You won't find a technical co-founder
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1. The founder sees themselves as the ideas person but doesn’t have the situational awareness to recognize that their ideas aren’t that unique.
2. The founder doesn’t understand that the value in a startup isn’t the idea but the ability to execute and build on that idea. For every very successful startup in X space there were 10x more with the same general idea but that failed to execute. The founder wants someone to built it for them but wants credit/equity for having the idea. In 99% of cases the value is created by the builders (technical cofounder) which instantly creates awkwardness of the founder wanting far more equity, credit, and control than their contributions warrant
For the above reasons I’d avoid 99% of asks for a technical co-founder like the plague.
More importantly, most businesses don't need an "ideas person". They need someone who knows how to run a business. You need a total of one decent idea to start and run a business. You need tens of thousands of little hard choices, emails, and sales calls to keep the business successful, and that means getting your hands dirty. Ideas are not valuable.
CEO = Sales and funding, maybe product owner very early days but quickly handing off to experienced product folks as soon as too painful to continue with rest of workload.
(n=1 from my experience at a hyper growth startup)
Founders also underestimate the degree to which good technologists who’ve worked at several startups also understand the business.
I’ve watched friends who are CTOs get in to the same conflicts over and over with founders and product owners.
The founders and product owners throw out 10 different ideas and push small dev teams to execute on all of them. There’s no focus or strategy, it’s just throwing ideas against the wall.
Expensive-to-maintain ideas with no uptake are held on too for way too long.
Expensive-to-create but sexy ideas are prioritised over cheap-to-create ideas with obvious potential for customer retention or up-sell.
CTOs are often the ones taking about disciplined experimentation to find product/market fit against head-in-the-clouds founders with a vague, uncommunicated vision.
I repeatedly see founders ignoring solid advice until, if they’re lucky, experienced boards say the same things as the ignored CTO.
So often founders seem to think they’re a fictionalised version Steve Jobs, not understanding that Apple’s success was as much down to gritty, detailed engineering as a single visionary. And of course not understanding that they themselves are usually not visionary geniuses.
These impressions are from a small sample of maybe 10 CTOs, but some of them had the same experience at consecutive startups before learning how to screen companies better.
We need more founders who care about the unglamorous nuts and bolts. Or at least value the people who do.
Would you say this is true even if you are not interested in scaling fast and are okay with a slower "organic" growth?
(For context I have a few ideas I'd like to make a startup out of eventually, and I'm okay bootstrapping to a low/mid-volume high-niche area. I don't intend for the startup to really have massive profits, as long as I can keep it net profit and carve out a name in the niche I'll be happy.)
Unless your startup is intended to be more of a boutique consultancy and not some kind of SaaS.
If you're shopping for a high performance $10,000 oscilloscope or 3000 high endurance SD cards a month for the next 12 months, or a point-of-sales system for your small business?
Then the suppliers will have a sales person who'll visit you, demonstrate the oscilloscope's features, offer to loan it to you for a month or two so you can try it out, chase up answers to technical questions ('Can I install antivirus software on this oscilloscope?'), and suchlike.
If you're selling into an industry where that's the norm, you're probably going to need someone who knows how to do it :)
Those are the unsung details that you notice when they're gone but are easy to take for granted.
For me at least that is some of the secret sauce of Apple...
Smartphones weren't a new idea, but Apple got to work and made them better.
On that note, I was really curious as to see what Apple would do with cars, but I don't think there was enough they could do that was different or better enough compared to the huge amount of competition all trying to do the same thing. Tesla was the closest we'll get to an Apple car (car company ran like a software company), and they couldn't even do mechanical engineering properly (car body, welding, etc).
Steve Jobs never tried to make me pay $8,000 extra for a feature that doesn’t exist yet but is just around the corner and will be totally amazing. Elon Musk convinced me to hand over that money, and five years later the feature still does nothing.
Jobs fundamentally wasn’t a liar. When I bought Mac OS X 10.0, it was rough and slow, but it did what was advertised and I was excited to remain an Apple customer to see this platform evolve. Musk sold me a steaming pile of vaporware, making me feel stupid rather than excited, and I don’t want to remain a Tesla customer.
Even the original iPhone touch keyboard was terrible compared to the hardware keyboards on BlackBerry devices. But consumers were willing to tolerate the keyboard because the iPhone was so much better in other ways.
Even after capacitance won, the iPhone keyboard was still snappier. I think they do some smoothing of the touch contact to infer from the glancing of the contact what you might have meant. Eg where did you keydown vs keyup.
If you've ever used one of those in-app banking "security" keyboards you might notice what a keyboard with no smoothing feels like.
It wasn't until SwiftKey that Apple even had to worry about competition
Or the Palm Pilot, which had a special 'graffiti' alphabet for handwriting recognition.
I didn’t want an iPhone, so I looked at the other stuff in stock at the cell phone stores.
I couldn’t figure out how to use the web browser on any of the display models. I ended up switching back to a nokia candybar phone until android came out.
In hindsight, one of the native linux nokia phones would have been nice, but they ran a similar OS as openmoko, and I was frustrated with that software stack’s lack of focus on being a daily driver.
Pick something that already makes money and do it slightly better. Idea not needed (other than "do it slightly better" which IMO is much more in the "how to run a business" camp than the "ideas person" camp). Forgive the ideological soapbox/tangent but this is really what capitalism is all about. You find a way to do something slightly better, faster cheaper - maybe all three - and you can have a successful business.
The problem is just that a sufficiently mature product has been battle tested already, so it’s difficult at the beginning.
Another angle is to build software for a non-software industry you happen to be involved in, or that family or friends are at. Unfortunately for a lot of developers, IT is their corner already so there's a lot of startups that make tools for developers, which is a heavily competitive space.
Other industries have a set of software they already use; CRM, inventory management, point-of-sale, websites / webshops, customer support, etc.
One interesting niche that isn't actually a niche was telecom, the soft- and hardware running the mobile network. Very invisible to a lot of developers, but I think it's ripe for disruption as it's currently dominated by old companies like Nokia, Ericcson and Oracle. The company I worked for had an idea, but were IMO still too old-fashioned and not eager enough - happy with slow and steady growth, etc. That said, they were using mid- to late 2000's tech for their front-end and C for back-end, surely there's ways to improve on that. I made an attempt but I didn't get enough support / people from the company itself, so after 2.5 years of trying to build a new configuration system which was the USP of their business on my own I called it quits. The size and complexity of that was more than I've ever worked on, and that was usually in teams of 6-10 people, if not multiple teams.
Indeed. It's been said that it's impossible to lose money selling software maintenance contracts. Or start a company that builds websites: you don't need an idea at all, the customers bring you their ideas, you just implement them. Ka-ching! Oh, and by the way Sir, you'll be needing a maintenance contract...
For me, Sales is much more difficult than coding. I had sales training that was reputed to be the best in the industry; I wasn't made for sales, and switched to support as soon as I'd completed the sales training. I like working with salesmen; I understand the game; but I can't play it.
Anyone who sees themselves as an "ideas person" as if that is a defining or valuable characteristic is a cancer.
I can understand a people person and a tech person working together; one person handles the business and finance side, sets up meetings with investors and all that while the other does the implementation side. These are separate and both complicated affairs already; if a founder takes all that on board, great, you get a share.
But you don't earn a share for an idea. Anyone can come up with a dozen ideas in an hour's time. It's low energy, low effort and you don't get a pat on the back for having an idea.
Company nearly went broke and was "acquired" by one of the investors for pennies on the dollar. I say never again... but, I like early stage companies. Maybe not that early.
“… it's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people "here's this great idea" then of course they can go off and make it happen.
