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Hey, OP here. I view it like this: if you were to take all technical people on the market for launching a startup and plot them on a distribution to find the "valuable in early stage" subset, you would find that 35% are good enough to get a startup off the ground. They don't need to be extraordinary programmers, just good enough but with a lot of drive.*

However, for non-technical folks that are on the market, the distribution is worse. Only the top 10% ~ 15% actually have sufficient abilities to pull it off. The remaining fall into the archetype I wrote about here.

The caliber for what's in the market is skewed thus the technical person has to be a whole lot more picky than the other way around to avoid ending up with a dead weight.

[*]: This excludes specialized skills like Deep Learning or chemical bio-engineering, etc...

Solo founders do worse and teams with a technical founder do better particularly in enterprise. So it seems your best chance is one of each.

https://10years.firstround.com/

This list is a pure fallacy of statistical understanding. Skewed data and cherry-picking while also being strengthened by our subjective biases. I would appreciate the list way more if it also included founders who applied but were rejected, or for any other reason were not invested in.

For stuff like this I recommend the book, May Contain Lies by Alex Edmans, he does a fantastic job explaining how most of the time we seek data to confirm our hypotheses, instead of seeking a hypotheses that confirms our data.

If you're taking a fail fast type approach, the business guys fail faster when they can't get a tech co-founder to rally around their ideas. If you can't do that, you probably can't sell the MVP either. On flipside, the tech guys will spend month and even years polishing their 'product' without ever actually launching it with actual attempts to sale it. So they fail slowly after sinking tons of time. They'll talk about it as a side-project to minimize the appearance of failure but if they put all that work in they really do want it to succeed. They just get to the point where code is good enough and can't force themselves to transition to marketing/sales/etc.

Well said!

   1. Pitch to and recruit team
   2. Find potential customers
   3. Build product
   4. Sell product
   5. Improve product
   6. Scale sales

Skipping directly to step 3 and ignoring the others is an open source hobby, not a business.

If I had to re-summarize your point, I'd put it this way:

1. Success is very little on the idea, almost entirely on the execution

2. Execution has both a technical side and a business side, and can fail from a poor execution either way.

How this applies to your target audience:

You have an idea for a business? Nice -- that's almost worthless (1). You can't influence execution on the technical side, so you need to bring execution from the business side (2).

I like the numbers -- "a waitlist of 1000 people or LOI from 20 businesses" gives a better idea what kind of execution a non-technical co-founder should be capable of.

These discussions also get wrapped up in what "non-technical" means.

It can mean management skillset.

It can mean people-networking and sales skillset.

For an early-stage startup, the former doesn't bring much value (management value literally scales with employee count) while the latter absolutely does.

> However, for non-technical folks that are on the market, the distribution is worse.

And that's where I took issue with your post -- that you are lumping all these people as "business co-founders".

That's false. To call yourself a business co-founder, you need to have the same kind of business and management chops as a technical co-founder has technical chops.

Your post seems to be complaining about co-founders who are just idea people who don't have any business skills at all. It's misleading to call them "business co-founders". You should call them "idea co-founders" or something.

> But a valuable business co-founder brings extensive domain expertise, a network of people, sales skills, management skills, and fund-raising talent.

A valuable technical cofounder brings the skills to literally create what you're trying to sell. Otherwise, have fun selling dust. Or networking to sell nothing.

The "0 to 1" here isn't "no management to management" it's "not having a product built to having a product built".

There's no point having the skills to build a product if you can't fundraise to build a team, market, sell, refine to find product-market fit, etc. etc.

I’m not sure if this is a joke.

You’re saying that there’s no point in having the skills to actually do something (building a product), unless you have someone derivative skills as well (all the business things you state).

That really comes off as trying to justify the business cofounder. I can build independently. You can’t build a team (which I can do), market (which I can do), sell (which I can do), or refine (which I can do) independently.

I think perhaps you misread it?

>> You’re saying that there’s no point in having the skills to actually do something (building a product), unless you have someone derivative skills as well (all the business things you state).

yes, with the proviso that the "someone" might include yourself.

