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What To Look For In A Business Co-Founder

112 points by jasonlbaptiste 16y ago

sabj 16y ago
I think I am good at all of these things! (And, beyond just 'thinking' them, have had the opportunity to prove myself before). While I know a lot of flaky aspiring business-types, I still get bummed when I see articles written like those that cropped up tonight, writing off the idea of ever partnering with someone who isn't going to necessarily spend 90% of their time writing code. I think that it's great to emphasize engineering / technical talent, but not fair to just write off everyone else as a waste of time. I'm fluent in the languages that developers speak and can serve as a liaison to the rest of the universe; I think that I have a way to be really helpful and at the same time help shape product visions. Plus I know enough code to make trouble for myself. If / when I have something I want to pursue, I am trying to make sure I won't be beholden to all of these finicky technical types who seem to enjoy so much scowling at the idea of anyone business-focused. I don't see things as so black and white, and while I understand that some will say it is easy enough for a hacker-type to learn the ropes of what other business things they might need to do, that doesn't mean that having someone less technical is all doom and gloom! At least, it hasn't been from my experience so far. Hopefully I'll have a chance to prove this perspective soon :)
il 16y ago
Great article, I'm happy to see that I have experience succeeding at many of these attributes, and am studying many others. I'm eagerly looking forward to the second half. Aside from these, I can't emphasize enough how important it is for the business guy to have some technical knowledge/ability, at least enough to be able to make reasonable demands of developers and determine project scope, expense, etc. If they've at least managed a technical team before, they'll know better than to ask you to build the next Google in a week on shared hosting. I was doing consulting recently for a B2C Web 2.0 tech startup where both cofounders were great at fundraising, talking to customers, etc but were completely nontechnical. Even making a small change to their site, like adding analytics code or uploading a new landing page involved an email to their outsourced dev team in India and 24 hours of waiting. Needless to say, the job was a nightmare.
- sabj 16y ago
  Wow! That sounds crazy indeed. My feeling is that if you are reasonably smart, there is nothing to stop you from learning those kinds of skills. Plus, in that kind of situation, it's very important to make sure that you don't get ripped off, etc. Have to be able to understand what's going on. Honestly, making / maintaining / designing web sites is fairly easy, especially if you have something in place and are looking only for incremental change. While I don't expect everyone to be able to write beautiful CSS in their sleep, if you have a web startup you should be able to know what's going on there. I can handle all kinds of front-end / design problems, just never cared to develop the technical chops for serious back-end wizardry. Looks like I am having to try to pick up more of that these days.
jiganti 16y ago
What's the best way, as a future business-cofounder, to be reasonably well-versed in the technical side of things? Would I approach it as if I wanted to eventually code, but stop once I view my understanding as adequate for it's purposes? Or is there a different approach specific to my having little interest in actually coding myself?
- jiffylu 16y ago
  Reading up on tech news helps as you run into tech debates such as html5 vs. flash. There are free MIT classes on opencourseware that have helped me bridge the tech gap. I've taken a few courses on the site on my own time and I still can't program very well but it has helped me better understand the theories and challenges of developing software. This helps when you're communicating with developers. I think a big issue is understanding the software development process. I would check out "Inspired" by Marty Cagan and a lighter (more anecdotal) read in "Dreaming in Code".
- albertsun 16y ago
  The best way is to develop an interest in coding and learning how to actually code.
  - jiganti 16y ago
    Yeah, this is what I imagined. I actually do have an interest in programming and computer science in general, but if I were to really become proficient I would want the technical side of it to be my main interest. That would mean sacrificing the business end, which is what I'm just more passionate about right now. I wasn't sure if there was a way to learn the foundations and jargon for what technical cofounders do, without actually beginning to physically code. It seems that the main intention is to be able to communicate on a higher level with a programmer than describing in layman's terms what I want.
- kloncks 16y ago
