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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

My advice: Ignore all points except the last one. I've seen a lot of startups trying to hire a technical co-founder on their own, even following advice similar to point 1-5, but still ending up with a co-founder that was a bad technical fit ~80% of the time. With the involvement of a technical person in the interview process, usually either referring the candidate or having an additional technical interview with them, that figure drops down to ~20%.

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Honestly, even that's a crapshoot. In fact this article presumes that it should be an interview, when it should really be a conversation.

If a non-technical founder wanted to "interview" me, I'd tell them to shove it. If they wanted to have a conversation about how we could bring our complementary skills together to solve a problem, then I'd certainly be much more interested.

I mostly agree. A co-founder interview should be more of a conversation rather than a traditional "company vs. employee" interview. Nevertheless, if it is already a running project, there is an imbalance of trust and skin in the game, similar to a job interview. So going through a technical screening can be a very easy way for the candidate to close that trust gap.

Also, the popular perception between technical co-founder and early employee-CTO is very blurry (unless you go by virtual vs. real shares). Some people will call a CTO that joined 3 months into the project and holds 10% virtual shares a co-founder and some people won't. Same goes for "technical co-founder" vs. "early CTO" interviews.

I'm assuming this is a technical co-founder in the stricter sense, rather than an early-employee CTO. If the case were the latter, I'd most likely be inheriting a dumpster fire built by an agency or a jilted technical co-founder, neither of which is a good position to be in.

If that's the case, then the onus is on the founder as much as me to prove their worthiness. I've inherited too many dumpster fires in my career to implicitly trust the word of non-technical co-founders.

If you're joining 3 months into what's often a 7+-year mission (where if you're successful you'll be underpaid for a long-time and make your money on stock) and you expect a 90-10 distribution of shares you better be getting something like a salary (co-founder in name only). These kind of distributions are part of why yCombinator discourages unequal co-founder distributions. You're asking for the company to implode over co-founder issues if you think your 3 months at the start is worth a 90-10 distribution in shares especially when as a non-technical founder hiring a technical co-founder the technical co-founder generally has bigger opportunity costs financially.

As a technical person, if I wanted to hire a technical co-founder, I'd probably:

- get started on my own without them

- if I was lucky enough to find someone I actually wanted to partner with, I'd make sure we'd be able & willing to own code both of us had written

- not get too attached to my pre-founder code (probably a good idea in general)

- offer them a nominal hourly rate for a week or two just to validate skills & compatibility while they decide for themselves if they really wanna do a startup with me

- when they fully committed, offer them the same comp package I offered myself, including number of shares

- hope it all works out!

You said yourself that you're a "technical person", so probably not the target audience of this article.

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