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Comment by jonbarker | Hacker News Reader

He came to speak at MIT while I was there, and I remember two things that stuck out. He's a really unassuming guy and smiled at everyone he met in the hallways(have to kind of enjoy when the market rewards humble people), and he also fielded the question "where do I find a technical cofounder" to which he had a great one word answer "codecademy".

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Fantastic answer. In other words: learn to code yourself, first. At least, you will be able to pick a tech co-founder better.

Why is that a great answer?

I think he’s saying that you should teach yourself technical skills instead of looking for a technical co founder

Well he was already coding in high-school, 20 years ago... Not much codeacademy then. But I can see the point he was trying to make, it just doesn't apply to him, like at all.

Which reminds me of another wealthy character with a JD degree telling people not to go to college. There might be some truth there for a very tiny 0.1% of the senior cohort, but again it doesn't apply to that individual.

But what he's recommending is basically his path: go learn it. The fact that he learned it before codeacademy existed isn't a reason to dismiss his recommendation of something concrete that someone could do.

It's infinitely more practical than saying, "Go back to high school age and start programming then".

If anything he is probably wishing there were a codecademy back then, as that probably would have accelerated even his path up the learning curve. I'm his age and back then we had to connect to the wall or go to the library and get a book with coffee stains on it. Also back then surprisingly few people believed studying CS was worth the investment.

There were places to learn how to code, but by reading books, docs, and sample code, and not watching videos.

A bigger problem is what you said in the second part. When I had a short chat with Drew when he was looking for a co-founder in 2007, he said almost all MIT students were joining investment banks, grad school in business/law, big companies, etc.

Because teaching yourself coding and attempting to do it yourself should be done or at least attempted before hand . A bunch of nontechnical cofounders think that coding is scary or they can’t learn it . You will burn a bunch of time attempting to cofounder date than actually get the job done.

There are exceptions such as already getting funding or having background knowledge or an inspiring vision .

The number of exceptions is mathematically very close to 0%

Because there is a surprising number of well-funded startups founded by people who can't/won't build anything themselves. While this seems OK on the face of it (maybe they are good at other things like business plans or marketing), in practice what it means is that they end up burning large sums of money unnecessarily on hiring and cloud hosting because they start with a massive technical debt. Also, since they aren't building anything themselves, the odds that they are solving their own problem (a problem you know exists) goes down. The alternative for someone who finds that they can't build anything is to learn how to build something. While this seems like it will take longer than just hiring people and telling them what to do, in fact it is a good investment of time because it eliminates all the headaches I described above.

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