Ask HN: I am currently the only developer in a startup. What to expect?
I am the lead developer for my startup with two other non-technical co-founders. What problems can I expect to arise ?
Just remember: the real bonuses will go to the managers, not you, they will get rid of you as soon as they will need to find someone to blame for their decisions.
And of course the non-technical managers will know that "everything is easy, you will do the new dropbox over the weekend, right" (however that's so easy that they cannot do it themselves).
Yes. I'm going to venture to say that if you sense this at all or you can already feel like you know that your co-workers / superiors aren't very tech savvy and you suspect they hired you to be a one-stop-shop to fix everything computer and technology related for them (that they don't know about themselves) than you need to, in painful detail, outline their expectations of you, your capabilities, what you can and can't do, what you think should be done, and also give ideas and plans for how to tackle the toughest things they expect as well as how you'll go about outsourcing things you don't know how to do / don't want to do / can't do from 3rd parties who absolutely can deliver those things.
Get ahead of the nightmare before it eats you alive.
EDIT: Since so many other people are echoing my sentiments I'll also add that if you feel like your superiors think along the lines of, "Good developers are a dime a dozen and you can be easily replaced.", than you need to start job hunting. I've met a few people who did IT or sales in server space / colocation, etc. and helped them on a few side projects / start-up ideas and I'll never forget how much money they wound up losing after trying to low ball me for work I did when they dropped that line on me, flat out, in the middle of me working on their websites, network, general IT stuff, and other apps / generic projects. They tried to renegotiate my payment amount and payment schedule in the middle of the contract after already signing it. Big mistake.
It felt so good to hold all the cards and power when they tried to flex that "I'm your boss and I can make or break your career / life right now." attitude. They thought they could easily replace a developer / technical person like changing shoes but they didn't realize that a lot of developers won't put up with this shit from the get go. Lots of people won't even give it a chance, they aren't willing to work with superiors who are learning how to treat technical folks. Be careful out there and don't allow your superiors to dictate your mood or happiness. It's not worth your time, effort, or the money because if you find yourself in that situation you can almost bet your aren't getting paid enough. You'll probably be doing the work of 2-3 or more professionals for people bringing in the money you should be making while doing next to no actual work that helps the company profit.
Another thing. If you do wind up leaving a company and you know they aren't paying you enough you can nearly bet that after you go and they try to fill your spot they'll attempt to fill it by paying someone LESS than they paid you. I've heard nightmare stories from recruiters / headhunters I've worked with who were tasked with trying to fill my shoes with companies who seriously thought I was wrong when I told them they were asking too much of me / paying me too little for the "bare minimum" they thought I was doing (multiple people's jobs as I said). People are crazy out there.
Having been in OP's exact position, he/she will probably be, at the very least, threatened with termination in a highly unprofessional manner if this is asked. I'm talking under-the-breath threats to passive-aggressive actions designed to make OP's life a living hell. Non-tech founders are the worst and will do everything to make you feel in debt to them since they provided you with a job (aka an "amazing opportunity to disrupt XYZ field").
Without some understanding in that realm it's going to be choppy seas.
1) continuously (daily) interview potential customers BEFORE the MVP is ready (and document their findings) so that you as a team have clear understanding what customers actually need
2) ensure enough financing that the product and team can be build
3) help you in recruiting more developers
Understanding customers
I once did a startup in a similar setup (2 non-technical founders, me as a single technical founder) and the biggest mistake was 2 non-technical founders were waiting for MVP to be ready before they really started to approach customers. I tried to push them to do more customer interviews, but they looked it purely from sales perspective and thought we didn't yet have anything to sell. We effectively build the wrong thing that nobody wanted and they started to lose interest when they realized that the MVP doesn't sell on it's own without significant iteration.
Hiring
Also, although building MVP quickly is an important step so that you can start to collect better customer feedback in a search for product-market fit, remember that building a team is as critical. Even if you don't have money to hire engineers at this point, you need to start to build hiring pipeline early. It is very hard as a single developer to effectively take care of both bug fixing, devops and new feature development when you start to get customers.