  I really like this question. As a technical guy, I struggled a lot to come up with an adequate answer as a business-minded friend and I were discussing this. We almost became co-founders. I'll be interested in what others' experiences entailed. But for us, I think we deemed it simply necessary for you to have a good idea of the technical side of things. You don't need to code and interest in learning to code isn't needed. But when I talk about topics regarding code, you should at least have an idea of what I'm referring to; you are, after all, aspiring to work in a technical project. So when I refer to something like vim or memory control, you should have at least a vague idea of what I'm referring to. Brush up on that. Read a lot on technology. A good person that came up in the discussion as an example was Steve Jobs. In many ways, he wouldn't be seen as the technical partner (at least when compared to Woz), but he does seem to know and understand the overall idea behind some of the hardware he mentions, which is vital.
mkramlich 16y ago
I like how right next to the OA's title was a photo of Steve Jobs. I think that pretty much answered the question immediately. If you could pick one guy who would be the epitome of the ideal business co-founder for a tech guy: Steve Jobs. You can't argue with a successful track record.
- bl4k 16y ago
  the Apple case of having a biz co-founder in Jobs and a tech co-founder in Woz is often cited, but Jobs is really a tech guy who knows his biz stuff. He made most of the tech design decisions at Apple and NeXT including ObjC, Rhapsody, Carbon, Cocoa, Mach, etc. When OS X was in early beta I exchanged emails with Jobs about some FreeBSD libs and he definitely is a tech guy first as he knew the ins and outs of everything. My suggestion would be to just find another tech person who can talk to a room of people and has some level of confidence. It is far more important to have two tech hands than one guy fine tuning powerpoint presentations and other other busting himself coding. You will pick up all that biz stuff easily anyway, especially with all the other entrepreneurs out there to help you.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    thanks for the info! I did not know he was that technical. I'll have to go reread my early Apple history again. But despite this angle, I think we agree he made a great "biz" cofounder partner to Woz.
  - kranner 16y ago
    Unfortunately Jobs is just the guy to have an engineer prepare replies on his behalf and pass them off without attribution, too.
    - dennisgorelik 16y ago
      How do you know that?
      - kranner 16y ago
timr 16y ago
Looking over this list, I think the problem with the "business co-founder" is clear: there's simply no such thing as "business". There's copy editing, user support, PR, HR, operations, accounting, legal, etc. And if you're going to work at a startup, everyone needs to be good at many of these things. Skill -- actual skill -- is at a premium. There's no room for the guy who wants to boss people around and think big thoughts and call it "business". Too often, the guys who you run into at meetups and valley social events are what are best characterized as "useless douchebags"; they have no marketable skills or experience, but plenty of ideas that they'd like you to work on (typically for free). But real, valuable, "business" people have hard-won skills. Real business people are accountants, lawyers, salespeople with experience and contacts -- people who have something with more value than the ability to talk a lot and go to parties. Thus, I don't think it's interesting to debate the question of the business co-founder, because it's not a useful categorization. If you're starting a business, you're a business co-founder, by definition. You might focus on code, but you're going to have to worry about a lot more than that if you want to succeed. It doesn't matter what you call the person sitting next to you, as long as they're contributing. And if they're not contributing, you're in trouble even if they're a hacker.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- wccrawford 16y ago
  I think the other half of that is that people that DO have skills are out using them. They aren't sitting around hoping to find a startup to co-found. The ones that end up being a successful co-founder are the ones that have a sudden lapse in activity for whatever reason, or can be convinced to give up their current success for a chance at bigger success. It's no wonder these people are scarce.
  - timr 16y ago
    Agreed. Personally, the biggest obstacle to doing my own thing is finding someone to work with who is hard-working and trustworthy, but who also has a similar outlook and tolerance for risk. These people are rarer than investors.
todayiamme 16y ago
For some funny reason this list is kinda secondary to me. Of course, it's critical that my co-founder is talented and brilliant. I wouldn't be approaching her/him if they weren't, but isn't trust far more important? I've been led to believe that personality, drive and determination are far more accurate metrics of measuring whether you should work with someone or not. Is that wrong?
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  "Trust" is key. I speak from (painful, expensive) experience.
- will_critchlow 16y ago
  I only have the good kind of experience here. My co-founder is also my oldest friend. I wouldn't recommend this to everyone, but my experience does mean that I would never co-found with someone I didn't know very well and trust completely outside of the venture. I would personally say that you are thinking about the problem the right way, but you do need the filtering step as well. Trust isn't (even nearly) enough if someone isn't smart or can't get stuff done.
