I (firmware/software) and a group of fellow mechanical (1x) electrical (1x) engineers often wax about starting a company. None of us are interested in managing anything non engineering-related. Where do you usually find the manager types for your startup? You know, the ones who can talk to investors, do the government paperwork, and other boring stuff.
I'd start by saying, don't discount the challenges involved in running a business. Yes it is talking to investors, paperwork, etc. But it is also lining up your vision, architecture, tech choices with available cashflow, recruiting efforts, etc.
In many ways it's actually totally different from coding (obviously).
But in many ways it isn't. I often use the same skills that I learned in technology to run a business. Am I always successful? Absolutely not.
But the same ideas of reusable, composable code (which becomes reusable composable processes for sales, recruiting, etc), making performance optimizations (not getting millisecond gains, but shaving multiple hours off an employee's workday) making some technology choices because it makes the makeup of our team stronger, are all similar skills that have made it a fun challenge that exercises the same creative parts of my brain that coding often has.
I still love coding and miss it as I do less of it. But running a business has its own challenges that will tickle those same neurons. And solving larger scale problems for customers will give you a lot of that same satisfaction, especially if you've coded for many years and are looking for more novel approaches to problems.
But especially nowadays, depending on what kind of company you want to run, you can still minimize the work needed in the business end, and maximize the tech work. But that's entirely up to you and what kind of company you want to run, and how much you want it to grow.
All that to say, you CAN do this yourselves. But it all depends on what you want and how you want to spend your time.
The hard part I find is not making myself a bottleneck on either the business or tech side because of me working on the other. It’s definitely a balance.
Often, time spent coding is often time spent not running/growing the company (in my role).
I feel like I don’t equally care about most people so managing them would be so hard.
So I’ve stayed away from management.
It is NOT easy managing people. But the flip side is that you also feel even stronger and more empowered with a good team. You can take on larger problems because they won't just fall on your shoulders.
Or is it spent catching up on personal/professional issues?
What most people overlook: doing a lot of the grunt work yourself gives you insight into where you can take advantage of the system, get a better deal for yourself, do away with some "must have" entirely, etc (i.e., people with "skin in the game" are likely to make more advantageous decisions than a hire).
"Do I really need to delegate this" is just as important a question as "what can I delegate?"
Some examples -
Lack of knowledge means you have no idea how hard something is, or where it’s ‘hard but necessary’ or ‘hard because you’re doing it wrong’. It means you won’t know how to evaluate if someone is doing a good job or not, is competent or not, or being honest or not.
It’s particularly challenging if you hire a ‘business guy’ (or sales people!) because they are almost all very adept at getting away with things, making people like them, looking good, and convincing people they should be paid more than they really need to be.
Which is great if you are benefiting from it, know how to manage someone like that, and aren’t getting taken advantage of.
If you don’t know how that type of world or person works however, and how to maintain boundaries and expectations appropriately? yikes.
Tasks that are good to delegate are those that are reasonably self-contained, are big enough to justify the overhead involved, and are easy to evaluate the results of.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_myt...
How will your customer use your product to solve their problem?
What hypotheses do you have? How are you going to test those hypotheses? What is the link from "solving this problem is important to me" to "solving this problem saves me money"? Structured thinking is helpful here!
Managing people is similarly not easy and the negative effects of a bad leader are going to be visible after a long period of time: you mistreat your employees and they all leave after a year.
That said, I agree some people will be able to get good results by themselves and yes, them being invested in the company will make for better decisions.
It's generally great to have a co-founder manager / business.
Not only can you do a "good enough" version of things yourself but once you NEED to hire someone, you will hire better if you already know the basics of the job.
Honestly if none of you has any interest in it, I would step back and ask what is it about starting a company that is appealing to you all? If the main appeal is working on whatever you want, this is a bad direction. I feel more constrained with what I work on now then I ever did before. Finding a position at a big company, is in my opinion the best way to go if what you want is to work on preferred projects. Obviously you would still have a boss, but you can find positions where the boss and the company are behind you, such as skunk works projects. Working for a company of your own, your hands are very tied to building what your clients need, or what makes the most business sense. Most of the time this is not what I want to work on.
If what appeals to you is being your own boss, that is not reporting to a person, then this is a decent path. However being part of a team will negate much of that.
I guess my best advice, would be to find someone like me (an engineer who is somewhat interested in or otherwise doesn't mind the business aspects) and make them a part of your team.
If you think that's the "boring stuff", then you're not going to love the amount of iteration/thrash/constraints that it will introduce to your engineering life.