Give up equity to raise money to hire and scale.
Otherwise, raise money preselling the product to scale the company, but this likely chains you to customers that you may find later would be better with their own consultants.
And if this means you're not getting paid, 20% (or 50%) of 0 and $12k opportunity cost is $144k/year investment
Less obviously you'll be making the technical decisions, and then having to work out where responsibility for these and "product" decisions lie.
It's not clear where the cash is coming from; are you all paying in? Did that decide the split? Who's getting paid and who's putting in "sweat equity"? You're also a founder, right?
Given your position you should entrench your status ASAP as "CTO" or similar title before you start hiring. You should decide how you feel about people getting hired "above" you (good or bad) and plan accordingly.
There will be at least one stand-up shouting argument early on. This is normal, but needs to be handled maturely - done successfully it will improve the business. Being the "remote" partner puts you at a disadvantage here.
Also, take the doomsayers in this thread with a grain of salt. Some developers have bad experiences in their career and start thinking that all non-technical folks are just soul-sucking vampires, while often in reality they themselves are the source of the problems.
I would say that your main function is to effectively communicate with the co-founders and be the bridge between technology and business goals. Make sure they're aware of pros and cons of every development related decision. Get used to saying no and pushing back on some of their ideas. Your main goal is building a successful business, writing clean code and using cool tech comes in secondary.
My fav resource (only discovered it recently here on HN) is this document https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZJZbv4J6FZ8Dnb0JuMhJxTnw...
it has helped me a great deal to assess a new situation and figure out whether the non-tech founders and decision makers in the firm are actually on the ball doing their part.
Understanding their role (what is their strategy in finding product market fit) is crucial in evaluating "your bosses" performance and ultimately if whether the team and product can make it post MVP.
Just focusing on MVP is a fallacy IMVHO because it lets them isolate you (the engineer) into sticking to your niche within the org. The problems then start once you have the MVP and bosses then realizes they have missed all the steps (because they didn't know and unlike you are still learning the hard way how to do things) and you as a team are actually nowhere. It always ends in tears unless all of you are already at eye-level.
good luck!
Tears is best case scenario. OP should be reviewing his/her paperwork with an attorney at this point. I fully expect the employment documents to have errors or vagueness conveniently located in places that would benefit the business.
Instead your focus should be to take some time regularly and make some changes to keep your code from becoming a chaotic vengeful mess of a spaghetti bomb. The best analogy I have is something akin to gardening: it's through constant care and weeding out of bad vegetation that you have a great garden. You can't leave your code unattended and must always tend to it...
As a single tech person you also have a lot of power.
It might not be like that, but it will sure as hell feel like it. When they both take an early Friday to have a meeting in the bar/home/park, and you're stuck burning hours, and the weekend, trying to make those quick changes needed before next release. They both agreed they were necessary, but they don't accept that needs a full db redesign.
You have everything in writing, and your respective percentage and share vesting sorted already? No? Leave now.
If you have 50% and they 25% each, signed off, and you thrive on stress, keep on truckin'
This is a position I was in for my own company and I will never put myself in a position like that again.
I spent countless nights and 20 hour days writing code, rewriting code, deleting everything, starting over, integrating every fucking thing on the planet, removing those integrations, etc.
The non technical founders won’t have any sense of what it takes to do the random bs things they come up with while “at a lunch,” and will expect you to whip it up quick, oh and it’ll have to take precedence over that thing they asked you to whip up quick just yesterday.
When you finally decide you’ve had enough and things aren’t going anywhere and you leave for a super high paying job, they’ll turn around with claims that you never did anything and you really fucked them.