zaidf 16y ago
The #1 problem with most business guys is not that they cannot program but that they are too damn passive. They accept the rules and the constraints too damn easily. My biz dev friend comes from a traditional background. He is great at what he does. But he will be the first one to acknowledge that his world is very limited by rules. A week ago I asked him to find us the best telemarketer in town and to have him working for us by next Monday(today). I told him to set up 2-3 interviews in the next 5 days. His response? "That is impossible..". What part of that is impossible, I asked. So I broke it down for him: there are 2-3 incredible guys in this town of 60,000 people who we could hire for this job. This is exactly what I told him: "you are THREE fucking phone numbers away from meeting the right guy". That's it. There is nothing more to it, really. Then I asked him to call up all his buds from his last job(in telemarketing) and find out who that top guy is. If they don't know, get at least another ph. number off their friend and ask them. Keep doing that until you find the number of one of the top guys. All this took place Sunday evening. He got in touch with the #1 performer at our campus phonathon through a friend and we had lunch Monday afternoon. Less than 24 hours from the time we hatched the plan, we found our guy. Now I am not a sales guy or a business guy. But programming makes you see BS. A business guy, by default, is full of self-sabotaging BS and limiting beliefs. Ones that are go-getters and refuse to accept the default rules can really add value to your team.
- fabiandesimone 16y ago
  You say you found him. Is he working with you now?
  - zaidf 16y ago
    Yes, today's his first day. It's just a PT position, not FT.
faramarz 16y ago
Cute! But I disagree and here's why. There is no list of criteria to be a co-founder. I'm sorry to pick on you Jason, but I'm speaking generally and your post happens to fall victim. Co-founder, founder, chairman, executive instigator, this and that; All of them are cute titles to have on your business card, attending the next non-important hot tech gathering in la-la land and none of them have anything to do with your business success. Maybe I've been surrounding myself with too much tech startup news lately, but It seems to me that because of low barrier to entry in this sector and the flood of weekend projects mashed up together under the influence of 10 red bulls, this community is more obsessed with quantifying every action/inaction of the journey than focusing on the actual journey and the end goal. My advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is to stop reading about should and would be lists and just go out there and get it done. You don't need a biz dev guy, or know what PR even stands for. Your number one priority is the obsession of getting-things-done. If you come up with a brilliant new BBQ grille design that sits on top of the camping fire pit, great, find a local fabricator and get a prototype. Pay for the CAD design and send it over to China for overnight production of a dozen samples. No NDA's. NO Investors. No biz devs or marketing guys. By weeks end if you don't have a solid demo of your grille in hand to walk into wal-mart for the sales pitch you booked a month before, you have already lost the battle. Go find a job. I take issue with reading entrepreneurship advice from a list because it's meaningless to everyone else but the person who wrote it. The more lists we as a group come up with, the worst shape we are as entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone and everyone is not made from the same fabric. So why are we trying to breakdown this pursuit into something everyone could comprehend, because they can't and won't, and only those who really do should not even have the time to read lists after lists of pre-packaged advice, because that means they're not getting-things-done. My apologies again if this seems like a direct response to the OP, because it's not.
emanuer 16y ago
Huh? Money, no mention of the ability do manage money? I mean, it is obviously simple to calculate the cash-flow. I am talking about making the decision: "Yes lets focus on this aspect of our business, because we can expect the highest returns for our time and resources invested." I understand that especially at an early point it is all just guesses, but some guesses are more probable than others. Some examples are: income, fixed and variable costs, margins, taxes, cash flow projections and all that other money related stuff. I suppose this might be negligible for every startup that gets more funding than they could possibly spend in the foreseeable future. Rather this is essential for every bootstrapped startup. Btw, I am the Business Co-Founder and I just went through the list. I gave myself 7 out of 12 points. (The fact that I have an MBA helped me only with the 4th point) If the points in the list are equally weighted, the conclusion for me would be; I suck. But at least this list gives me an indication for where I have to improve. At last I want to mention, I found it to be a great post and want to thank you very much for your free advice, it is highly appreciated.

