What To Look For In A Business Co-Founder
jasonlbaptiste.com
jasonlbaptiste.com
Too often, the guys who you run into at meetups and valley social events are what are best characterized as "useless douchebags"; they have no marketable skills or experience, but plenty of ideas that they'd like you to work on (typically for free). But real, valuable, "business" people have hard-won skills. Real business people are accountants, lawyers, salespeople with experience and contacts -- people who have something with more value than the ability to talk a lot and go to parties.
Thus, I don't think it's interesting to debate the question of the business co-founder, because it's not a useful categorization. If you're starting a business, you're a business co-founder, by definition. You might focus on code, but you're going to have to worry about a lot more than that if you want to succeed. It doesn't matter what you call the person sitting next to you, as long as they're contributing. And if they're not contributing, you're in trouble even if they're a hacker.
It's no wonder these people are scarce.
Maybe I've been surrounding myself with too much tech startup news lately, but It seems to me that because of low barrier to entry in this sector and the flood of weekend projects mashed up together under the influence of 10 red bulls, this community is more obsessed with quantifying every action/inaction of the journey than focusing on the actual journey and the end goal.
My advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is to stop reading about should and would be lists and just go out there and get it done. You don't need a biz dev guy, or know what PR even stands for. Your number one priority is the obsession of getting-things-done.
If you come up with a brilliant new BBQ grille design that sits on top of the camping fire pit, great, find a local fabricator and get a prototype. Pay for the CAD design and send it over to China for overnight production of a dozen samples. No NDA's. NO Investors. No biz devs or marketing guys. By weeks end if you don't have a solid demo of your grille in hand to walk into wal-mart for the sales pitch you booked a month before, you have already lost the battle. Go find a job.
I take issue with reading entrepreneurship advice from a list because it's meaningless to everyone else but the person who wrote it. The more lists we as a group come up with, the worst shape we are as entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship is not for everyone and everyone is not made from the same fabric. So why are we trying to breakdown this pursuit into something everyone could comprehend, because they can't and won't, and only those who really do should not even have the time to read lists after lists of pre-packaged advice, because that means they're not getting-things-done.
My apologies again if this seems like a direct response to the OP, because it's not.
My biz dev friend comes from a traditional background. He is great at what he does. But he will be the first one to acknowledge that his world is very limited by rules.
A week ago I asked him to find us the best telemarketer in town and to have him working for us by next Monday(today). I told him to set up 2-3 interviews in the next 5 days. His response? "That is impossible..".
What part of that is impossible, I asked. So I broke it down for him: there are 2-3 incredible guys in this town of 60,000 people who we could hire for this job.
This is exactly what I told him: "you are THREE fucking phone numbers away from meeting the right guy".
That's it. There is nothing more to it, really.
Then I asked him to call up all his buds from his last job(in telemarketing) and find out who that top guy is. If they don't know, get at least another ph. number off their friend and ask them. Keep doing that until you find the number of one of the top guys.
All this took place Sunday evening. He got in touch with the #1 performer at our campus phonathon through a friend and we had lunch Monday afternoon. Less than 24 hours from the time we hatched the plan, we found our guy.
Now I am not a sales guy or a business guy. But programming makes you see BS. A business guy, by default, is full of self-sabotaging BS and limiting beliefs. Ones that are go-getters and refuse to accept the default rules can really add value to your team.
Aside from these, I can't emphasize enough how important it is for the business guy to have some technical knowledge/ability, at least enough to be able to make reasonable demands of developers and determine project scope, expense, etc. If they've at least managed a technical team before, they'll know better than to ask you to build the next Google in a week on shared hosting.
I was doing consulting recently for a B2C Web 2.0 tech startup where both cofounders were great at fundraising, talking to customers, etc but were completely nontechnical. Even making a small change to their site, like adding analytics code or uploading a new landing page involved an email to their outsourced dev team in India and 24 hours of waiting. Needless to say, the job was a nightmare.