I know this might come off as harsh, but being the only technical person is a huge mistake. Try to get at least one more in there and REALLY push to set expectations. Be very transparent in exactly what it’ll take to do something. If you need to create a feature, let them know “sure I can do it. It’s not easy though. There are database migrations to write, the feature will need to be tied into our existing codebase. It’s currently X, but needs to be Y for this to work with it. Problems A, B, and C will probably arise and I’ll have to 1, 2, 3, ...200.”
Even then they’ll just be daydreaming about their next “important meeting” where they’re really just getting drunk at another lunch with someone and discussed the product in a few hushed tones before “shooting the shit.”
You are the backbone and the heart of this company. Don’t be afraid to speak up, and understand if you leave, they’re fucked. Don’t let them make you believe otherwise.
I’m not saying they would, but I’m wondering how possible it is. Could they vote to redistribute equity, or massively dilute OPs equity and then distribute more equity to themselves for example?
As such, unless I’m confident that I trust everyone involved, I would value equity quite low (and I’ve certainly been screwed out of equity in the past...)
Would I do this again? YES. I enjoyed having the freedom to make technical decisions from the database to the amount of tests I wrote (the app still has some 80% of its code covered, the rest is just the admin area I never cared writing tests for). We also got the product out early to customers. Make sure the decisions and implementations you do are there for the next five years. Don't attempt something stupidly new but stick to solid tech with a good ecosystem that you can rely on without having to keep track of it all the time. Mind you, I mentally wrote off the little equity I had (the hourly rate was great) since it just didn't grow exponentially, I rather see the company around another eight years without me.
What I'd do differently is to set myself a target, say three years. If by then the company didn't grow as we wanted it, I'd go and try with another startup.
1. Equity. I like to think that the percentage of equity you get in relation to the amount of work you will be asked to do. 20% to do all the product (and/or service) development seems way too low for me.
2. In one of the startups I founded, we could not convince the non-tech CEO founder to release the MVP to early customers - even after extensive customer interviews, because the non-tech was not comfortable that it was an MVP. No desire to find the golden product/market fit and no desire to release anything less than a full blown, polished product (which we could immediately start charging for). And no funds for development either (just equity) - so entirely too much development needed to be done before any return (and no customer feedback).
3. And then I was in a startup that had a non-tech founder who was very weak at sales and very bad at raising money. But really good at asking for AI, VR, voice recognition, and (add buzz word here) in an MVP - entirely created and supported by a sole developer.
I would suggest staying away from any of the above.
Good Luck.
Such people exist, I've worked with them, and that was all good. In the beginning it did sometimes take lengthy discussion why some features couldn't 'just' be implemnted but for the rest the main problem I had was getting into a 'me alone on an island and I'm the king' state leading to less self-critique and being stuck with old tools while better stuff is available. But nothing that cannot be fixed by keeping an open mind and reading around on the internet on the tech used.
Obviously if your co-founders don't quite fall in this category, yeah, running might still be the better option.
Based on other comments, it looks like OP got 20% (even unclear if it's documented), while the other 2 share the remaining 80%. This is a strong clue that these guys have no respect for the technical guy/gal. They will see him/her as a code monkey that can be replaced asap by a bunch of guys in India or in Eastern Europe.
Ah, didn't get that. That indeed is not the best sign..
> for my startup
It's not YOUR startup. Your startup would mean 100% of ownership.
(from another answer)
> 20% for me for now because I work remotely.
Do you have any documentation for this 20% stake ownership? If not, you can be replaced in an instant.
Are these two founders in the same country? Yes, well expect to have decisions made without your input.
There is also the challenge of the other founders appreciating your input into the company. You are doing everything. They won't appreciate this and they won't see the amount of work either.
Non-technical founders know squat and they don't care either about how much time it takes to do things.
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I've gone through this myself. I was a "founder" in 1 startup with a non-technical founder and before that I was a "small" equity holder in another company, which was founded by 3 non-technicals.
In both circumstances I was just an employee doing my job. No upside at all. I didn't come away with anything but experience in the respective industry.
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If you are going to stay, then I suggest to learn how to implement the tech for this startup and in turn, can provide you with a springboard for your own startup and if this is the case. Ensure you are getting paid!
