Solo founder dilemma; CEO or CTO?
nvnt.substack.com
nvnt.substack.com
Getting into YC changed the course of the company, increased many orders of magnitude my ambition and made fundraising much easier. Most importantly, even though I worked in tech in the bay many moons ago, at the time I was very isolated in Paris and thought I understood the startup game but I did not really. Being part of a cohort like YC with like-minded amazing peers, truly felt like I was able to go up to speed on many subjects that would have been out of reach for a solo founder.
If you are a solo technical founder and considering applying to YC, reach out to me, I am more than happy to help.
[1]: https://windmill.dev
But cool otherwise. Is JS the only supported language?
But yeah if you're showing your comparable or same ballpark the criteria is less crucial. Was mainly just adding addtional data. Good luck on the project. A light framework like this for essentially scripts locally without kube or heavy docker is nice.
Good luck with the product, but it took me a while to understand that this has nothing to do with the "original" Windmill (it's waay too similar).
On the other hand, French people/VCs will wonder what can go wrong whereas in the US they look at what can go right. There are enough hurdles to face when trying to build a global tech companies as a solo founder and it can definitely make a difference.
Europe progressed quite a lot and now can be considered a matured one, however compared to US and sophistication of investors, deal-making and deep-tech it is still a young adult compared to the season 50 years old American veteran with scars and experience.
APAC still a teenager in that sense but with a lot of spotlight.
Different cultures, mentality, support system and also chances of making it in the end. I feel like if you have a possibility to be close to the valley, your chances of making it are probably 50% higher than anywhere else in the world and that route actually makes sense.
If you're a startup in Europe you can forget about the scale you can experience in the US and you should dedicate someone in your team to apply to every European grant out there to survive.
The successful European founders I know invested the equivalent of a Silicon Valley round of their own money (or friends / family / great contacts from networking) before seeing VCs
Great to see Windmill advancements
I’m the Solo Founder of https://atomictessellator.com, also applied to YC this batch
(Actively looking for co-founder), wish me luck!
Will absolutely keep this in my personal list of articles for friends and acquaintances looking to start their own firms.
How can someone get the title of a cofounder of an already (at least) 2 years old company which is already set up an running? I understand that traditionally this person then represents in investor meetings, but why does it need to be a _founder_ title of something that was founded long ago?
For me personally, I don't think I'd have grown as graciously as you seem to have articulated that you have. I'd like to ha e retained a strong semblance of direction and control in the company as a co-founder.
for the most part though, I am involved quite a bit in the technical direction we are taking, so i dont feel as if ive been completely pushed out. I've now lived through several leadership shakeups and kind of glad that the stress of knowing the board could axe me at any time is mostly not on me. my historical knowledge of the system and domain alone is enough to guarantee job security and my compensation remains competitive
given that chances like this are extremely rare, I've committed to riding it out to liquidity or the ship sinks, and learning as much as I can until then.
It's determined at the time of incorporation and stock issuance. QSBS, and other legal structures, do not allow transferability of "Founder" to follow-on Investors and employees.
It varies in incorporation requirements by state, but most only require 2 titles positions - a President and a Treasurer (the “Officers”)
Adding or removing a Director, as in “Board of Directors”, requires amendment to the Corporation’s bylaws, which should state how many seats there are.
Aside from those titles/roles, all the “C” prefixed titles are made up. Usually, one C level person is the President, another the treasurer. Co-founders are usually on the board of directors. Many times, a single person can be on the board, a co-founder, and ceo.
between Retool, Budibase, Superblocks, and Tooljet, i'm confused about how to choose. anyone have a good mental map of the low code internal tools landscape?
In the end, they're all pretty good
> A "solo founder" should be too busy with real work to be writing articles like this.
Amazing that they couldn't understand the article's marketing value
He was able to hire someone fast.
You won't be this good/lucky.
In the traditional non-traditional startup you need a salesperson and engineering to be free, because money. I suppose with dev tools you can get rid of the salesperson because you're selling tools to individuals? Which is more risk, but if it works then go for it.
Also the link to HN launch that helped a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408
> with negligible traction
Disagreeing to these two points. The traction from HN & ProductHunt launch was good that ToolJet got 1000+ stars on GitHub in under 8 hours. The intros were made mostly by great open-source founders who were totally strangers at the time who discovered the project mostly from HN.
And most tools kind of suck.
But that market size overall is small, and the number of players is large.
The entire dev tools market is consistently estimated at around 5 billion right now, and only 11-12 billion 5 years from now. The CAGR is about 13-14%.
ML, which appeared out of nowhere, is estimated at ~15-20 billion right now, and 100-200 billion in 5 years. The CAGR is ~40% right now.
(The estimates vary on whether they think CAGR slows down or not, etc, hence the variation 5 years from now).
In one of these markets, you need to be a big fish in a small pond, but you'd have to take out established players to do it.
In the other, you at least might stand a chance of building something new that takes over as the market grows 10x.
In the o
I keep forgetting that most developers throw their stuff over the wall to IT and probably don't have a ci pipeline, do IaC, , and probably don't deploy their own microservices or understand the AWS stack. They probably have a 60% chance they use source control instead of just copying folders and changing the folder name. They don't do logging or security. They scale by buying bigger instances. Docker is their current tech boner instead of puppet.
Although pathetic, it is an opportunity.
In short it's a pretty tough group to market to.
To be clear, I'm not making a value judgment on this. If those people are happy with life, that's great! That's mostly the point IMHO.
There are probably so many good ideas that devs have, but they don’t have enough interest in being a ceo of a big unicorn company, but understand the problem and can get a prototype up with no red tape
I wasn't aware there was any stigma there. Considering that Gates, Dorsey and Zuckerberg were engineers who wrote code and continued to be CEOs of their companies for very long.
If you have a product that is possible to launch in just a couple months, then you might be able to get by as this guy did. If your product is much more complicated and takes several years for a solo developer to build, then you have to pick the CEO or CTO role and go with it.
My own project has been a work in progress for several years now. I can build it, but my sales and marketing talents are quite lacking. It is a new kind of data management system and it can be really tough to raise awareness and get people to try it out.
There are many talented Sales/Marketing people. But few who can effectively target Developers.
The Authors path of bootstrapping via open source is a known tactic/strategy.
Ultimately growth will require directly approaching other Developers with a commercial proposal.
>I can build it, but my sales and marketing talents are quite lacking.
Can relate to this. What worked well in the case of ToolJet is that the product did not require marketing efforts to get the initial traction since the project is open-source.
Like the article, one way is to do it yourself until you grow and can hire someone into the positions you need. Do you have 1 customer ready to go who will fund solo development? Do you have a team who will jump in if you land a seed round, or will you start building solo? This all depends a lot on your funding & runway situation.
There is no time for Worrying about titles -- I was "Jack of All Trades" for 4 years at the company I co-founded before I became CEO!
How did you handle the VC raise or were you entirely bootstrapped?
In the end, they were useless, and I walked away from the company.
Make sure everything is in writing, and if you're a technical co-founder, make sure your co-founder is someone you can respect.
This is quite valuable. Great article Navaneeth, thanks for sharing.
I call myself head of research in my own bootstrapped start-up. :-)
Whatever you cannot find a person for, you do yourself.