112 points by jasonlbaptiste 16y ago

sabj 16y ago

I think I am good at all of these things! (And, beyond just 'thinking' them, have had the opportunity to prove myself before). While I know a lot of flaky aspiring business-types, I still get bummed when I see articles written like those that cropped up tonight, writing off the idea of ever partnering with someone who isn't going to necessarily spend 90% of their time writing code. I think that it's great to emphasize engineering / technical talent, but not fair to just write off everyone else as a waste of time. I'm fluent in the languages that developers speak and can serve as a liaison to the rest of the universe; I think that I have a way to be really helpful and at the same time help shape product visions. Plus I know enough code to make trouble for myself. If / when I have something I want to pursue, I am trying to make sure I won't be beholden to all of these finicky technical types who seem to enjoy so much scowling at the idea of anyone business-focused. I don't see things as so black and white, and while I understand that some will say it is easy enough for a hacker-type to learn the ropes of what other business things they might need to do, that doesn't mean that having someone less technical is all doom and gloom! At least, it hasn't been from my experience so far. Hopefully I'll have a chance to prove this perspective soon :)

il 16y ago

Great article, I'm happy to see that I have experience succeeding at many of these attributes, and am studying many others. I'm eagerly looking forward to the second half. Aside from these, I can't emphasize enough how important it is for the business guy to have some technical knowledge/ability, at least enough to be able to make reasonable demands of developers and determine project scope, expense, etc. If they've at least managed a technical team before, they'll know better than to ask you to build the next Google in a week on shared hosting. I was doing consulting recently for a B2C Web 2.0 tech startup where both cofounders were great at fundraising, talking to customers, etc but were completely nontechnical. Even making a small change to their site, like adding analytics code or uploading a new landing page involved an email to their outsourced dev team in India and 24 hours of waiting. Needless to say, the job was a nightmare.

sabj 16y ago
Wow! That sounds crazy indeed. My feeling is that if you are reasonably smart, there is nothing to stop you from learning those kinds of skills. Plus, in that kind of situation, it's very important to make sure that you don't get ripped off, etc. Have to be able to understand what's going on. Honestly, making / maintaining / designing web sites is fairly easy, especially if you have something in place and are looking only for incremental change. While I don't expect everyone to be able to write beautiful CSS in their sleep, if you have a web startup you should be able to know what's going on there. I can handle all kinds of front-end / design problems, just never cared to develop the technical chops for serious back-end wizardry. Looks like I am having to try to pick up more of that these days.

jiganti 16y ago

What's the best way, as a future business-cofounder, to be reasonably well-versed in the technical side of things? Would I approach it as if I wanted to eventually code, but stop once I view my understanding as adequate for it's purposes? Or is there a different approach specific to my having little interest in actually coding myself?

jiffylu 16y ago
Reading up on tech news helps as you run into tech debates such as html5 vs. flash. There are free MIT classes on opencourseware that have helped me bridge the tech gap. I've taken a few courses on the site on my own time and I still can't program very well but it has helped me better understand the theories and challenges of developing software. This helps when you're communicating with developers. I think a big issue is understanding the software development process. I would check out "Inspired" by Marty Cagan and a lighter (more anecdotal) read in "Dreaming in Code".
albertsun 16y ago
The best way is to develop an interest in coding and learning how to actually code.
- jiganti 16y ago
  Yeah, this is what I imagined. I actually do have an interest in programming and computer science in general, but if I were to really become proficient I would want the technical side of it to be my main interest. That would mean sacrificing the business end, which is what I'm just more passionate about right now. I wasn't sure if there was a way to learn the foundations and jargon for what technical cofounders do, without actually beginning to physically code. It seems that the main intention is to be able to communicate on a higher level with a programmer than describing in layman's terms what I want.
kloncks 16y ago
I really like this question. As a technical guy, I struggled a lot to come up with an adequate answer as a business-minded friend and I were discussing this. We almost became co-founders. I'll be interested in what others' experiences entailed. But for us, I think we deemed it simply necessary for you to have a good idea of the technical side of things. You don't need to code and interest in learning to code isn't needed. But when I talk about topics regarding code, you should at least have an idea of what I'm referring to; you are, after all, aspiring to work in a technical project. So when I refer to something like vim or memory control, you should have at least a vague idea of what I'm referring to. Brush up on that. Read a lot on technology. A good person that came up in the discussion as an example was Steve Jobs. In many ways, he wouldn't be seen as the technical partner (at least when compared to Woz), but he does seem to know and understand the overall idea behind some of the hardware he mentions, which is vital.

