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Comment by padobson | Hacker News Reader

I'm always looking for a co-founder, whether I'm the geek or the suit. When a suit approaches me to be the geek for their idea, I usually give them some simple technical task to do - like setup a Tumblr or a Twitter account for the idea. Then I'll often ask for something businessy - form a C-corp for the idea or file a provisional patent.

Finally, before I even consider opening my laptop to code their idea, I want some paltry measure of idea validation. Are you selling a product? Good, find someone who will pay you to do the task manually before we program it. Are you looking to give the service away and monetize the user base? Good, get 5000 emails from a landing page describing your idea, or get 1000 followers on Twitter for your idea's account.

If they can do all this in a day or even a week, then they're quality co-founder material. Any longer and it's a judgement call. Most won't get past step one, and you certainly didn't want them as a co-founder.

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(Note: I am a programmer.) Being "the suit" isn't just "I have an idea", and assuming the suit must be capable of doing something technical undermines the interesting complexity that that kind of knowledge entails.

Instead, imagine someone who has found a "market opportunity" (not "an idea": everyone has ideas, and assuming programmers somehow don't have enough of their own to work on is part of what makes these kinds of e-mails insulting ;P): in this case, "the suit" is someone who has the knack for turning ideas into formal/defendable contracts and closed/agreeable business relationships in the same sense that you or I have the knack for turning ideas into stable prototypes or scalable production implementations.

I personally then love dealing with "the suit": I love bringing my ideas to him, and I love seeing what he does with them; I love not having to worry about that particular aspect of building a business that I often find tedious, frustrating, or even intractable (a similar feeling, I imagine, to how he feels about what I do).

From this perspective, I can't imagine any of "the suits" that I know (and I now know a bunch) sending an e-mail like the one in this article: it doesn't have any of the properties I'm used to "the suit" having found fascinating about these kinds of problems. (Of course, this e-mail is probably not verbatim, summarized through the veil of this blogger, and I might be reading a bunch into it based on your response.)

I can thereby understand feeling the need to ask someone like this to go off and do tasks like "try to find a customer" and "can this be done manually", but somehow I feel like this is really just trying to tutor the person on the other end to see if they have basic business sense (the same kind I imagine you have): when "the suit" contacts you, you will know it ;P.

Now, you may also have been contacted by many such "the suits" already, and disliked them: sometimes, these people's slavish devotion to business opportunity and formal agreements might cause them to be as alien as someone with a slavish devotion to process and repeatability (as many programmers have) is to a "normal" person.

Alternatively, you might not have been inspired by the kinds of markets they attack: they might not seem world-changing, or challenging, or technical enough to even involve you; but the property of "the suit" that gives him that title is that he didn't just have an idea: he is thinking about how all the people fit together, and is fully intending to be the person who makes it all happen.

I thereby encourage everyone to get to know a real "the suit", get to know his friends, and try to see how they live their lives and why they do so: I think you might be pleasantly surprised. That said: you might wonder how to recognize "the suit" if you feel all of them are like this e-mailer (by which I really mean the stereotype of the guy who has a lightbulb go off in his head, brands himself "the idea guy", and tries to find "the programmer").

I might recommend finding someone older (although my go-to "the suit" isn't), who honestly likes wearing suits (;P), and weirdly knows all of the lawyers in town; he probably also knows about every business operating nearby (and exactly who funded them), is friends with the guy who owns half the buildings, and is respected enough to be invited to give advice to others at local business plan programs.

You might, then, be surprised both at how useful these people are, how unimportant it might be that they are currently technical (although enough geekiness in their past to have at least some feel for what is technically possible is quite handy), and at the same time how the people sending these e-mails are more like a guy who just learned PHP last week trying to start a business with the CEO of General Motors than someone we should be up-in-arms about.

I am with you all the way on this. The great businesses and fortunes of the last 200 years of industry did not come from engineering or technical expertise, but rather from those few, adept individuals who were able to navigate the mysterious world of relationships. If you do not make a dozen friends in every crowded room and instinctively form lucrative relationships on a daily basis, then knowing someone who does is the most valuable asset to your professional goals.

That's a simplistic view. I did almost exactly what you suggested and failed because although my co-founder was good at building lucrative relationships and even had some technical knowledge, he thought that he always knew best what should be done, wasn't really open for discussion, and generally was full of BS thinking he's likely the next Steve Jobs.

Unfortunately I recognized this way too late. Also, he never really proved he can in fact build something really valuable (but there were some smaller successes so I was hopeful).

Sounds like he wasn't very good at managing the relationship with you. Steve Jobs turned on the charm when he needed it - he was so good at reading people that he knew when he could treat them like crap and when he had to really suckup.

Sounds like you're partner didn't have anything like that. That's too bad because there's no relationship more important than the one with your co-founder.