Running a business is more than the technical problems. It is people. And logistics. And taxes. And payroll. And ... And ...
My suggestion? One of you will have to do it, it really isn't that hard. Then when you have a product, a market fit, think about finding someone. But until then, put in the effort.
There are exceptions where a technologist builds an amazing technology and happens to accrete enough people around it to "do the boring stuff", but it is way more common that they'll build something awesome and nobody will ever know because they don't market and sell it effectively.
If you want it to be your business, you need to find the customers and investors (you can probably hire someone for the paperwork, but not as easily as you'd think I've found).
What makes it a business is lining up the money / customers. Otherwise it's a research or engineering project. If you're not part of that work, you're working at someone else's company, which there is nothing wrong with, but it's a different thing, and comes with less ability to influence direction of the company.
Atonse's comment is excellent. You can get excellent CFO and government finance help via contractors.
But in the end you will want to at the least understand it: what marketing, fundraising, sales, and financial commitments you make in your company are your responsibility.
Some mistakes I've made attempting to go it alone:
- Let a client go too long without paying me resulting in them stiffing me for a 14K loss.
- Took on too much work without hiring help resulting in burnout.
- Over-estimated jobs and under-charged them, resulting in my pipeline running out sooner than I expected and leaving me hungry (see #2)
I've often wished for some kind of "software Jerry MacGuire" who can front-end my work, sell me to clients, deal with the contract shuffle/payment and get me what I'm worth.
Of course, YMMV and this is also very product dependent. Some products sell themselves. Most don't however.
If it's pure operational stuff you're looking to offload, you need a COO.
What I hear you saying is that you just want to do engineering, which isn't starting a business. You can find that in many places and I'd recommend just sticking with these roles.
Source: founder and complete owner of my own business that has been profitable every month since day one and now has 250 full-time employees.
The job of a startup CEO is a 100% full-time hustling. Use observation and negotiation skills to strike deals that will benefit them (the CEO) in the long run. If the CEO is one of the founders (or hired by investors with proper skills in setting incentives and making contracts), the benefit of the CEO will be aligned with the benefit for the company. If a bunch of engineers lacking these skills hire a CEO excelling at them, the CEO's first priority will be to replace the founding engineers with someone replaceable and loyal as soon as the chance of a payoff appears on the horizon. It sucks for the company long-term, but it happens left and right, because that's the job of a CEO - take advantage of suckers that cannot negotiate and hustle. And there are numerous shenanigans in their arsenal to pull that off (stock dilution, creative voting rights/board structure, etc).
The best advice I can give you as an engineer - you can rewire your engineering brain to do all those things. Just like you study examples for a framework before starting to use it, research what similar companies do, how do they find customers, how do they handle pitches, etc., and try to replicate it. Just as you may conclude "I need a better PC to build this library" you will likely think "I need better presentation skills to give that speech", so go ahead and practice them! Join your local Toastmasters, try to launch a blog and get some consistent followers, set goals and accomplish them. Once you get the hang of it, you'll see it's no different from having to refactor your code to avoid drowning in exponentially rising complexity. Just another skill to acquire and use.
Based on how you've described things in this post (and in the comments) it doesn't sound like you have experience working at an early stage startup as an employee. I would recommend doing that first because it will let you get experience about what you need to do (and more importantly, what you need to avoid) when starting a company. If you find a good founder, you can observe how they operate and absorb lessons through osmosis. You will also likely get a chance to work with great business development and operations folks, who you can then build your next startup with afterwards.
If you don't want to do that (it's a lot of work and will probably take you 1+ years to do), then your remaining options aren't great. You can try to hire someone to do this work, but you won't find anyone good unless they end up owning most of the company as well as the idea, in which case you're really just working on someone else's idea and someone else's company -- which brings you back to what I just described earlier! Another alternative to that is just that you do all of the work yourself and learn very quickly about what the hard parts and easy parts are about starting a company. But I wouldn't recommend that unless you just want to do it for fun and aren't really serious about being successful.
If you're serious about being successful, I think you need to focus on building the right experience and networks to give you a fighting chance at success.
Source: early/founding engineer at 3 startups that either hit $1B+ or got acquired; currently running my own company which I started and successfully raised a significant amount of capital for.
I'll add that many people ITT are focusing on your "boring stuff" comment. I'm a founder, and honestly, the "business stuff" is not my favourite thing to do either; particularly sales. However, it also happens to be the most important work I do. Your comment indicates that it's not something you and your co-founders believe is valuable work. I hope that's not the case, but if it is you may struggle to engage a partner with this skillset.