Honestly, making / maintaining / designing web sites is fairly easy, especially if you have something in place and are looking only for incremental change. While I don't expect everyone to be able to write beautiful CSS in their sleep, if you have a web startup you should be able to know what's going on there. I can handle all kinds of front-end / design problems, just never cared to develop the technical chops for serious back-end wizardry. Looks like I am having to try to pick up more of that these days.
I'm fluent in the languages that developers speak and can serve as a liaison to the rest of the universe; I think that I have a way to be really helpful and at the same time help shape product visions. Plus I know enough code to make trouble for myself.
If / when I have something I want to pursue, I am trying to make sure I won't be beholden to all of these finicky technical types who seem to enjoy so much scowling at the idea of anyone business-focused. I don't see things as so black and white, and while I understand that some will say it is easy enough for a hacker-type to learn the ropes of what other business things they might need to do, that doesn't mean that having someone less technical is all doom and gloom! At least, it hasn't been from my experience so far.
Hopefully I'll have a chance to prove this perspective soon :)
I've been led to believe that personality, drive and determination are far more accurate metrics of measuring whether you should work with someone or not. Is that wrong?
I speak from (painful, expensive) experience.
I would personally say that you are thinking about the problem the right way, but you do need the filtering step as well. Trust isn't (even nearly) enough if someone isn't smart or can't get stuff done.
He made most of the tech design decisions at Apple and NeXT including ObjC, Rhapsody, Carbon, Cocoa, Mach, etc. When OS X was in early beta I exchanged emails with Jobs about some FreeBSD libs and he definitely is a tech guy first as he knew the ins and outs of everything.
My suggestion would be to just find another tech person who can talk to a room of people and has some level of confidence. It is far more important to have two tech hands than one guy fine tuning powerpoint presentations and other other busting himself coding. You will pick up all that biz stuff easily anyway, especially with all the other entrepreneurs out there to help you.
He is known for obsessing about his public persona, meticulously preparing his speeches to appear off-the-cuff (to the point that it has become an inverted joke), and 'posing' in every way imaginable (when he needed to).
I give that a maybe (at best). I've seen many companies that had two tech people going at it that forgot the business in favor of the technology. They eventually had an amazing technology that nobody cared about. That, IMO, is the biggest risk of not having a dedicated biz guy.
> My suggestion would be to just find another tech person who can talk to a room of people and has some level of confidence.
I like the idea of finding somebody who was a tech person (in fact, I think it's a requirement for a tech startup), but their focus in the startup should be 100% business. Now, of course, every startup member is giving 150%, so that leaves time left over to help on the tech stuff. ;)
Depending on your startup, I think you need somebody with at least some experience in the sales and/or marketing. Engineers often trivialize these jobs, but they are not easy and can't be picked up in an afternoon with "Sales for Dummies."
I'm a former tech guy who moved into product management and then into my current role as the biz founder. I spend most of my time talking to potential customers, potential partners, doing research to make sure we have a competitive differentiator, and, on the side, building the website (we are a B2C product) and testing.
Woz + Homebrew Computer Club + Apple I + 1976 made Jobs.
Without Woz, I think there's a good chance Jobs would have ended up as another micro-managing charlatan at Microsoft.
edit: Don't get me wrong. I love Jobs. I've read every book that's ever come out on him (I think).
He cheated Steve Wozniak out of the first money they ever made together, for the game Breakout. And not by a little -- by some reports, it was a factor of ten.
Sure, if you meet the next Steve Jobs he might very well turn out to be a success. But you might be one of the people he runs over on his way to the top.
Would I approach it as if I wanted to eventually code, but stop once I view my understanding as adequate for it's purposes? Or is there a different approach specific to my having little interest in actually coding myself?
I think a big issue is understanding the software development process. I would check out "Inspired" by Marty Cagan and a lighter (more anecdotal) read in "Dreaming in Code".
I wasn't sure if there was a way to learn the foundations and jargon for what technical cofounders do, without actually beginning to physically code. It seems that the main intention is to be able to communicate on a higher level with a programmer than describing in layman's terms what I want.
I'll be interested in what others' experiences entailed. But for us, I think we deemed it simply necessary for you to have a good idea of the technical side of things. You don't need to code and interest in learning to code isn't needed. But when I talk about topics regarding code, you should at least have an idea of what I'm referring to; you are, after all, aspiring to work in a technical project.