You give the non-technical person's point of view and there is no way it can be correct. All successful tech firms are successful because of their advanced technology created by employees or acquired. In no situation did Apple engineers hang out in a crowded room until someone told them where they can pick iPhones off of a tree. Someone had to actually design and make those, and that is what made the business the largest. It's the airplane effect. Airplanes are so amazing that its difficult to image that a group of people designed and crated it.

Apple is the worst example that you could use. Steve Jobs never wrote single line of code! He didn't solder a single chip into a single iPhone. Nor was he the lead product designer, the lead ad man, or an expert in any field EXCEPT dealing with people. He brought all the people together to form the iPhone teame at Apple, and that was far more instrumental to designing, manufacturing, shipping, and selling iPhones than any technical expertise.

My point stands that the iPhone exists because of the scientists and engineers who created the technolgoies. Just because Jobs was the figurehead does not mean he should be attributed with the success of apple technology, which probably wasn't even developed specifically for apple.

>The great businesses and fortunes of the last 200 years of industry did not come from engineering or technical expertise, but rather from those few, adept individuals who were able to navigate the mysterious world of relationships.

I am not sure how you can say that, considering the dramatic technical advances over the same period. I mean, there is no way to experimentally show what is cause and what is effect, but to me, the idea that we had this incredible technical progress because a few guys figured out how to better socialize, rather than the other way around (what social and organizational progress we had was enabled and really, made almost inevitable by the incredible technology we developed.) We all have opinions, I guess. I disagree with yours.

>If you do not make a dozen friends in every crowded room and instinctively form lucrative relationships on a daily basis, then knowing someone who does is the most valuable asset to your professional goals.

Social skills are extremely context-dependent. The same attributes and actions that mean you are well liked at the sales meeting will get you the cold shoulder at a sufficiently technical conference.

I mean, I'm not saying a 'human interactions' specialist isn't useful... I'm just saying, it's not as generalizable as you think.

Really, a 'business guy' isn't necessarily a social specialist, either. I mean, a lot of what makes a professional a professional is the ability to grab as much of the surplus value in a deal as possible. Being a nice person with a sense of fairness can hold you back at that, sometimes.

A 'business guy' could also specialize in finding inefficiencies in the market.

It's interesting; I primarily sell virtual servers to people that are smarter than I am, people that generally identify as nerds. I seem to be okay at this. But, I go and try to sell bandwidth to co-lo customers? even at dramatically below market prices, I find I am not so good. See, in that case, you are usually selling to some middle manager. different people;

The really interesting thing isn't so much that I am bad at it; it's easy enough to hire a sales guy on commission, and like I said, my bandwidth prices are way below market, so there is plenty of room for commission. The really interesting thing is that even when I do that, and the sales guy closes the deal and I get the customer? they aren't happy with me.

I mean, your nerds? they like transparency. They like to see how the sausage is made; I mean, yeah, I have some serious problems; Nerds want to hear about those, and if the answer to "why are you doing it that way?" is "because I made a bad decision 2 years ago and the contract isn't up" or "because I haven't fixed it yet, I'm sorry. This thing, that thing and the other thing are ahead in the priority queue." - that's usually okay.

Your business people? they want the godaddy response. As little information as possible. short and to the point. They don't want to hear there is a bug in your router software. They don't want you to say "I might be wrong" when you give them something.

It's weird... almost all of my 'organic' customers seem to be pretty happy with me. (Not all of them. I do have problems, I do screw things up, and, well, some people just have high expectations. But the vast majority seem to be pretty happy.) But the customers I've gotten through sales people, through professionals? It's like they are expecting a very different personality on the other side of the phone line. The social skills that serve me well with the first group actively hurt me with the second.

Technological progress and building a big business/fortune are not the same thing. At the end of the day, to build a big business or fortune is about convincing people to give their capital to you. People who deal well with people do this the best, by definition.

Social skills are extremely context-dependent. The same attributes and actions that mean you are well liked at the sales meeting will get you the cold shoulder at a sufficiently technical conference.

And if I was working in tech, I would want a relationship manager/account man/business cofounder who was good at dealing with people in both contexts.

My original point boils down to one simple thing - the people who are good at dealing with people are more instrumental to creating big companies and fortunes than the people with technical expertise. Getting the most value out of the deal comes back to dealing with people. Selling the most widgets is about convincing a lot of people. People, people, people.

Does this person have to be nice? Does this person have to be everyone's pal? Not necessarily, no. But such a one does have to be able to get people to do some desired action.

So if you're better at selling to nerds than lay-consumers, make more products for nerds. If you can deal with nerds better, you'll be able to build a better business around serving them.

