout, configuring the servers and databases and finally acquiring users... that's where the value is. The idea has little value on its own. I never would have known this had I not started to learn the hacker-fu.
So, may I respectfully suggest that if you're looking for hackers to help you start a software business, and are not one yourself... Take some time, read some programming books, and get in touch with your inner geek. If you are looking for a Hacker to found your business, first look inside yourself to see if there is a hacker waiting to come out.
If you can't do that, then at least offer them some cash to work for you.
It took a lot of effort, time and lawyer fees to get at least something back from the guy. His startup failed (of course).
Remember that an idea is worth nothing. A funded idea is worth something, but it doesn't sound like you have funding since you're asking someone to work for free.
Most of the non-hacker founders that I heard of were personal friends of the hackers involved. It's hard to convince a hacker to take a chance on you otherwise.
"Great opportunity to work for free!" is not a good value proposition.
I think you need to demonstrate what you bring to the table other than an idea. When you do that you will gain the respect of the hacker and you might be able to get a deal going. It might even be something like, when you raise some cash I'll come join you.
What are you going to do for the first 6 months, to raise the value of the business? What have you done since you thought of the idea?
Convince him that the work will be challenging and interesting.
The generous stock options need to be a very significant percentage of the company think more along the lines of cofounder than early employee.
http://programmermeetdesigner.com/
In a way it depends on how discrete you wish to be about your idea.
Thinking outside of the box. One kinda interesting place to find up-and-coming young hackers is to check gaming coding sites. New gaming mods and game scripting communities are often a doorway into for-profit hacking. Quality may be hard to control for, but most of the potential candidates there don't yet know they have marketable skills.
For example:
* Eventscripts/Python scripters: http://forums.mattie.info/cs/forums/viewforum.php?f=90)
* C/Pawn developers: http://sourcemod.net
There's also major development conferences like PyCon (next week in Chicago):
Set up a Google Blog Alert (or other blog search alert service) for the technologies you think make a good hacker. For example "python", "lisp" or "arc".
As you get new personal blog alerts on those topics, you probably could get a decent sampling of hackers talking about technology. Approaching them individually on their blogs might be something that could work out for you.
Linux User Groups ( http://www.linux.org/groups/ , http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Software/Operati... ), Perl User Groups ( http://www.pm.org/ ), 2600 Meetings ( http://www.2600.org/meetings/ ), DorkBot ( http://www.dorkbot.org/ ) and amateur radio meetings.
After the company is incorporated and has significant fund. Then the options plus salary will make sense. But for founding member, it is just not right to give them options.
You're more likely to find someone to do it if they are still in school and don't need the money yet.