So when I refer to something like vim or memory control, you should have at least a vague idea of what I'm referring to. Brush up on that. Read a lot on technology.
A good person that came up in the discussion as an example was Steve Jobs. In many ways, he wouldn't be seen as the technical partner (at least when compared to Woz), but he does seem to know and understand the overall idea behind some of the hardware he mentions, which is vital.
However this is extremely time intensive, and can defocus you from your primary skills and abilities which would be most beneficial to the company anyway.
The second best way is to project manage some software projects. This will give you several sobering doses of reality, and will provide you with very useful reference experiences and skills in relation to software.
So, put together a spec for something you need done. Write it down in plenty of detail.
Then try to find someone to do it for you for a fixed price.
(Advanced Level : Find someone to do it for you at an hourly rate.)
Ask them to keep you up to date on their progress, and to keep you abreast of the challenges and problems they face.
Offer yourself as a sounding board to talk out problems, and challenges. The more you listen to people talk about software, the more you'll start to get an intuitive understanding of whats going on, and how developers approach development.
After a few hours, the first thing you'll notice, is the need to make everything as simple, and distilled as possible.
That whizbang spec you put together that will revolutionize life on planet Earth? As you have written it, it will take 40,000 man years and will require a budget of the GDP of a European nation.
Get used to cutting things down into bite sized chunks, and cutting those chunks into bite sized chunks.
After about 5 or 6 software projects, you will have a decent understanding of the complexities and difficulties in software development.
Ideally, most of those projects will be complete failures.
Then you will have an advanced understanding of the complexities and difficulties in software development.
After completing these tasks, you will never again utter the phrase : "But it's just a simple requirement. Just do it, it should only take an hour or two."
You should also be filled with respect and admiration for people who can turn ideas and solutions into workable and clean software.
You are now ready to not make your technical co-founder go completely insane.
Good luck !
Some possibly helpful resources which you may have already seen:
http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-S...
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ (right sidebar has a ton of articles)
http://www.amazon.com/Facts-Fallacies-Software-Engineering-R...
http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-S...
Joel Spolsky mentions that every manager at Microsoft has to read it (I could be wrong on that, but a lot do read it apparently).
(Note: I differentiate "knowing how to code" from being a coder. One means I made it through Python for Dummies; the other means I have a history of making software and understand the issues around it. That is far more than useful.)
The biz cofounder needs to understand the technology as it applies to their business. Simple example: my startup relates to email. I have to understand SMTP, IMAP, and POP pretty well. I don't have to know how to build a mail agent.
You need to understand your particular technology backwards and forwards. When you are out talking to people, you are going to get asked technical questions. You need to understand all the pieces of the system and how they work together.
In a big company, marketing, product management, and even sales engineering may get away with just using marketecture documents. You can't do that. You need to understand the full architecture.
A biz cofounder don't necessarily need to know how to code. Picking up a book and learning how to code won't help significantly. The value of a coding background for a biz person is understanding the development process, which kinds of things are easy to change (and which aren't), and (perhaps) acting as a sounding-board for the tech founder.
Since you aren't going to pick those up without a few years experience, just learning to code gives less value. Learning the meta information about coding (project management, agile development (and what that means to both developers and product owners)), mythical man-months, etc, are more valuable.
(All of this is, of course, my own opinion and worth every cent you paid for it, though I'm not sure it's worth every cent pg paid to host it...)
Some examples are: income, fixed and variable costs, margins, taxes, cash flow projections and all that other money related stuff.
I suppose this might be negligible for every startup that gets more funding than they could possibly spend in the foreseeable future. Rather this is essential for every bootstrapped startup.
Btw, I am the Business Co-Founder and I just went through the list. I gave myself 7 out of 12 points. (The fact that I have an MBA helped me only with the 4th point)
If the points in the list are equally weighted, the conclusion for me would be; I suck. But at least this list gives me an indication for where I have to improve.
At last I want to mention, I found it to be a great post and want to thank you very much for your free advice, it is highly appreciated.