>> You can’t build a team (which I can do), market (which I can do), sell (which I can do), or refine (which I can do) independently.

If you can do those things, then great, you have the "someone" you need.

But, it's fair to say that most techies do not have those necessary skills. As evidence see the endless stream of question in the "Ask" section of HN trying to get advice on those activities after the product is built.

So the point is not "There's no need for a business founder". The point is that to have a business all the bases must be covered, and you need as many people as you need to cover those bases. Sometimes it's 1. Sometimes it's 2. Sometimes it's 5.

The most common successes have 2 or 3 founders, but that don't make the other numbers impossible, it's just a trend. Which makes sense - the more hats you wear, then less time you have to devote to each of them.

I think that comment is saying that there is a difference between building a project and building a feasible company that productizes the project. There are many other aspects of company building that purely technical folks often trivialize as unimportant.

One can have 3 technical cofounders but the paperwork still needs to be done and someone has to do it.

Selling dust is the job of the business co founder before the product is built. This is how you verify there is customer demand before wasting everyone’s time. It’s surprisingly easy if you’re solving a real need. It’s also how you can demonstrate meaningful value to your technical cofounder.

>But a valuable business co-founder brings extensive domain expertise, a network of people, sales skills, management skills, and fund-raising talent.

Yep.

I tried doing startups with a few ideas. I can easily code all day. But then, when it comes to doing all the secondary stuff, like filing paperwork for an LLC, marketing, networking, and so on, that stuff was "painful" to me, as it took some of the fun out of the whole making things work.

You could have a good idea, but without a strategy to let people know about it, even if you build it, it may never get used.

>But a valuable business co-founder brings extensive domain expertise, a network of people, sales skills, management skills, and fund-raising talent.

I've found across industries that the technical guys typically have more domain expertise given equal time spent in that industry with way too many examples to throw in here down to entire factories being known better from just about every angle (bar the nuts and bolts) by a single senior tech guy than the actual owners and sub domain mangers. Just because he and many other technical guys in the other examples had to understand the problems in depth to develop for them and abstract them away for the managers, accountants, ppl running the machines, etc

The sales skills can matter a lot especially for b2b but it's not a given that these (along other people skills) aren't possessed by the dev. I tagged along trough a ton of the studies of my girlfriend as she studied international business management... and as far as practically useful stuff goes it honestly didn't go that far beyond what we got taught in our company management course when studying compsci.(other than things like statistics with spss and the like which they seemed to almost collectively suck at.) All it gave me was a sense of wonder at the amount of buzzwords and cargoculting in that sphere outside of the usefull stuff.

Don't get me wrong. There's technical guys that are bad at these 'people skills' and/or have no sense of popular aesthetics that makes their ads entirely ineffective or can't manage themselves so even your mentioned "management skills" would be usefull in a 2 people team, etc.

But if a technical guy is somewhat naturally competent on these fronts... or where they're lacking they could have a technical cofounder that completes them and they both keep eachother accountable... Well then i'd put my money on them rather than a technical/mba cofounder couple.

To be honest, it sounds like you’re one of the business people.

Everyone on the tech side has this experience. “I just need you to build the software”

You can build a product and sell it without business guy but you can't have a product without the tech guy. One definitely is more valuable than the other.

Either I have a talent for the business aspect or I am just a tech guy with a lot of luck, but I invest time into my products not marketing and still get what I want.

>> You can build a product and sell it without business guy but you can't have a product without the tech guy.

I'd argue that you need both guys. But that both guys can be the same person. It's just uncommon that they are the same person. If you have both sets of skills, then you can do it alone.

A tech guy, with little to no business acumen will fail just as easily as a business guy with no technical acumen.

There's {set of things that need to happen for startup to be successful}, then {set of skills required to effect those outcomes}, and then {set of individuals who possess those skills}.

Whatever labels those individuals have isn't generalizable enough to form into "thou shalt"s.

And as the article put it

>> equal partners who trust and respect each other deeply

is probably the key.

Is everyone bringing valuable skills to the table (that others aren't) and does everyone respect and value what their co-founders / counterparts are doing?