Jumping from this, even if OP is getting paid he/she should make sure they're not doing anything sketchy with their pay/tax documents. I've had to go to the IRS (US tax agency) because a former employer filed me on their business taxes as a contractor when I worked in the office as an employee. Some of my colleagues who also worked at startups in the past told me about pay discrepancies when times got tough for the business.
That being said I would do two things differently. 1. Be hyper about testing. If you are the only dev working on a project test,test and test more. Write good unit tests. Have your fellow co-founders test and sign off on a feature before going to prod. If you are working hard it's easy to miss the obvious. Test it all.
2. Find good ways to communicate where you are and what you are doing. Some features take longer than others. It drives non-technical people crazy (Why did this feature take an hour and this one a week?) but that is the hard fact of software dev. Use a Jira board or an email, whatever will let your co-founders know what features are where. It really saves on the annoying status update requests in person or over email that disrupt your day. Good Luck :)
Example from my career - I joined a startup as a senior-level architect. There were only a few tech folks at the time and my background was databases, so I ended up doing a lot of the database work. It was something I was good at, but I considered it part of a past from which I was moving on.
Eventually I was typecast as an operational DBA - a tactical role rather than the strategic one I envisioned. When management decided to adjust my salary accordingly, I had to leave.
Lesson: Communicate to management all the technical roles that are required in your startup. Let them know which ones align with your own career path. Remind them that they eventually need to get others to fill the other roles. You will have to repeat this often, just not often enough to be a pain about it.
Everyone else commenting has brought up valid points. This is a high-risk high-stress low-reward situation for you.
Get out while you can. The first version of the app you built can serve as a great showcase in your portfolio.
The problem with startup advice is that a lot of it just doesn't apply. People make assumptions and generalizations that apply to one business space or team dynamic, and then project it onto your space and team dynamic.
Because of this, it's very hard to anticipate problems.
In my experience, I was 50-50 with someone non-technical. My biggest mistake was not walking away soon enough. The warning sign was that my co-founder let his imagination run away whenever we tried to plan anything. We could have fixed all the other "mistakes" we made otherwise. The problem was that most of our planning turned into me trying to guide my co-founder back to reality. (Edit: It took me over a year to realize that my co-founder was constantly letting his imagination run away. In hindsight, if I realized this sooner, I would have set up the arrangement very differently.)
IMO, it's all about everyone's attitude and product / service choice. As long as you're in a space that you're capable of working in, and everyone has the right attitude, you can learn the rest. (My co-founder, after we separated, had a lot more success once he stopped letting his imagination run away.)
What I can say is this: Are the people you're working with reasonable people? Reasonable doesn't mean mature, as unreasonable people are good at appearing mature. Reasonable means that, if they have an idea, they don't keep pushing when you say no.
Because "they" outnumber you, another thing to look for is if one team member is a mediator. They might try to mediate in situations when they should take a side. (IE, trying to mediate when someone wants to make a green line with a blue marker.) That's what I mean by confusing maturity with being reasonable.
My only advice: if you don't get at least 40% of equity, run away. Two "idea guys" giving barely 20% to the technical code monkey and enjoying controlling share while they can deal with "the real stuff" is a huge red flag. If they are willing to treat you as a real equal (and even more, as the guy who will actually do most of the work for at least a few months) then it's worth giving it a shot if you believe in the idea.
Other things include contractor or W2, the nature of your work environment, who's tools you're using to do the work, who decides salary and the method of payment, company culture, etc. In startups like this, you have a much higher risk of being scammed somehow (late paychecks, being given a 1099 when you are legally entitled to a W2, having your pay docked if your boss isn't satisfied with your work, etc) when the business starts losing any amount of money.
Bottom line is that you should treat this as a 3-6 month W2 gig and jump ship during that time.
