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Comment by waprin | Hacker News Reader

By that logic, you can hire a freelance dev to do all the programming too. There are some pretty good people out there who aren't that expensive. But there's a bunch of risks with that approach and they are similar to the ones where you outsource design - you will constantly have to re-hire if you need pivots, there might be major friction switching people, and the costs can start to add up. It's not 100% analogous, freelance design is a bit cheaper, it's easier to spot bad designers etc, but I think the analogy somewhat holds.

Consider that the #1 market cap YC company of all time - AirBnB - was started by 2 founders with a background in design.

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> By that logic, you can hire a freelance dev to do all the programming too.

The market for developer talent and designer talent are visibly different. Different in terms of supply, compensation (as a factor of supply), and risk (due to the compensation!). Risk here is you mostly take the word of the developer they're competent. We come up with elaborate interview processes for this (if you have an idea for a better process... ). For a designer, a portfolio clearly demonstrates they're competent. This makes outsourcing and freelancing more viable, increasing supply, and driving down the overall costs, in my opinion.

I won't touch on actual skill / investment in becoming a good designer vs. developer except to say I think there's differences there too, at least outside of the tail.

I would circle back to my second point, that even if you have an excellent designer, someone still needs to implement it and not make it janky. I think it explains, as a whole, why people gravitate towards engineering co-founders if they don't have the skillset.

> Consider that the #1 market cap YC company of all time - AirBnB - was started by 2 founders with a background in design.

I don't think Airbnb won on design or would consider design its moat. Designers can also be excellent leaders and executives.

Fair points, but a note on AirBnB with the caveat that I only know the public information and never worked there. To me, their only moat is their brand and the network effects they built with that brand. The famous stories are them fundraising by selling Obama themed cheerios, and going to apartments helping hosts take better pictures. Neither of those things are the “cranking out iPhone mocks” you’d expect from a freelance designer but seem like stories fundamentally linked to their design backgrounds and ability to tell stories in the visual world. Strong design probably matters more for something like Snapchat than Coinbase so I’m sure it depends. You’re probably right in your explanation for why Eng skills are more in demand but I still suspect you’re understating the impact of a great designer.

In my opinion empathy for users (doubly important in a multi sided marketplace e.g. hosts and guests) helped Airbnb succeed. They no doubt removed friction, and prioritized that internally, and that helped them become an aggregator for their new market but unclear if it was due to being designers that provided this insight.

I think for an early stage startup you need to make tradeoffs. What skills can we get with our founding team's overlap, and what skills can we easily fill? Of course, the person matters so much more than these checkboxes, and I don't think anyone would suggest not working with a designer, but I think it does explain why so many are looking for technical founders.

But I was complaining about the exact opposite- I have a hard time finding potential design cofounders as an engineer, and every hackathon and similar events seems to be filled with engineers , but short on designers even though designers win pitches more than engineers (you can fake implementation for a demo but can’t fake design).

The fact that it’s harder to find designers than engineers for founders despite the opposite dynamic in the job market is what I was saying was surprising.

The platform does not have many designers looking for technical founders. As I said, it’s filled with MBAs. When pressed what skills they would contribute, they say things like “backend finance.” Usually either they have no money but need you to build a complex project before you can think about raising money (raising the question why not just build it and pitch VCs yourself), or they already raised money but want to give you some absurdly low percentage (you’re not really cofounder).

Are there people in there that would be able to raise money /sell the product if you built it? Maybe but others have discussed why that’s the hardest of all skills to vet for.

Either way if the platform was filled with strong designers interested in partnering with technical cofounders I’d be much happier and speak more highly of it.

Why don’t those people just outsource development if they’re so brilliant and business minded?

> By that logic, you can hire a freelance dev to do all the programming too.

And there's plenty of successful companies that do this btw.

> But there's a bunch of risks with that approach and they are similar to the ones where you outsource design - you will constantly have to re-hire if you need pivots, there might be major friction switching people, and the costs can start to add up.

This is simply not true. This can happen regardless of wether you outsource your dev team or not.

> Consider that the #1 market cap YC company of all time - AirBnB - was started by 2 founders with a background in design.

One of the top 50 largest companies in the world was started by an engineer who dropped out of school. What's your point? Correlation != causation.

Outsourcing is such a dirty word here and I don't get it. It's objectively not a bad option, it just has different risks.

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