And the problem with that is that there is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get in the subtleties of it.
And you also find there's tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can't make electrons do. There are certain things you can't make plastic do or glass do. Or factories do, or robots do.
And as you get in to all these things, designing a product is keeping 5000 things in your brain, these concepts. And fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
It's that process that is the magic."
Very much not the case.
I was on the iPod software team 15 years ago, and let me tell you, we got plenty of detailed feedback from periodic "SJ reviews". My manager (a line manager of a small team) went to those meetings and came back with lots of very specific things we needed to change.
One year (fall 2008) Steve was going on vacation to Italy for a week or two, and asked for a development version of the iPod shuffle we were working on to take with him on the trip. (We were terrified, because it wasn't really ready for that level of scrutiny.) That was at a time when the iPhone 3G and the original iPad were also under development, and yet we got a bunch of feedback on the humble little iPod shuffle when he returned.
He really was in the details, to an astonishing degree, and not just for the headline products, either.
I've yet to hear a story where Jobs was the one who discovered the fix, only stories that he pointed out the things that needed to be fixed.
He's lauded as a visionary, not as an engineer. And all the stories about him are about him pushing others to realize his vision.
Edit: Lots of people seem to disagree with me, but then pointing out how he was an extremely skilled ideas man. Perhaps that term has too much negative connotation for Jobs' visions (ideas) to be associated with?
Not to say ideas guys aren’t prevalent, but for all his faults I would argue that Jobs wasn’t one of them.
I think "ideas guy" doesn't capture this. He had big ideas but also was super particular about details.
(Which doesn't justify being a prick, to be certain)
You can easily identify the wrong thing as the problem then end up trying to hide a symptom instead of fixing the problem. Medicine is notorious for treating symptoms when the underlying problem is usually related to something else like diet or (lack of) exercise.
You can also completely fail to identify an obvious problem such as the games where you end up stuck and having to Google how to progress because the game is poorly designed. This poor design isn't going to be obvious to anybody working on the game every day because they designed and already know the solution but it would come up if somebody else played the game and got stuck.
Realizing that the iPod had to be thinner was a visionary idea. Making the iPod thinner was a technical feat.
One had the idea, the other had the technical ability (even if they had given up before Jobs pushed them harder).
(Without a doubt, something you think is OK, and everyone else does, will be seen as a horrible monstrosity by your descendants. It won't be something you can think of, and yet you'll be judged for it as a monster by some.)
There are a mandated number of unassigned, non-employee dedicated handicapped parking spaces per overall building size/parking spaces. And that in some cases, there are far too many for the building/business's use case.
An example? A shopping mall needs lots of handicapped parking spaces. Yet an office will assign close spots to employees with special needs, as the generic spots aren't for-use by employees. Thus there can be an excess of generic handicapped spots.
There are only so many spots available close to the building, and Jobs would obviously take one. So by using one of the many never-to-be-used generic handicapped parking spaces, Jobs was saving a high value parking space with prime location. And also allowing others to have use of a close to door space, all without depriving any handicapped person of a place to park.
It was a social hack, one he may have been quite proud of.
Clearly the handicapped are taking too many resources and we need the billionaires to have some.
His terrible attitude is also entirely orthogonal to his product management sensibility. The fact that he was a jerk does not mean he must be generally canceled and his unique product development theory and insight ignored. The two are not directly related, and it is possible to appreciate one while condemning the other.
I'm simply pointing out he's not the same category of non-technical founders being discussed in this post
We know a lot more about hardware and software development than we did even 10 years ago let alone 50.
Those of us who came into tech in the last 20 years through today did not have as many unknown unknowns to stumble through. It’s all so much more streamlined. There inherently cannot be another Jobs or Gates in IT land same as there will never be another Christopher Columbus
Idolizing the prior generation is a fools errand. The discovery phase is over. We get the maintenance phase
Compare that to the level of change between Ballmer-Nadella or Schmidt-Pichai. Apple has displayed remarkable constancy.
However, I absolutely don’t think Steve Jobs would have let the Vision Pro in its current state sit on store shelves.
I just can’t imagine him greenlighting a product so close to the prototyping stage, especially in an environment where Apple had zero urgency compared to the past.
And yet he launched the iPhone, which, in its first generation, didn't even let you install apps on it. The point is not to excel in all areas. The point is to excel in relevant areas where the competition can not easily catch up with you.
The Vision Pro doesn’t have a lot of features where it excels. Running apps on it is inferior to using your phone or tablet. Watching movies is inferior to your home television. Productivity is inferior to a standard computer. Games are inferior to existing VR gaming systems like Index or Quest. Reviewers universally describe it as lonely, dystopian. Eyestrain is still a problem, dizziness is still a problem.
The iPhone had things about it that were better than existing solutions in a product category (cell phones and smartphones) that was proven and growing.
The most optimistic thing you can say about the Vision Pro is that if it were more like a pair of sunglasses and got rid of all the downsides to using it, it might be a really good true AR experience where your brain forgets about the fact that you’ve augmented reality. The problem is, there is no physical hardware technology that is on the horizon that will ever feasibly bring it to that place.
Not being able to install apps was completely resolvable by a software update. The hardware problems of the original iPhone like the lack of 3G were resolved within a calendar year with the next model, and the original model had an acceptable level of battery life.
If a similar situation to the iPhone was happening we should be seeing a Ming Chi Kuo type of rumor about a Vision Pro coming in 2025 that scuttles the external battery, enables the system to get through an entire Hollywood movie without charging, and solves the problem of the headset messing up your hair and making you interact with the world through ski goggles. These improvements are impossible within the next 10 years or so.
There was also way more urgency with smartphones. If Apple had waited one or two years the iPhone would have been snuffed out by competition. We would see a market dominated by other players in the market like Nokia, Microsoft, BlackBerry, or Palm.
In contrast, the VR/AR market is literally a contracting one with the only major players being Valve and Meta. The iPhone entered a market that was clearly in an upward trajectory.
Would anyone be surprised if Meta announced the shuttering of the Quest division within the next 5 years or so? It has never made money. It has never come close to breaking even, it’s a complete moonshot money sink for Meta. The Quest 3 is selling slower than the Quest 2 did. Microsoft quit on the market before Apple even entered it. Valve hasn't made a follow-up headset and might not ever do so.
A reminder of this story from a few years back: https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/13/apples-ar-vr-headset-repor...
This is a product that was in development hell that had pressure to ship. A more courageous executive would have seen the struggles at Meta and killed the project years ago.
The Apple Car idea was legitimately way better and would have taken less time.
Most non-technical people I know genuinely like Apple, it is a great experience for them. They don't know, and don't care, what "side-loading" etc means.
Hmm...no it didn't.
I suppose using switched-mode PSU in the Apple II was revolutionary to me at the time, but someone else would have figured that out pretty quick. They were already in TVs.
Are they? I don’t see it. They’re more profitable than ever and are still extremely competitive in multiple markets.
The arguments against this have been the same for decades: Apple is overpriced, Apple’s product are inferior to competition, and yet here we are with large chunks of the market share and larger chunks of market gains.
Some products are stupid, but it’s not like Steve hasn’t pushed dead products out before.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BA/financials/
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BA/boeing/net-inco...
Sure, it was him alone doing all that, not the 10,000 employees, within a 40M people ecosystem such as California which is the tip of the spear of a yet bigger ecosystem such as the United States which in turn is the tip of the spear of the entire 4 million history of mankind progress up to now.
The cult and the propaganda causes a whole lot of illusion/delusion. Then you actually get to meet these people and you are as disappointed as the groupies who were asked to self cut their veins by Led Zeppelin for their satanic rituals.