mkramlich 16y ago

I like how right next to the OA's title was a photo of Steve Jobs. I think that pretty much answered the question immediately. If you could pick one guy who would be the epitome of the ideal business co-founder for a tech guy: Steve Jobs. You can't argue with a successful track record.

bl4k 16y ago
the Apple case of having a biz co-founder in Jobs and a tech co-founder in Woz is often cited, but Jobs is really a tech guy who knows his biz stuff. He made most of the tech design decisions at Apple and NeXT including ObjC, Rhapsody, Carbon, Cocoa, Mach, etc. When OS X was in early beta I exchanged emails with Jobs about some FreeBSD libs and he definitely is a tech guy first as he knew the ins and outs of everything. My suggestion would be to just find another tech person who can talk to a room of people and has some level of confidence. It is far more important to have two tech hands than one guy fine tuning powerpoint presentations and other other busting himself coding. You will pick up all that biz stuff easily anyway, especially with all the other entrepreneurs out there to help you.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  thanks for the info! I did not know he was that technical. I'll have to go reread my early Apple history again. But despite this angle, I think we agree he made a great "biz" cofounder partner to Woz.
- kranner 16y ago
  Unfortunately Jobs is just the guy to have an engineer prepare replies on his behalf and pass them off without attribution, too.
  - dennisgorelik 16y ago
    How do you know that?
    - kranner 16y ago

timr 16y ago

Looking over this list, I think the problem with the "business co-founder" is clear: there's simply no such thing as "business". There's copy editing, user support, PR, HR, operations, accounting, legal, etc. And if you're going to work at a startup, everyone needs to be good at many of these things. Skill -- actual skill -- is at a premium. There's no room for the guy who wants to boss people around and think big thoughts and call it "business". Too often, the guys who you run into at meetups and valley social events are what are best characterized as "useless douchebags"; they have no marketable skills or experience, but plenty of ideas that they'd like you to work on (typically for free). But real, valuable, "business" people have hard-won skills. Real business people are accountants, lawyers, salespeople with experience and contacts -- people who have something with more value than the ability to talk a lot and go to parties. Thus, I don't think it's interesting to debate the question of the business co-founder, because it's not a useful categorization. If you're starting a business, you're a business co-founder, by definition. You might focus on code, but you're going to have to worry about a lot more than that if you want to succeed. It doesn't matter what you call the person sitting next to you, as long as they're contributing. And if they're not contributing, you're in trouble even if they're a hacker.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
wccrawford 16y ago
I think the other half of that is that people that DO have skills are out using them. They aren't sitting around hoping to find a startup to co-found. The ones that end up being a successful co-founder are the ones that have a sudden lapse in activity for whatever reason, or can be convinced to give up their current success for a chance at bigger success. It's no wonder these people are scarce.
- timr 16y ago
  Agreed. Personally, the biggest obstacle to doing my own thing is finding someone to work with who is hard-working and trustworthy, but who also has a similar outlook and tolerance for risk. These people are rarer than investors.

todayiamme 16y ago

For some funny reason this list is kinda secondary to me. Of course, it's critical that my co-founder is talented and brilliant. I wouldn't be approaching her/him if they weren't, but isn't trust far more important? I've been led to believe that personality, drive and determination are far more accurate metrics of measuring whether you should work with someone or not. Is that wrong?

michael_dorfman 16y ago
"Trust" is key. I speak from (painful, expensive) experience.
will_critchlow 16y ago
I only have the good kind of experience here. My co-founder is also my oldest friend. I wouldn't recommend this to everyone, but my experience does mean that I would never co-found with someone I didn't know very well and trust completely outside of the venture. I would personally say that you are thinking about the problem the right way, but you do need the filtering step as well. Trust isn't (even nearly) enough if someone isn't smart or can't get stuff done.