Also, this has been said all over HN but it needs repeating, equity is essentially Monopoly money. Forget the equity and focus on finding a new job. Remember that these people shoving all this work on you are also the ones who control your ability to get paid (and, by proxy, house and feed yourself), and have the ability to "forget" to file your paycheck when times get tough.
- If there's no unequal investment in the startup (like for example someone putting in a lot of money or more time compared to others) ownership should be split equally amongst the founders. Working remotely is a nonsense argument for getting less equity, not giving everyone the same will most likely end up in conflicts later on.
- Make sure you have your equity on paper and come up with a vesting scheme so no co-founder can walk out with 33% after a couple of months while the others have to carry on for years. (for example unlock 4% every month of work so that you only earned the complete amount after putting in at least 2 years)
- Becoming profitable and/or receiving investments can take a while, does every team member have the runway to work on this long enough to not need any income from it?
- You can't just leave like with a regular job since the future of the startup depends on what you do, keep this in mind. If you are not 100% sure you want to spend the next couple of years on this tell the co-founders beforehand that you will build the MVP and decide once that's done if you want to continue or not. A vesting scheme will make sure you at least get something out of it.
- If you complete the MVP and don't want to continue you can consider selling the MVP to your co-founders at a predefined rate in exchange for your shares. If you do this for a good price and terms and they have the funds for it this might be best for all parties since you are no longer connected to each others as shareholders, they don't have to involve you in new decisions and you don't have to free up time in the future for a company you are no longer involved in otherwise.
- You might want to wait with formalizing the shareholder deeds until a investment comes into play (this all depends on where to company is located and what the laws are of course). Do get stuff signed on paper beforehand though!
- Don't undervalue yourself, in the end YOU are building it, idea's alone are worth nothing.
- Startups are rough, prepare for a lot of fights, failure and lost free time and decide for yourself if you think this startup is worth spending a couple of years of your life on. Keep in mind that most startups fail, my personal experience is that this usually has to do with the dedication of the team doing it.
Good luck!
My thought:
Get out.
This rings alarm bells to me.
Long story short, I worked 6 months, they sat around being neurosurgeons all day. They found a buddy to invest seed round at a poor valuation, basically sold the company.
My mistakes were: working on it too long without an agreement, not asking for enough when we did get an agreement, poor negotiation when seed was being done, and not knowing their motives for doing a company. They wanted a check box for their resume, not to run a business (despite what they told.me and themselves)
Bail. They haven't raised enough money or presold enough product.
This deal sounds like more they found someone to work to them for free. Being remote shouldn't matter.
What exactly does that mean? Do you expect your stake to go up or down in the future? Do you have it in writing that has been reviewed by your own lawyer? Because the reality may be 0%-50%-50% and you just don’t realise yet.
I have trouble following the logic there. If your remote status means you're significantly less valuable / productive than someone local (to the other founders), they should replace you with a local hire.
But if you're a right person for the job, then I can't think of any principled reason for you to accept less than 1/3, protected ownership of the company.
That being said, because this is a business relationship, IMO you're best served by viewing this dispassionately as a negotiation. It's hard to justify a particular level of ownership for you as being "fair", similarly to how it's hard to justify a particular price for a commodity as being "fair". So you might consider the following goal instead: try to maximize your equity + salary, within the constraints of (a) dealing honestly, and (b) keeping it a win-win-win proposition for you and the other two owners.
And, as others have said, prior to renegotiating, give some serious thought to the ways your 20% can become 0%. Even if your still in the honeymoon period with the other founders, there's a decent chance they, or other investors, will try to strip that away from you in the future. It sucks, but it's one of the painful lessons of startup life. Monetary stress or greed can turn many persons into unbelievable jerks.
Can we just.. Could you just.. Surely it's just..
Source: I got diagnosed with major depression after leaving a job almost exactly like OP's. Doing better now, though.
It happens frighteningly often especially outside of tech hubs. A lot of small to medium businesses still treat tech workers like Revenge of the Nerds outside of the city limits of SV, Seattle, New York, etc.