Humanity as a whole makes progress, individual humans just partecipate in a giant lottery for monetary and recognition allocation. The latter has nothing to do with the former, much like winning a car race on a racetrack has nothing to do with building the track nor the car.
Max Verstappen won the Las Vegas GP. The GP , the cars, the track itself are the byproduct of billions of humans at work and every minute of work towards that has approximately the same value, if there's a positive outlier is very minimal and perhaps that person has never been to the track at all or doesn't even care about car racing.
This is what happens when there's 8bn of us right now with a total number who ever lived standing at 10-12bn
Let's make a practical example in order not to keep talking past each other:
If you owned a resturant and they were still alive would you offer them a steak or cancel another reservation to make room for them?
I wouldn't , don't care if you are Jesus H. Christ, you gotta pay me.
Apple has numerous very talented people who do all the rest of the required work to get products created and built.
That he defrauded his buddy Woz on one of their first ventures when Woz was the one doing all the tech work is really the ironic part. When it came to running Apple, Steve was very good. But he hired good people and those people are doing well (if not as good as Steve) now.
From everything I’ve read, Jobs was deep in the weeds with all that stuff. In terms of asking all the relevant questions, finding the right experts, the suppliers to provide the right inputs at the right price, finding alternative solutions to problems, etc.
I doubt very many people knew more about bringing a new product idea to fruition from beginning to end than him.
I don’t think people realize how shitty everything you make is. It’s only through continuous improvement and iterations that it becomes really nice.
Unless it’s something you’ve done many times before, if no one is pointing out problems with your design in the first version, it’s probably hot garbage.
Unfortunately, a lot of PM's only check the project manager box.
Makes you wonder why they are so popular if this is the average user experience right?
* Apple products are status symbols
* Induced demand through marketing
* Ecosystem lock-in, once you go Apple it's hard to switch back out
Because 90% of the people are irrational buyers. They buy to impress their annoying cousin, or prove that they're more worthy than his wife's sister's husband. Because Apple's products are pricey and iPad case costs more than a iPad's competitor itself.
Same reason why my friend business owner in Dubai says his employees from India buy the most expensive phone with their first salary. Just because you buy the most expensive product, doesn't mean you get the best quality. And good marketers know it.
Because people in general don't do risk analysis. Like in the 80s when everyone still smoked despite the risk of death being well known. Oh it won't happen to me!
Then when you have to throw away that perfectly functional $1000 apple device because apple decided you can't use it anymore, only then you realize you've been had.
Also, it’s not bricked. Just needs to be wiped:
They'll brick both. But they'll complain more about the non-standard solution.
The problem here is that apple, in their infinite arrogance, feel that they continue to be the owner of the device you bought. The owner is who gets to set the policy. Apple here is setting and enforcing this bricking policy thus they are effectively the owner. But they still want you to pay for the device as if you were purchasing it!
The job of a vendor is to provide mechanisms to implement any kind of policy the buyer wants; the job of a buyer is to establish the policy that is best for them.
Apple wants to sell a device but continue being both the vendor and the owner of it. That is wrong.
These stories are semi-ridiculous. I don't doubt this person is in the predicament you describe. But why can't he just go to an Apple Store and have them unlock it? Does this person not own an ID?
The older macos devices (pre-t2 chip) are always usable. You can usually get old data off them, or they can be re-initialized.
But old ios devices? Had an old ipad, it glitched and it needs an apple id password. but it hadn't been hooked up for years and you can't connect it to wifi without it. old ipod touch? same mess.
It seems if older ios devices get out of sync of current os, it becomes hard to recover them unless you have a mac with macos that matches ios by year.
“Mr. [Founder] is new to the business of having ideas, and so when he has one, he becomes proud of himself for having it. He has not yet had enough ideas to unflinchingly discard those that are beautiful in some aspects and impractical in others; he has not yet acquired confidence in his own ability to think of better ideas as he requires them. What we are seeing here is not Mr. [Founder]'s best idea, I fear, but rather his only idea.” --https://hpmor.com/chapter/78
The person had never run a business, never been a product manager, never built a product, could not code. I almost choked on my coffee but tried to be cordial.
Confidence is a hell of a drug.
My stuff tends to be pretty good. Sometimes, I give exactly what was asked for, which might not be so good, but what I make, works; even if rather ugly.
If I'm allowed to work iteratively, with a good creative, we can make something very good.
I don't usually come up with uniquely original ideas, myself, but I'm really good at turning vague ideas into reality. I Make Stuff Happen. I've been doing that, since I was in my early 20s.
What I have encountered, is that folks put no value, whatsoever on that ability. Like, to the point of being downright insulting. They don't like the cold wash of reality, bringing their lofty ideals into the world of the achievable. I've been told that I'm a "negative naysayer," but nothing could be farther from the truth. I want the thing to happen, and recognize the hurdles that need to be vaulted.
When I was younger, and part of much larger organizations, I had to eat the disrespect poo.
Nowadays, not so much. I guess folks think I'm a cranky old prima donna, but I won't accept being treated like crap. I'm quite aware of the sheer value of what I can do.
I typically try to encourage my potential future clients to shop around and maybe ask a famous consultancy for a quote. After they recover from the shock, they are then much nicer to work with.
3. UPFRONT RISK: If you are doing this with sweat equity (no salary) then the Technical Co-Founder is taking almost all the risk. They are putting in all the time upfront, before the Business Co-Founder does. Smart Business Co-Founder would sell the idea to potential customers also, or get POs, or raise funding to pay for the technical effort, or invest their own $ to pay for the technical effort. However, a situation where one co founder (technical) puts in all the effort while the other gets a free option to put in effort later, is a very bad setup.
4. LEVERAGE: The Business Co-Founder essentially gets more leverage the more work the Technical Co-Founder does -- because now there is sunk-cost and a psychological shackle. The Technical Co-Founder just wants to be done with the build-out so the business can proceed and make money -- but the Business Co-Founder has every incentive to expand the MVP more and more since they are putting in no effort (possibly have not quit their job either) and wants more and more before the system can be sold.
ADVISE TO POTENTIAL TECHNICAL CO-FOUNDERS
- You be the "Business Co-Founder" also, no need for another person
- If there is a Business Co-Founder, equal out the contribution at every stage. A PRD is not enough to equal out a build-out. Some ways to equal out the contributions:
- Business Co-Founder has proven record that attracts success guaranteed (e.g., prior major exits, IPOs, huge online following, extreme case would be Elon -- i'll be a technical co-founder for him any day :-)
- Business Co-Founder sells concept to clients, gets Purchase Orders before build-out
- Business Co-Founder gets huge list of potential customers, ideally with pre-orders
- Business Co-Founder raises funding and pays technical co-founder for upfront effort
- Business Co-Founder puts down their own money (or takes a loan) to pay Technical Co-Founder for upfront build
Ideas are important. Building a product is important. Both achieve nothing unless you can actually sell what you have built.
>> Both achieve nothing unless you can actually sell what you have built.
I both agree with you and disagree. As a technologist, I agree sales are the only thing that matter. Most technical things are easy to me, and ultimately they are just code unless they can be monetized.
But I disagree on the value question -- they are only valuable if they are being done before the build-out. If there is just a promise of sales after free upfront effort from a technical co-founder, then the value is tenuous.
A good Business Co-Founder would be selling early, ideally at concept phase, such that there is no question of value becuase you already have pre-sales or purchase orders.
If the non-tech guy says "Here is my idea for a product. I've been working in this domain for 15 years and I know what the pain points are. I have XX customers that have expressed an interest and paid a deposit (or committed to pay once the company starts)." then that I think is worth something.