>My original point boils down to one simple thing - the people who are good at dealing with people are more instrumental to creating big companies and fortunes than the people with technical expertise. Getting the most value out of the deal comes back to dealing with people. Selling the most widgets is about convincing a lot of people. People, people, people.

Re-reading the parent comment, I see now that I misunderstood what you were saying. I thought that you meant that 'great men' who created "the modern corporation" and other social structures are what drove innovation over the last century.

I agree that social stuff has a lot to do with an individual's ability to accumulate money, and that a social specialist can still generally go further than a technical specialist (though, both get a lot of mileage out of knowing a little of the other's specialty.)

I do note that the world is dramatically better for the socially unskilled now than it was 100 years ago; the trend is that nerds are more and more valued, to the point now where some of the socially skilled manipulators actually pretend to be nerds.

but yeah, re-reading, I misunderstood your point. I don't really disagree that business people tend to make more money than technical people. (though, like I said, the trend is favourable for the technical folks.)

I love working with the sort of people you describe, but they are pretty rare, and they don't send out emails like this. I've worked with people like the OPs emailer (not because I got such an email, just because I needed a job), and its pretty much the equivalent of this:

"Hey I heard you are an experienced removalist, and I am moving house at the weekend, so maybe you could help me out? I won't be helping, or lifting anything, but I will be giving lots of advice about the best way to do things. Even though I have never moved house before, I believe my advice is valuable because I have watched a lot of episodes of Holmes on Homes"

Really love what you've laid out here and think it's a great description of the relationship connecting both sides of the equation.

I am also always looking for a co-founder. When a geek approaches me (or I approach them) to be the suit for their project, I usually give them some simple soft skill to do - like go out and talk to potential customers and get feedback from say 500 in a day.

Finally, before I even consider hustling customers and investors I want some paltry measure of ability. If you can hack something together in 24-48 hours or even a week, then they're quality geek co-founder material. Any longer and it's a judgement call. Most won't get past step one, and you certainly didn't want them as a co-founder.

I have learned this the hard way. I raised money only to find out my tech co-founder couldn't push code in a timely manner. This street goes both ways and that is why teams of 2 work best, one to build it and one to sell it to the world. The question for me is, can the geek cut it?

Talking one-on-one to 500 customers in one day to get feedback doesn't seem possible. If you only spend 5 minutes talking to each customer, and you have them lined up back to back so you don't waste time in between, it would still take 40+ hours.

I guess you could do 1 minute conversations and get it down to about 8 hours, although even assuming you can get 500 people to queue up for this, I'm curious what will come out of 500 x 1 min. back to back conversations.

It seems to me that the only useful way to get feedback from 500 people in one day involves sending out some kind of survey. Then again this isn't really my area of expertise, so I'm curious, how would you go about gathering feedback from 500 people in one day?

The entire post was a satirical response to the GP comment. It was meant to show how, depending on your point of view, the same logic can be applied to either the tech or the business side and maybe even "look good" but seem unreasonable to those on the other side of the table.

Not saying I am in full agreement, but it's pretty clearly the purpose of the parent comment.

Except that it is possible to hack together something in 24 - 48 hours, or a week, assuming you are willing to pare it down to essentials and fake parts of the demo.

Satire aside, it's enough to make me wonder if talking to 500 people is as trivial as setting up a twitter account. Setting up a twitter account or a C Corp is really not that hard to do.

I had a feeling that might be the case when I started reading about the 500 people in one day bit. The second half however, about assessing whether the future technical co-founder can actually build a prototype over a weekend, seems like reasonable advice.

Programmers aren't immune from overestimating their competency, and if you are about to get into a venture with someone you don't know well, I think it makes sense for both sides to do some due diligence.

>Programmers aren't immune from overestimating their competency

I would actually phrase it differently: programmers quite often overestimate their competency. I am not sure if it is unique to programmers or just an instance of the general inability to objectively analyze ourselves, but I do notice that the vast majority of programmers I have met (myself included :)) have a tendency to consider ourselves a smidge more capable than we actually may be from a purely objective standpoint. Then again the stretching is what grows great developers, so that overestimation that spurs you into attempting things just outside your current grasp is probably a net positive.

The reason is because the skill appears as magic to others, whereas business skills are something that anyone can at least imagine themselves doing. This is completely orthogonal from how difficult these jobs may be under varying circumstances.

I am curious about that too. I'm taking it at face value that "talking to 500 people" is as trivial as setting up a twitter account.

Only way I can think of is to do a survey and enlist the help of bored college students to stand in front of of a busy intersection. I'm guessing part of the "soft skill" is recognizing that > 90% of the people walking by won't even be interested in stopping and talking. (Or send an email/twitter/whatever blast somewhere. Or something). But essentially, "talking to 500 people" is not necessarily "talking one-on-one".

