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Comment by charliepark | Hacker News Reader

Developing a web application is a very twisty road. There are a number of assumptions that you'll be making about your market, the problem that market is facing, the solution you think can solve that problem, and the channels you'll be using to market your solution. Is it possible to pay someone to be on staff to execute your changing specs and meet your ever-changing use-cases? Sure. But it's going to cost you a lot of money. It'd be better to have someone who has a vision for solving the market's problem who has the technical chops to execute on the idea and to be flexible when your needs change.

Put another way: Launching the app is really only the very beginning of the process.

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If they have the money to hire a full-time employee, how will it be different than having a tech-co-founder do the job ? (Its cheaper equity wise)

In other words, what can a co-founder do that an employee cant ?

Make executive decisions with full autonomy.

That power can be delegated to an employee.

Only if the employee is very good and sufficiently dedicated to stand up against decisions by the founder(s) which are bad for technical reasons. It's hard enough for us techies to hire people like that; for non-techies it's basically a lottery. And that's if they don't actively select for the wrong traits. It's likely they'll focus on people who talk the talk, do as they're told, or have a business background but have dabbled with some techy stuff, etc.

Not in my experience, an employee (non-cofounder) will never stand up to your dumb ideas like a co-founder will.

It may not be any "different" to have a co-founder vs an employee in day to day operations. It may however be impossible to find someone sufficiently skilled to complete the job and yet dumb enough to not feel they are bringing more value to the business than simply a salary is worth.

They have skin in the game and a strong incentive to do really hard things to make the business succeed.

Many of the innovations that'll ultimately make you stand out from the crowd are very, very difficult to implement. If the difference between implementing that and implementing the same 80/20 solution as everyone else is, say, getting a $150k/year salary instead of a $100K/year salary, they're not going to bother. If the difference is cashing out with $20M vs. ending up with nothing, they will bother.

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