1. Discovering the real requirements to make the product succeed.
2. Being really really good at sales.
Technical people often lack those skills, and even if they build the best product in the world, it’s worthless without someone who can get it in front of the right people and convince them to pay for it.
A CEO who knows a bunch of stuff I don’t know about the domain, who talks to users more than me, and who sits her ass down and researches the hell out of stuff to bring me back useful knowledge—I’m glad to have.
Technical folks often dramatically underestimate sales for the same reason that sales dramatically underestimates technical folks - they require very different mindsets, and almost everyone is insecure about it on one side or the other.
To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until I see their execution."
Here is IMHO a more real world take on the question (can you find a technical co-founder?).
* There are three problems in business. They are 1) Distribution (sales), 2) Product/Service (the thing being sold), and 3) Operations (broad but lets say e.g. Legal, Accounting, HR).
* In very small business (e.g. startups) the Ops is not a ton of work yet, so in practice we talk about having potentially two founders, one needs to deliver a product, one needs to deliver the distribution.
* If you can provably bring the distribution on day one you will have zero problems finding a technical co-founder. In fact you'll have so many options you probably won't need a co-founder, you can just hire someone on a nice package.
* If you can't provably bring the distribution you are borderline worthless. That's the nature of sales, it is an uncomplicated discipline. In sales you produce or you're out.
So the author of the post kind of addresses this when he asks why you as the non-technical founder don't have the money to just hire. That part's more or less right. The "biz" founder with distribution already lined up is more valuable than the technical founder. Yeah the tech founder is more valuable than the biz guy who can't produce.
A successful business consists of customers and money, not unique ideas.
I would say that the idea behind a business is one of the least useful things of a business. It helps with marketing, recruitment, and sales, but really, the idea itself is irrelevant. Execution counts for much, much more.
In fact, the idea that ideas must be unique is the #1 problem with startups. There's plenty of space in the market for companies doing what other companies are doing, but just better.
Often the attitude is because 'execution is someone else's problem who doesn't matter much, I can just pay them peanuts'.
Which is why all the hate from the engineering side, because they aren't looking for a technical co-founder but someone to do all the actual work while being told they don't matter. Often while being paid like they don't matter either.
1. The founder being unaware that their ideas aren't unique is a feature not a bug. If Silicon Valley stopped reinventing the wheel, it would cease to exist. 2. The idea is what matters because ideas (and charisma) convince investors, and the goal is to make money, not a product.
Not all execution is technical. 99% of the time, you aren’t building something that technically impressive, so I’d say that most execution isn’t. You’re probably building some CRUD database app and are throwing your VC funded development team at solving your own flavour of the same old scaling issues that they all solved at their last startups.
To categorise 99%+ of serious^ nontechnical cofounders as just* contributing an idea and not meaningfully and positively contributing to some aspects of the actual execution very much paints you as having one of the typical shortcomings of a developer: you think that nothing else matters.
If a technical founder is sitting down and writing code until 2am on the weekends the non-technical founder better be making phone calls and sending emails, etc...
The inexperienced "idea guy" thinks by sharing "the idea" they have done their part and are just now going to sit and watch as the "the programmer" implements it.
Some problems I commonly see in people's analysis of situations:
- believing themselves to know things which are unknowable ("the ideas person doesn’t have the situational awareness to recognize that their ideas aren’t that unique", "value in a startup isn’t the idea but the ability to execute and build on that idea", etc).
- representing (and I suspect perceiving) subjective, heuristic based opinions ("aren’t that unique") as facts.
- using inadequate variable types when describing (and I suspect perceiving) the problem space ("the value", "wants credit/equity for having the idea").
- making up facts ("In 99% of cases")
This entire thread (as are most threads when the prompt is of a certain class of topic) is chock full of all of these, and many of the people in this subreddit are arguably genuine "The Experts" on this sort of thing...which is (or can be) kinda funny if you think about it for more than a few seconds.
And yes, I do realize that I "should" just "know what you meant"....except: how should I go about doing that?
And if these silly delusional founders should not believe silly delusional things, should that rule not extend to everyone?
The best startups have both.
You can execute, great. But if you have poor industry understanding and no idea what is going to work in that space. Let alone something that is going to revolutionize the space. It is, similarly, not going to work.
Your industry expert need to have 20-30 years in the space. Understand it from the ground up. That guy is actually valuable.
It's not one idea, it's comprehensive understanding of all the current struggles in the space.
Managing social media, meeting with prospective users, translating feedback into product requirements. They should be taking every little thing we work on, whether its a napkin sketch or a working MVP and putting it in front of people so we can steer the product as intelligently as possible. If they do all that they are more than lifting their weight. That would make me almost feel like a slouch just doing the coding.
>> 1. The founder sees themselves as the ideas person but ...
Ideas are like assholes ... everybody has one and they're usually full of shit.
1. You have at least 8-10 years of experience in that domain with some of it in a leadership position (ie product manager)
2. You already have a huge following or audience. Especially important if this is a SaaS product or b2c. Not as important if this is hard tech (ie biotech).
But if you’re doing a HR startup, show me your 10,000 engaged HR followers on LinkedIn. If you’re doing a martech startup, show me your Substack with 10k marketing subscribers.
3. You already have talked to at least 25 people about this, and gotten feedback about their pain points, initial reaction to your solution, etc. These conversations are documented and easily shared with me
4. You preferably have at least 1 successful exit/company under your belt, or a couple of failed ones is OK too (but I would need references to make sure they failed for legitimate reasons) the worse is 0 years of experience starting a company.
5. You are a cold email/call/outreach junkie. Because you will OWN sales in the early days. I want to see your 100 send emails or 100 daily calls or 100 sent DMs everyday asking potential customers for feedback or validation conversations or to sign up for your beta
I think that's a crucial point of 4. I'm not sure if actual founding experience is necessary (as long as the company structure/cap table looks good if going the VC route). However a managing director position or something similar would definitely be something I'd look for nowadays as a lot of people seem to underestimate what that role entails and/or don't cope well with having the final responsibility in a organization structure.
It's like a good driver doesn't make a good cyclist.
Basically nothing translates well to working in an early stage startup. Not even working in an early stage startup.
my cofounders paid me my full wage for the first year we worked together. it was seeing them check all these boxes and seeing them hustle to get us in the door along with proper market research that I could take action on as a technical contributor that made me take on an equity agreement.
The irony is that their idea isn't that original or unprecedented. the difference is the execution.
But...what are you bringing to the table? There's 27 million software engineers. Let's say 99% of them are trash. That means there's 270,000 amazing engineers this mythical sales-machine-with-a-big-audience Founder could partner with.
Do you have any successful exits?
Have you built [Saas, B2C, Hard-tech] from the ground-up yourself before?
Have you built & managed a team of engineers?
Have you ever fundraised before? Do you have any connections?
Do you have any audience?
Do you have any product design taste?
Etc.
And let's say you do tick all those boxes. Then that's maybe an even bigger problem. Because if both of you are so amazingly talented and in-demand, are you really going to stick to it when the going gets tough (which it will)? Especially with a 500k/yr do-nothing middle management FAANG gig as your opportunity cost?
What's most likely is neither of you will tick most of those boxes, and it won't actually matter, because the market and your product's fit will weigh much heavier on your success. Better to pick a co-founder with some of those qualities that you already know and have a good level of trust with. You can absolutely figure out the rest.
This whole thread reads like a lot of 6's bragging how they only date 10's.
But that founder isn't talking to 269,999 of them, in that situation. And the BATNA for not jumping on the technical cofounder train is "darn, keep my overpaid job".
This arrow mostly goes one way.
HN folks commenting about their overpaid jobs while lambasting Tech for underpaying engineers. Peak HN confusion.