Long story short, though, we didn't take any investment, government paperwork is best done by lawyers, and once we got relatively big we hired a CEO.
Overall, the takeaway for me is that (assuming some amount of good luck), no one aspect of running a business is particularly difficult; it's just that there are a lot of things, and it takes a ton of energy.
What is the problem you are solving?
How painful is it?
How much are people willing to pay to get rid of the pain?
If you have a solution that you can deliver at a lower cost than what people are willing to pay, then you have a business. Hire a sales/marketing hustler! to get the message out there that you are solving that problem.
If your situation is none of the above, then you don't have a business. You have a wonderful technical solution in search of a problem.
In my case it's an API as a service, and I've mostly bootstrapped the company. So I've been able to automate most things and keep the business type of work to a minimum.
There indeed is a bit of a learning curve, but I recommend learning the basics, even if you find a manager type to work with. My mentor would tell me that the business itself is a machine of sorts. So once you have a product providing value, "engineering the business" was an interesting way to look at it.
With that said, if you really want a business side partner, there are a number of ways to find one. First, let your network know that you're looking for one. Word will get around and someone may know someone.
Second, there are always startup networking events, and I've found that they are usually filled with business types looking for a technical cofounder.
Lastly, I've heard of a few firms now that are geared towards people like yourself that are technical and interested in starting a business for the first time. I recently met with some people at https://www.fractalsoftware.com, whose model is basically a business as a service. I haven't worked with them, so I can't comment yet, but I understand they can hook you up with a business idea, partners, funding, customers, and general advising.
I'm open to chat further and share my experience for anyone that's interested.
1. Go founder-dating:
- In your network (best place): You'll need to keep your team tight. Resist adding people specialized at a specific responsibility and aim for people who can take on *all* of the complementary skills. By the way, at 3 people you're already pretty big cofounding team imho, but up to you.
- At incubators: San Francisco is fantastic because there are lots of places like https://www.southparkcommons.com/
Background for my advice (so you can judge if it meets your standards of experience): I'm in charge of eng at a trading startup; I have 10+ close friends who founded companies currently valued between $20 m and $7 b, so I've seen their journeys; I live with 2 of them right now.
From your background, it sounds like you're in hardware (where I really know very little), but if for some reason you're thinking of a SaaS business or marketplace, then I can intro you to some guys who do seed funding in the ad tech, e-commerce, crypto space if you're in SF.
As others, I would nudge you towards testing the waters yourself first. Then hire people who complement you well. Then consider where you want to go from there.
It's risky to employ someone to do a piece of work you can't do yourself. How would you know what's good? It's way easier after having had a shot at it yourself, and then sharing the workload with others. It's also easier to recruit a good executive when you have already shown that someone wants your product.
> who can talk to investors, do the government paperwork, and other boring stuff
That sounds more like a secretary than a manager to me.
Why is your product valuable? To whom? I assume you're solving hard problems. Pitching the problem you solve to investors without understanding the problem is going to be hard.
So while it's a good idea to learn the basics, I think at some point you'll need to hire staff to take care of these areas. Depending on the severity of the position and necessary skills these people might ask for shares.
I'm confused what the point of starting a business to not do business is. Maybe you have a beautiful idea that doesn't currently have a market, in which case you might want a business co-founder, but you'll still want and need to have opinions about fund-raising and success....
It's pretty difficult to qualify and recruit a non technical co founder who is any good. The same goes for technical co founders. So you are someones solution, and they are yours.
If you are willing to learn to run a business start doing contract or freelance work.
Regarding managing the actual business, just look at department directors in other companies and be ready to pay some good money.
There is no plug-and-play solution or protocol for you to engineer into the organization.
You have to talk, wine and dine, and be part of professional groups with the same people to then try to pull them into it.
Summits (as a concept but not all implementations) in my experience has a higher signal rate, as the attendees are all participants too, and pretty much requires being entrenched in a somewhat tight knit professional group already.
That’s where we’re at right now. You really don’t want a clueless bizdev manager person. This group of people have no qualifications and making up unrelated metrics of validation is their job. “So and so was a lawyer, so I trust their attempt at this obscure engineering problem” is the kind of logic this group will try to sale you on, and theyre going to trainwreck you to their clients the same way.
Finding a good one for you doesnt come from apps. It comes from human relationships.
you'll need some type of COO who will fill in other positions to find clients keep you all busy.
what types of projects have you done before? dealing with clients & getting paid while accurately estimating the time required to complete a task is an art.
this is a recipe for pain
either do the business yourself or find a way to value the work the business will do