I think that says a lot more about the difference in mindset between the geek and the suit than anything else.

But the difference is that the 'software geeks' are the ones in demand in this senario.

A geek does not typically approach an outsider and say 'I've got skills can you come up with an idea for me?'. But on the flip side 'you have skills, I've got this idea' is a -very- common occurrence. If you are the one doing the approaching applying your own quality control is a given.

If against the odds you are being approached by an unknown geek wanting to partner with you, then testing their skills should be part of the process yeah, you both have to be confident in each other; though I would consider the above methods to be a truly terrible interview...

Isn't 5000 emails a bit steep to ask for in a day or even a week?

A conversion rate of 5% is pretty respectable, that means the landing page needs to be seen by 100k people to collect 5000 emails.

That's quite a bit for having nothing more than a landing page to offer, I can see that happening for a MVP, but not for just a landing page.

A post on Reddit, HN, etc, can get plenty of views for an interesting idea.

I'm kind of curious what the 'etc' are to which you refer?

Websites specific to the niche you're targetting or well known sites in the native language of the target audience. Perhaps Twitter or more closed communities like Something Awful.

Yeah, but it can't get that many. Not for a landing page.

Being #1 on HN for a few hours will bring you 20 to 30k views (cumulative with getting up and drifting back down). The reddit frontpage frontpage will get you the amount of views you need, but you're not getting there, I can almost promise you that.

Views are not email addresses. Worse, views are not real people expressing real interesting (e.g. would pay or be willing to change their habits) in your product. Views are a pretty meaningless indicator, overall.

I think the point was the parent post was saying you'd need 100k views w/ a 5% conversion which would be challenging. Evbn was saying reddit could get the 100k views.

I think you are completely correct. I think @evbn is, well, not wrong, because you can get the 100k views. I just don't think those views are going to net your (incredibly high) 5% conversion. The value of a view from a bored redditor is generally less than the value of a well-earned, targetted view.

It is quite a bit to get from a landing page, but I think that's the point. If something can get 5000 people on a mailing list in 1 day then it shows that there's a strong interest in the idea, so it's worth investing time in developing it further.

Man, if you can get 300 in a single day, you have my attention!

I got 300 in 1 hour - I used HN! :D

Well congratz to you sir!

Any early stage startup where there's so much polarization between geeks and suits at the outset is in trouble. Basically geeks need to learn to sell and suits need to learn to code. I could elaborate on this in a longer post. But I have to go back to working on some new channel capacity ideas. Stay tuned.

HN has novelty accounts now?

Honestly the suits don't need to code, but they do need to be comfortable discussing software and the limits/possibilities of technology.

Similarly, the geeks don't need to know all the aspects of selling, but they do need to know how to tell a customer that their product is awesome and all the advantages it has and why it's silly to not have use it.

Tell me the limits of a miter saw as they relate to project X without ever touching one...

I don't actually think suits need to learn code either but the knowledge is worth its weight in gold if they can.

In just about every business relationship I have with a vendor, there are two people talking to me. A sales guy who doesn't work on the product, and an engineer who does. The sales guy sells me the product, and the engineer gets me to buy it. It's far from standard to have suits get their hands dirty.

My experience is similar but with a key difference.

The sales team often consists of a sales guy who has barely seen the product (as you said) and a "systems engineer" who should not be confused for a developer. The engineers are often technically skilled members of the sales team that are experts at deploying the product and using it in customer environments. That said, they often have development skills (from previous experience) but they are certainly not getting their hands dirty with code in this role.

The "suit" co-founder of a start-up should be playing the role of a systems engineer and the account exec rolled into one because the "technical" co-founder rarely has the right personality/sales experience to be involved in sales.

Obviously, if you do manage to find a technical co-founder who has the systems engineer skills then you can change up the roles a bit but, in my experience, such people are incredibly rare (even in successful start-ups).

It would be interesting to correlate the numbers in your post with numbers that measure a developer. For example, the ability to get 5,000 email list subscribers in a week could be equivalent to creating a project that gets 200 Github watchers in a week. Both parties in this arrangement are classifiable.

Why spent everyone's time?

Usually it is clear from the beginning what people are made of and the quality of their thinking. Just say "No, thanks, good luck" and in 99,999% cases your decision will be the right one.

Making decisions based on conventional wisdom prevents you from "farming black swans." By asking the other person to do some basic tasks, they're at least passing the equivalent of fizzbuzz in execution ability and motivation.

No offense, but how many exits have you had to date?

Does the suit ever give you some technical task to do to test your execution or some other criteria (what if he actually wanted to see some code you've written)? What if the suit has some preferences on the technical side, sort of like how you have preferences on the "businessey" side of things? (e.g. C corporations and provisional patent applications)

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