Some people here think FAANG overpays. Some people here think tech (including FAANG?) underpays. Some think that FAANG overpays and the rest of tech underpays. Some think the market in jobs is more or less efficient.
Don't take comments here - even a number of them - as reflecting a consensus of "HN folks". There is rarely a consensus here.
And that's fine, because thoughtful, well-reasoned comments from people I disagree with are one of the best things about HN.
But, yeah, walking away from a very solid $150K+ job--especially outside of the Bay Area, I make way less than a Bay Area principal but simply do not think about money!--to play the lottery is not an economically rational decision, and so if you want somebody to do that, yes, you absolutely do need to come correct.
- is in your country
- has an engineering degree
- understands pointers
- has worked in Faang and/or serious startups
- is someone you can trust
- has business acumen
- is in a family position to do a start up
The choices drop off pretty fast.
The whole question is irrelevant. From what I've seen, it is Business Co-Founders chasing Technical Co-Founders. If i'm getting unsolicited messages and getting cornered at hackathons, I'm not sure why I would be answering these messages. I can just walk away.
I don’t disagree with the fact there’s tons of non-technical “idea-only” dreamers running around. Definitely more of them than engineers.
But the type of people that OP described are far more rare than software engineers, who are dime-a-dozen by comparison.
Maybe a little humility is in order here?
I agree with most of your statements. But you realize the whole discussion is about Non-Technical Co Founders chasing Technical Co Founders. If people are chasing the Technical Co Founder (at meetups, at industry dinners, at hackathons) why is it on the Technical Co Founder to go thru a full interview first? Shouldn't the person doing the chasing justify their side first?
As a technologist being cornered, am I obligated to do a full interview every time someone has an unsolicited idea and approaches me? Or can I just enjoy hanging out with fellow technologists at Hackathons?
I have literally gotten people pitch me ideas at cafes where I go to relax. Am i obligated to now do an interview on the spot? If random people started demanding unsolicited job interviews I think that would piss off most technologists.
There's 8b people, all of them have ideas and networks. Let's say 99.999% of them are trash. That means there are 8m people that these amazing 270k engineers could partner with. Almost 30 per engineer. And of course not all 270k amazing engineers will be interested in ever doing a startup so the ratio is even more unfavorable.
If you trust your co-founder so little that you feel the need to check their work every day, maybe you shouldn't start a company together.
and those are just metrics to measure your progress. pick a different number, but co-founders should share what they are working on, just as much as developers in a team do. like in daily standups.
when i was working with a co-founder i got regular feedback on the progress they made with regards to finding funding, etc. while i shared my progress on the development.
Note, for most successful Technical Co-Founder, $150/hr is a very low rate.
Not so sure about your numbers however… I'd care more about depth of connections than raw volume, especially in B2B SaaS (maybe you’re right in B2C)
Don’t care about your outreach numbers as long as you can own it and be effective at it. I can even help you with that grind and do 10-20% of it initially.
"Do Technical Founders Need Business Co-Founders?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43RhhwpiSk0&ab_channel=YComb...
"How To Build A Tech Startup With No Technical Skills" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpKu2wvquWg&ab_channel=YComb...
1. You have at least 8-10 years of experience in the technical domain, with some of it in a leadership position (e.g., lead developer or CTO).
2. You have a significant portfolio or demonstrable projects. Especially important if this is a SaaS product or B2C. Not as crucial if this is hard tech (e.g., biotech). But if we're launching a software for HR, I expect you to have built scalable platforms before. If it's a martech startup, show me the sophisticated algorithms or tools you've developed that can handle big data.
3. You have already collaborated with or led at least 25 people in technical projects, collecting feedback on your work, understanding user needs, and iterating on your solutions. These collaborations are documented and easily shared with me.
4. You preferably have been a key technical lead in at least 1 successful startup, or a few that didn't make it is okay too (but I would need references to ensure they failed for legitimate technical challenges)—the worse is 0 years of experience in startup environments.
5. You are a code commit and problem-solving junkie. Because you will OWN product development in the early days. I want to see your 100 lines of code per day, your daily problem-solving on GitHub, or your 100 weekly commits pushing our product forward, asking for feedback, iterating on the platform, or preparing for our beta.
But #3 and #5 on your list are dumb. Their equivalents for the "ideas" co-founder were about validating that specific business idea and problem. Whereas you're just trying to score cheap points.
Of course, there's good non-technical co-founders out there, too, but just as in the job market, the good candidates disappear but the bad ones circulate endlessly, resulting in every hiring managed seeing almost all bad candidates, it's the bad "ideas guys who want 80% equity while you do the work" who we all encounter.
And since I fulfill most of those requirements I have the same demands on non-tecchnical cofounders. I honestly do not think they are that high.
Are you able to prove theorems relevant to solving business problems? Give me an example.
Do you have good ideas for improving the accuracy of geometric reverse engineering pipelines?
Can you mathematically design optimal pricing strategies?
The technical challenges we face are too great to solve on my own. I need a second technical founder.
That sort of people's skills is what differentiates a technical from a business person. I've been amazed by some of these guys and how they are able to get great terms from VCs, providers, customers and other parties.
When you are the technical guy, you want to make sure that your non-technical cofonuder knows plenty of negotiation jujitsu so that while you are working on the machine, he has all the bases covered getting money, selling the idea and getting other great people into the company.
One of my CEOs put it pretty bluntly: When you are starting and are just 2 or 3 people, there are only two roles: BUILD SHIT, and SELL SHIT. You necessarily need at least one person who knows very well how to do that.
Also, the CEO never stops Selling shit. He may not sell to customers, but he will keep selling to investors, government agencies, prospective employees or advisors, etc.
I've had an incredibly great experience and I can confidently say I could not have built this business on my own by far. Here's what got me to sign the deal for the last 10 years of my professional life that I didn't regret:
- "just enough" technical knowledge to be dangerous
- an incredibly well researched market opportunity demonstrating great first principle reasoning and business sense, with a pitch deck for cofounders that was almost seed investor level quality
- a nontechnical early market test, executed intelligently within a few days and 200$ of budget that served as an early indication of product-market fit
- previous demonstrated experience building a team and growth as an employee at a startup
- a lot of grit, with a bias towards action (complementing my sometimes fragmented mind and hesitant personality)
- a humble, reflected personality
In the end, while 98% of pitches for the best years of your professional life are probably BS, don't underestimate how far an excellent nontechnical cofounder can bring you.
I'm a technical person looking for a non-technical person who can absolutely smash the sales/ops/marketing side of things, and has a killer idea in a domain they know like the back of their hand. The struggle I've found, e.g. on hn startupschool, is that people have ideas that are unproven. Like, they haven't even scrappily pieced together an mvp. They feel blocked by a lack of what is almost always yet another CRUD app. Most non-technical-domain things, outside of dev SaaS or super-technical products (which a non-eng has no business doing) can be 'behind-the-curtain' 'fake till you make it' products IMHO so I feel a bit let down when someone comes along with an idea and have hit a barrier without even trying to scrappily piece together their product with bits-and-pieces.
My counterparties are not real.
In descending order of frequency:
* Tirekickers / wannabes: these people have fantasies about doing a startup... someday, but definitely not just now.
* Super excited about <thing/area>... has no related experience, fails at basic business ontology ("target market", "valueproposition") <- 95% mark
* Has no hypothesis about marketing channels, nor any insight on why this particular combination might work
* fails on all of market scoping, TAM, customer development, financial model <- 99% mark
Rest: limited operational experience, OR self-defeating / low psychological resilience, going nowhere.