zaidf 16y ago

The #1 problem with most business guys is not that they cannot program but that they are too damn passive. They accept the rules and the constraints too damn easily. My biz dev friend comes from a traditional background. He is great at what he does. But he will be the first one to acknowledge that his world is very limited by rules. A week ago I asked him to find us the best telemarketer in town and to have him working for us by next Monday(today). I told him to set up 2-3 interviews in the next 5 days. His response? "That is impossible..". What part of that is impossible, I asked. So I broke it down for him: there are 2-3 incredible guys in this town of 60,000 people who we could hire for this job. This is exactly what I told him: "you are THREE fucking phone numbers away from meeting the right guy". That's it. There is nothing more to it, really. Then I asked him to call up all his buds from his last job(in telemarketing) and find out who that top guy is. If they don't know, get at least another ph. number off their friend and ask them. Keep doing that until you find the number of one of the top guys. All this took place Sunday evening. He got in touch with the #1 performer at our campus phonathon through a friend and we had lunch Monday afternoon. Less than 24 hours from the time we hatched the plan, we found our guy. Now I am not a sales guy or a business guy. But programming makes you see BS. A business guy, by default, is full of self-sabotaging BS and limiting beliefs. Ones that are go-getters and refuse to accept the default rules can really add value to your team.

fabiandesimone 16y ago
You say you found him. Is he working with you now?
- zaidf 16y ago
  Yes, today's his first day. It's just a PT position, not FT.

faramarz 16y ago

Cute! But I disagree and here's why. There is no list of criteria to be a co-founder. I'm sorry to pick on you Jason, but I'm speaking generally and your post happens to fall victim. Co-founder, founder, chairman, executive instigator, this and that; All of them are cute titles to have on your business card, attending the next non-important hot tech gathering in la-la land and none of them have anything to do with your business success. Maybe I've been surrounding myself with too much tech startup news lately, but It seems to me that because of low barrier to entry in this sector and the flood of weekend projects mashed up together under the influence of 10 red bulls, this community is more obsessed with quantifying every action/inaction of the journey than focusing on the actual journey and the end goal. My advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is to stop reading about should and would be lists and just go out there and get it done. You don't need a biz dev guy, or know what PR even stands for. Your number one priority is the obsession of getting-things-done. If you come up with a brilliant new BBQ grille design that sits on top of the camping fire pit, great, find a local fabricator and get a prototype. Pay for the CAD design and send it over to China for overnight production of a dozen samples. No NDA's. NO Investors. No biz devs or marketing guys. By weeks end if you don't have a solid demo of your grille in hand to walk into wal-mart for the sales pitch you booked a month before, you have already lost the battle. Go find a job. I take issue with reading entrepreneurship advice from a list because it's meaningless to everyone else but the person who wrote it. The more lists we as a group come up with, the worst shape we are as entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone and everyone is not made from the same fabric. So why are we trying to breakdown this pursuit into something everyone could comprehend, because they can't and won't, and only those who really do should not even have the time to read lists after lists of pre-packaged advice, because that means they're not getting-things-done. My apologies again if this seems like a direct response to the OP, because it's not.

emanuer 16y ago

Huh? Money, no mention of the ability do manage money? I mean, it is obviously simple to calculate the cash-flow. I am talking about making the decision: "Yes lets focus on this aspect of our business, because we can expect the highest returns for our time and resources invested." I understand that especially at an early point it is all just guesses, but some guesses are more probable than others. Some examples are: income, fixed and variable costs, margins, taxes, cash flow projections and all that other money related stuff. I suppose this might be negligible for every startup that gets more funding than they could possibly spend in the foreseeable future. Rather this is essential for every bootstrapped startup. Btw, I am the Business Co-Founder and I just went through the list. I gave myself 7 out of 12 points. (The fact that I have an MBA helped me only with the 4th point) If the points in the list are equally weighted, the conclusion for me would be; I suck. But at least this list gives me an indication for where I have to improve. At last I want to mention, I found it to be a great post and want to thank you very much for your free advice, it is highly appreciated.