There is a laundry list on sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39904704) for ticking boxes. My current hypo, is that peeps who check these boxes AND don't have a tech cofounder on their rolodex typically go to angels/VCs, and get a recommendation from them; and therefore will never appear on any markets for cofounders. Curious if this matches your experience.
What inspired that question?
1) Access to capital, normally through family or a family friend. I've worked at several companies where the main thing the CEO brought to the table was that someone trusted him or her enough to invest millions of dollars.
2) At least 5 years working a 9-5 job in the target industry and the associated social connections and experience. This eliminates most college students, sadly.
3) Something unique that enables the execution of the idea. This is normally a relationship or insider knowledge. The answer to "Why you?" can't be "Because I had the idea".
The most common exception I see to this list is when both founders have the same level of passion for solving a given problem. If you have to explain the opportunity and get someone else interested in it, it could be a tough road.
That said, don't lose hope. It's a big world. People meet and things happen.
"But my idea is great! I'm sure an engineer will understand and work for equity"
The problem is that Angels/VCs have a lower bar for seed investment than the engineer. So if you can't get seed investment, it is a bad signal.
You become a technical co-founder to trade in your technical skills, learn about a new domain, figure out where the pain points are, and eventually jump ship and become a captain of your own vessel.
Also, the article is an obvious pitch in the likes of "don't get a co-founder, order an MVP from me instead".
Like, can you get forced to sell?
The company issues new shares for the investors and new hires.
So, you might start with 100,000 shares and 10% of the company, but by IPO, there could be 100,000,000 shares, giving you 0.1% of the company.
(These numbers are completely made up, though if the company ipo’s for $1B, that’s $10/share which is a plausible price per share. Companies often grant additional shares to early employees.)
So by your logic, only the CEO gets to make bank from a startup and everyone else, CTO included, are to get screwed and accept this?
A CTO, in theory, is supposed to be shielded from all the political screwery, and focus on delivering the product. In practice, it makes the CTO's equity one of the easiest targets for those willing to play games.
So, unless the CEO/CTO relationship is decades long and is worth to both sides more than a short-term gain, CTO gets screwed.
This is just straight up wrong. You don't HAVE to enter the VC cycle of endless raising, and if they're wanting to replace/kick you out, what are you doing wrong?
> eventually jump ship and become a captain of your own vessel.
That's literally what being a co-founder is. You might be even split with someone, but you are still very much the captain.
Is this what people commonly think about technical co-founder?
Or are you recommending a less-common way to think about it?
Technical founders create the initial actual value by building any MVP. Ideas are worthless, execution is everything, more so with founders who have solved successfully in a particular area before.
It was striking how often a founder with an idea had not much more beyond that. It would scare me when the tech guy who has learned business may know more than the non-tech founder, simply from working with so many other founders with only an idea.
I would offer to build free, or a steep discount to retain 100% of the IP. The non-technical founder would earn back their stake by delivering on marketing, sales, and revenue.
It taught me that:
- tech people can learn business easier than the other way around, even though I strongly believe non-technical founders should learn the tooling enough like they might know enough about their cars.
- 90% of the MVP had nothing to do with solving a problem. Logins, billing, security.
- Most MVPs would waste their innovation points, too soon, by building entirely too much from scratch, leaving it inflexible to modify as you learn through the lean startup process. Simply avoiding this pitfall would allow enough iterations quickly to uncover the valuable problems.
- Boring and quickest techs for MVPs reign supreme because MVPs are supposed to be temporary and disposable, right? Just like a startup is supposed to be a temporary organization to find a repeatable and scalable business model
If a non-technical cofounder cannot market or sell (establish distribution), the greater loss occurs to the Technical founder.
> Looking to make a Garry’s mod day z server called gmodz would need someone experienced in coding I have the ideas just need someone to make them come to life wouldn’t be able pay right now but once servers are up and get players donating we can figure a split so you can get money and i can as well
It is true that working for free is bonkers. Priority number 1 is always rent, at minimum cover that so that business is priority 1.
You have no idea much I feel that sentiment
You can work "for free" if investments cover all your basics ... so only bonkers under the assumption that you haven't taken care of your basics already.
If a business founder did their research and has a line of people just waiting to get hands on the product, then he can simply get a loan and build the damn thing because the money is just there on the street waiting to be picked up.
So many times people start with the build without making sure there is market for their product - that is the original sin of any startup.
I'll go out on a limb to say that loans (famous for needing to be paid back) are not the way to fund an idea which is not likely to be successful. Funding a startup requires you to find money that doesn't require you to be liable if things don't work out. That's why it's more complicated than finding money "just there on the street waiting to be picked up." You actually need to convince people you have an idea that might succeed, so they're willing to risk their cash.
So many times, looking for a technical co-founder is caused by the fact that the "business founder" doesn't know how to verify the idea otherwise that by building the actual product.
Hence being in the black about the market for such product, they obviously want someone to do it "for free" as the risk is high.
Anyone who did a solid research and even sold his product to people before it even existed won't be worried about putting their own money or taking a loan to finance the development.
This is spot on -- many Business Co-Founders want to borrow -- but they want someone else to borrow (their time, their effort) and take the risk. The risk needs to be transferred back equally to all co-founders. If only one person is taking the majority of the upfront risk, this isnt a co-founder situation!
I once met a "Business" Co-Founder who "Personally Guaranteed" this business would succeed if I did 3mo of upfront work. He followed me around at multiple events in NY and kept insisting. I retorted if he was so sure, why not take a HELOC and pay for the technical PoC/MVP?
Maybe it's just me being overly pragmatic, but if you're willing to personally secure a loan to build a startup that will probably fail, I personally find you too reckless/unintelligent/misguided to work with. Whether you get the money from a bank as a loan or from investors genuinely doesn't matter (money is definitionally fungible), what matters is that you can procure it. If you can't convince any investors to work with you and you have to take a loan out to cover the costs, that's an unimaginably large red flag and a sign of foolishness.
The technical co-founder is contributing $70k to 100k of time assuming 3mo of effort -- they are also "borrowing"...from an uncertain future. They have obvious skin in the game.
The business co-founder needs equal skin in the game. The best would be to go pre-sell the idea. But if they cannot do that, what are they brining to the table?
This is a good thing to remember. I'd also add that at best the prototype ends up as the Ship of Theseus, it may gradually be replaced piece by piece. The idea that you'll have a chance to re-build the entire thing starting at 0 is a myth. True prototypes are possible within the product, but not the product itself.
Anyone considering joining or starting a start-up (business and technical side) should be aware of that and plan accordingly.
I thoroughly hated our video player but an MVP of it had to be built for the rest of the app (AI video editor) to even make sense.
And that hated video player ended up being part of the product for 18+ months (I was hoping for <6) because there were much more valuable parts of the app to improve.
and, crucially, extremely successful parent companies that could afford to throw millions at long shots that might not pay out for a decade.
Having a cofounder that can sell and market, while you build is tremendously valuable
If they are young, they are full of their own ambitions and ideas. It is hard to cooperate. If they are old, they already have built something in the past and not looking for help in exchange of new risks.
Finding a co-founder is an additional full-time job. I have tried that in 2018 when I was starting my startup. I spent days on meetings and forums like this one.
I found dozens of amazing folks, but it was impossible to negotiate and actually start something together.
Finding a co-founder = finding a girlfriend. You do not seek for one intentionally. You just live having a chance to meet that one. Same with a co-founder.
I can only fit a single one, Individual Contributor, I can do all the code and design and devops...
Leadership abilities? nah I'm an introvert
Shares the vision? Depends on the vision... no cash grabs pls
Available? Works for free? No and No
Same vibe? don't think so. Same age? maybe yes, I'm in my thirties.
Commitment to somebody else's idea after 2 meetings? No, there are trust issues if I don't know you already...
I dunno who made this list up but imho there are conflicts. You can't be a leader and commit to somebody else's idea unconditionally. You can't be a super fullstack dev and work for free.
become your own technical cofounder.
I'd say that if you're doing a software startup and it takes 3-5 years to figure out market fit, probably the idea/execution isn't very good. Another story if you're doing hardware or require intense R&D, but for software? That's way too long time.
software is the easy part
Right?
Eh, maybe. Software is legitimately challenging and time consuming to learn. Especially for people to whom math doesn’t come naturally.
Sure, it doesn’t take too long to learn how to throw together a crappy website. But building a business on top of beginner skills would be like trying to compose the score for a movie after 6 months of piano lessons. You can do it, but the output will be visibly crap.
I agree a lot more with the advice in this blog post. If you’re struggling to hire a technical cofounder, find someone who knows their craft well and hire them.
I've only thought this but it's nice to see someone say.
Guy 1: "What do you bring to the business?"
Guy 2: "We are a technology business, I made the technology. People seem to like it so far. How about you?"
Guy 1: "I'm a business and finance guy, I get the business money to use. I also had an idea one time."
Guy 2: "can I have some money?"
Guy 1: "no, I don't have any"
What do I need Guy 1 for? His idea? I'll pass.
business/people move slow... you can't muscle your way through it. you need like 5 high-quality opportunities for 1 to close. so if you build something great, it will take just as long if not longer to develop a business around it.
you need to advance each side in parallel.
once you have an MVP, immediately start building for a customer
If his "idea" is so valuable, he's not going to want you to take all the equity, he'd put his money forward.
If I'm putting more money forward than he (in terms of doing work for free), I'm also the money guy. If I'm both the money guy and the tech guy, who is he?
But your business cofounder would need to show the ability to be a pretty good sales leader and a sales person with a very impressive rolodex. Effectively you're looking at/for a CRO (chief rev officier). These kinds of people are basically working at enterprise software firms because sales people don't care about the product and can effectively sell anything.
I've been some incredibly sales guys in my life. People who could proverbially sell ice to eskimos or sand to egyptians or whatever. I've always thought if I could team up with one of those people (who are usually already paired up and very well paid!) it would be awesome.
The truth is everybody on the team risks—tech or non-tech founders: both types invest their own time and expertise regardless of a task to be done. The fact that non-technical founder doesn't code MVP doesn't mean that there is no time/expertise invested that moves the needle. So, both invest and should better "date" for some time to test getting along.
The funny part is that it's people like the author who got easily tricked by a good salesman and smooth talkers into working for free. A good salesperson clearly sees what motivates such people and promises a lot of it to only deliver nothing later.
People make the mistake of thinking that a business is a "tech company" just becuase it uses the internet.
If you're an online retailer, just think of your self as a typical small (for now) business rather than a tech startup. There's a whole world of entrepreneurial advice on that front that you'll miss out on if you only read about VCs.
* Not really having 'much' to bring to the table other than the idea and self-proclaimed knowledge of the problem and domain. As the article mentions, having some capital already, having some sort of following or verifiable reputation or whatever would help a long way.
* Not really having any kind of story around "What have you tried so far?". The least sexy conversation is one where the non-technical founder is telling you about this "new" thing to work on and build and the reality is they've only been thinking about it for like 2 months and haven't really "done" anything other than some cursory research. Like, for example, if they don't have capital at all yet, have they tried before they came to you?
My main advice for all aspiring founders is the same:
You cannot be waiting. You must be executing.
You can't wait for funding. You can't wait for a technical cofounder. You can't wait for the dev shop to finish your MVP.
If you're not actively, personally building something, you MUST be executing somewhere else. Ideally this means you're talking to customers, pitching, and trying to solve their problems with the skills and resources you have available to you.
But you can't just sit around and wait for someone to save you and your startup. And this article gives a great explanation of why: those saviors can save themselves. If you're 100% dependent on them for success, what are they getting out of the relationship?
Don't wait. Do.
Ideas are cheap, I can have 10 great ideas in an afternoon, and I can change some of them tomorrow, execution is what it all matters.
If you're a skilled "x", you should look for a skilled "y" that is at your level or above, and does not need to be taught the absolute basics.
Getting any project off the ground with a cofounder that has never worked in an entrepreneurial environment is going to be extremly challenging. The bigger your skills/assets you're bringing to the table, the more you should be filtering for experience.
1) are you a tech startup? If yes, your founder (i.e. you) should be technical or you are the wrong person for the job. The definition of a tech startup is that the primary thing that company does is centered around some technical innovation. If you are not a tech startup, you shouldn't need a technical co-founder.
2) but you need a technical co-founder anyway, somehow. Is this person going to be creating patentable, novel stuff or do you just need a person to build a generic website/app? If you do need unique magic technology that you are not capable of inventing, see 1. If not, you don't need a technical co founder but a vp of engineering or a senior developer. Whatever you do, don't label this person as your CTO because they are not. Also don't give this person any controlling equity because they are not equal to you as the founder; they are merely executing your vision. Consider using agencies, contractors, etc. Whatever you can afford. Plan for replacing people in this role over time or adding more mature people at least. The people you can afford early on tend to not be management material.
3) If you are at this point still looking for a technical co-founder, good luck.
so it seems you are right. that initial hire was not management material.
but looking at the platform they built, i am not sure anyone would be happy to just take over and work with what they already have.
doesn't a CTO want more control over what is being built?
so would they not have been better off looking for someone willing to grow into a CTO role from the start?
If you know a person that blindly trusts you to execute on your amazing vision that's also perfect for the job, that's great of course. It does happen. But I've seen plenty of examples of not especially great developers ending up way out of their depth because they got the CTO label stuck on them by some person that was just desperate to get any techie working with them.
Often a big part of the problem is that not only are such founders incapable of doing the work themselves, they are also incapable of being a good judge of the type of people they would need to do that work. Classic A's hire A's and B's hire C's stuff. This stuff should be a giant red flag for both wannabe CTOs and investors.
Experienced founders usually have access to a network and know how to avoid that pitfall. Sometimes raising funding requires you to have a big name CTO. I've seen companies that had CTOs that weren't actually doing much beyond carrying the title just to woo the investors. In an extreme case, I was actually doing the CTOs work (as a freelancer) without ever even meeting the person in question. Just a name on a website. Zero actual involvement. Never saw any evidence of any technical decision making by that CTO. I fired myself from this company later because of the whole scammy nature of that particular company.
A common pattern of startups that survive with a less than ideal CTO is to appoint a VP of engineering and then sideline the founder CTO as soon as convenient. I once knew a guy whose unofficial job title was "minder of the CTO". His job was protecting the rest of the team from the random bullshit, brain farts, and whatnot from this CTO founder and making sure he did no damage. The actual company was being lead technically by a very competent vp of engineering at that point.
Can you quote a single successful (has PMF, fast growth, 8-figure plus revenue or exit) SaaS built by/with an agency?
The problem is that the non-technical founder doesn't have the funds to hire senior developers so he needs to raise money without being able to present a team and alpha version. Also, if there is no buy-in from tech-people, how well are you going to do when that senior developer gets a better offer some months down the line from a different company?
I dunno how well investors value that proposition?
I think many of the points of the article still apply, especially regarding opportunity cost. A great salesman can make way, way more than a great engineer, so why would he want to join me?
And let's say I want to hire my first salesperson. How do I know who is good and who is not? For me as an engineer, everyone looks like a good salesman, because everyone is better than me (I suck at sales)
If you don’t know the criteria for a good salesperson for your product you don’t know enough about the problem you’re solving and shouldn’t hire anyone, yet.
Similarly, if you don’t know exactly what to build to solve a problem (= you haven’t already validated it with low tech tools) you shouldn’t hire an engineer to build anything.
Sounds like contrasting it with people who aren't wired to be technical cofounders, or who haven't bought into this particular cofounder relationship.
Otherwise, no, you're trying to find a zero-cost implementation of a very costly employee number 1.
Why wouldn't you want a cofounder "keeping you honest" about the startup?
Of course, convincing engineers that there is enough "runway" to pay them for a few months and that their job is going to last beyond that is always necessary.
Matching services are weak at best and should be treated like online dating sites; The vast majority aren't those you're looking for and frankly, some of them are bunny-boilers.
If you're serious - use and exploit your own network, reach out to people you know and discover those who others value and might be interested in your hypothetical (or proven idea) backed by data, science, experience and value.
I say this having experience co-founding multiple businesses; 1 IPO on LSE/NASDAQ, several trade sales and a bunch of failures (which really really hurt). The most valuable lesson being that the failures teach you more than anything else!
And I was the only technical person who was supposed to build the thing, to launch it and they were the ones nit-picking little stupid details that took forever to fix but didn't matter all that much.
In the end I spent 5 months working on it and we still didn't get any paying clients, but many more ideas on what else I should build "to get clients". I realized they suck at marketing and business side of things and they don't know shit.
If you're a tech person, don't make the same mistake I did. Most people don't understand marketing. Their ideas are shit. They don't know the technology. And YOU are the one who's gonna be doing most of the work. And THEY think that the business belongs to them because as someone said they "came up with the idea" that wasn't all that unique because everything that's needed under the sun has already been built. Many times over. They had just no idea that that's the truth. Now if they have the money and want to hire you to do the work, charge them market rate.
It has never been easier to do things you've never done before
Programming tutorials are ubiquitous and high quality
Claude opus and gpt 4 provide an incredibly decent starting point if you're looking to build a company
If you have the hustle you are going to need to be a successful founder, you can write enough code to validate your idea
Oof. Yes.
https://www.strategic-options.com/insight/2024/04/02/believe...
Can an idea get a lot of value via a patent or held as a trade secret?
Uh, let's see: From Bell Labs, the transistor.
They saw that it was so valuable they deliberately didn't patent it and, instead, gave it to the world for free -- that's in effect what they did, but there may be legal details, and I'm not a lawyer.
Suppose that now we had to pay a penny a transistor ......?
Uh, the laser? Not just one that fills a large airplane and is powerful enough to shoot down a missile but the ones the size of a grain of rice and light the long-haul optical fibers for the backbone of the Internet?
How 'bout the amplifiers on the optical fibers?
I'm not a lawyer, but how 'bout RSA encryption?
And the FFT (fast Fourier transform)?
And mRNA for creating vaccines? I know; I know; some people see the mRNA for Covid as naughty, bad, ugly, ...?
Well, there were the Phase III trials, randomized, placebo controlled, double blind, reported in
"Efficacy and Safety of the mRNA-1273 SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine", New England Journal of Medicine, February 4, 2021, 384:403-416
at
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2035389
with efficacy 94% and safety 100% -- uh, for just how the efficacy arithmetic is done might want to check the paper.
Yes, the safety was from ~16,000 persons, and with 1 billion persons maybe safety will be lower than 100%.
There are various error correcting codes, maybe some buried in hardware devices.
It does appear that James Simons had some ideas that are valuable and not easy for others to copy.
If you'll check the historical record you'll find, for example, patents US2524035A (Bardeen&Brattain, Three-electrode circuit element utilizing semiconductive materials, oldest priority 1948-02-26) and US2569347A (Shockley, Circuit element utilizing semiconductive material, oldest priority 1948-06-26).
> How 'bout the amplifiers on the optical fibers?
patents.google.com reports 65279 hits for "optical fiber amplifier"
> Uh, the laser?
The original invention of the laser led to patent disputes and lawsuits that weren't settled until 1987.
> RSA encryption
US4405829A (Rivest, Shamier, Alderman, Cryptographic communications system and method, filed 1977 awarded 1983)
> And the FFT (fast Fourier transform)?
There's an entire category for this, G06F17/142, with 11186 entries: https://patents.google.com/?q=G06F17%2f142
My understanding of the transistor is that Bell Labs gave it to the world for free use by anyone. For the exact legal steps they took to accomplish this -- I'm not a lawyer.
For the FFT, amazing patent activity: There was a lot to the FFT -- not all for just some 2^n numbers for positive integer n. There was a book I lost in a disaster -- was written at MIT and full of really tricky extensions of the basic FFT ideas. Curiously I can't find any mention of the book anywhere on the Internet. Was the book withdrawn as some part of US national security?
For RSA, okay, there's a patent. Did the three guys ever get any revenue from that?
I agree with the common remark, that this thread seems to agree with, "Ideas are easy; execution is hard" and "80% of success is just showing up", etc. Also agree that tough, as in the discussion in this thread, to get a technical cofounder ....
But I also wanted to point out that sometimes there are some quite powerful ideas that were not at all "easy".
Maybe the ideas resulted in gushers of revenue so that "execution" was easy.
My real view is that, unique ideas can be darned valuable, the key to being more successful than all the competitors. The ideas maybe are protected only as trade secrets or intellectual property -- i.e., don't tell anyone.
I obviously can't say for sure why that is, n=1 and all, but here's where I see my differentiators compared to the other nontechnical founders I see on YC's own matching board (https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching):
- I have domain expertise. I have done the thing I am trying to do before (I used to be part of the leadership at a company in the same space), and I'm trying to build a thing that has had some real-world proof-of-concept already. I don't have "an idea", I have a plan for how to create it and for why I think it will be a viable business. I'm not "the ideas person", I'm "the person who will make the business side of this work so you can focus on the technical stuff you like, which is an equal and complementary role".
- I'm offering something "divisive". Specifically, I'm not* trying to build the next unicorn, I'm trying to build something small and sustainable. Many people do want to build the next unicorn, but the people who don't* have much slimmer pickings. I'm not more interesting on average, but I can be the most interesting to a specific subset of people. This is essentially the same dynamic you see on dating sites, as with OKCupid's old blog about attractiveness-rating distributions (archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20110110230054/http://blog.okcup...) - you don't want to be a 5/10 to everyone, you want to be a 10/10 to someone.
- Related to the previous bullet, I act like a human being. Basically, I bet on the idea that other people who want to start companies are often doing it for (one of) the reasons I am: because they're so tired of the pervasive culture of corporate BS that overlays almost every company of any size, and want to laser-focus on something that keeps you honest. My profile is direct, human, emotional, and does not shy away from talking about who I am, not just why my credentials are great (which they honestly aren't - they're not terrible but it's certainly not my competitive advantage). I think people respond to that, because I respond to that, and I can't be the only one.
- I'm trying to build a thing engineers care about. That's obviously not something you can control if you're trying to, I dunno, build the next fintech app that is fundamentally boring on the technical side, but if you're a nontechnical founder, it might suggest to you which ideas you have would be easiest to find a technical partner for.
None of this is particularly earth-shattering, mind. If you just watch the Startup School videos, they'll tell you most of this. But as with a lot of things, a surprisingly huge chunk of the "market" fails to grab the low-hanging fruit.
(* nontechnical in the sense that YC's matching uses, i.e., I cannot build the product myself with my current skillset. I am considerably more technical than the average "non-technical" founder, though.)
If I landed on your profile, I'd probably send a match invite. The only things I'd want to talk about are A: what's the business model and B: what's the sales/marketing/funding plan.