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Here's why I advise extreme caution when partnering up if you're a programmer: If you have a co-founder or co-hacker that goes postal, off on their own, acting

Here's why I advise extreme caution when partnering up if you're a programmer: If you have a co-founder or co-hacker that goes postal, off on their own, acting shady, behaving badly, for whatever reason, you're lost at sea. If you don't have a safety net or savings in place to catch you, you're going to be living on the street. Thanks to someone else. You can't control other people. Your co-whatever could become a saboteur. The reasons why and how don't matter, it's about the ramification on your life and how deeply it reverberates. If that's the only thing you have going - your life is wrecked. You're humiliated by being kicked out of what you created. You have to start over, with an added penalty to all your family you can't support, your networking in tatters, and so on. Make no mistake - have a co-founder - you're one person away from having collateral damage done to your life. And they'll probably make the company tank afterwards. The main reason a co-founder was there was to keep each other's ideas/egos/visions/whatever in-check. Without that personality mechanism in place, the business is rudderless. So consider me a skeptic to this whole idea of sharing when I coded everything without safeguards in place for myself. That's the exact opposite reason I run my own thing. This is the one thing where I get control. If you got cash stashed away somehow, or other cash flow sources, you're in a safer spot to take your chances with a co-founder and bounce back should stuff hit the fan.

godzillabrennus 9y ago
There is so much truth to this. Just because someone is a good programmer doesn’t mean they will be a good partner in a venture.
jnordwick 9y ago
Why is this specific to being a programmer? This applies equally to every start up entrepreneur, from artists to inventor. And if you only waited until you have a firm financial backing behind you and you alone with nobody to split risk with, we wouldn't have very many start ups.
- git-pull 9y ago
  > And if you only waited until you have a firm financial backing behind you and you alone with nobody to split risk with, we wouldn't have very many start ups. A programmer doesn't have to wait. Try to take it from a programmer's perspective: We already have ideas. There's a huge supply of programmers. One's that'd be happy to write an MVP for that inventor/artist/etc in exchange for 20k. But I guarantee you there's zero programmers waiting around, saying to themselves, "If only I had a visionary come along to give me an idea" Programmer's get used to it. But at least once per year many of us hear something like, "I have a vision", "I got this idea, psst", because you can guarantee 99% of the time, they're not willing to put any cash into it themselves. What I get is a person bossing me around, while I don't get paid, and I absorb all the risk of their idea. > This applies equally to every start up entrepreneur, from artists to inventor. If I take on a co-founder, co-hacker, inventor, what do I get? What role do they play? The "ideas guy". My above post was based on the assumption they have a 50% split. But since they view themselves as the unique, creative force behind everything, they want 51%. Maybe more. Now, this co-founder thing would make sense if we laid transparent ground rules up front: while all this comes into formation, am I getting paid while I'm crafting this "vision"? Programmers are in a unique position when it comes to tech startups. They can bootstrap by themselves. The burden lies on the prospective co-founder to balance that contribution through something more than dictating and having ideas. That usually is them going out and raising a seed or self-funding.
  - dyim 9y ago
    "But I guarantee you there's zero programmers waiting around, saying to themselves, 'If only I had a visionary come along to give me an idea'" My co-founder and I are both technical. For the first year of our company - as we built and sold things - we were constantly thinking "damn, life would sure be a lot easier if we had a killer idea. We would pay millions for an idea that we could execute on." It's super important. Everyone has ideas, but most ideas are frankly not that great. Our ideas certainly weren't. Then we found a better idea, got some traction, etc. Life's good. But if great ideas truly were a dime a dozen, we would've had much more fun in 2016 :) Furthermore, if you take on a co-founder, here's what you get: one founder can focus on building the product, while the other founder focuses on figuring out what variation of the product is most needed by the outside world. It is very difficult for one person to do both. These require two fairly different skillsets, and both benefit from having technical experience - the former for obvious reasons; the latter because it's much easier to know what's buildable if you've built stuff before.
robbrown451 9y ago
And yet, so many successful companies were started by more than one person. Caution is advisable, but simply working by yourself isn't for most people. It's quite possible to start working with someone tentatively, and get to know them and trust them as time goes on, as well as to protect yourself and your project legally once it gets further along.
tinbad 9y ago
To me your comment seems to highlight how important it is to have good safeguards in place when founding (any) company. I’ve seen (and experienced first hand) things go south even when people knew and trusted each other for years/decades for an infinite amount of reasons: people change, you may not know them as well as you think, success/failure puts immense pressure and makes people irrational, etc. etc. Have basic safeguards in place like backups, paper trials, make sure you have good contracts that cover what happens if one of you leaves, can’t work, doesn’t perform, etc. make sure you have an independent board member further along, etc.
jv22222 9y ago
This comment makes it seems like it's a foregone conclusion your business will be a success. Yet, the odds of success are _very_ small... If you have a co-founder... or if you don't have a co-founder. In other words, it will probably be nothing to do with your co-founder that you end up on the street! And, while I'm on that subject. DON'T leave your day job when you start your side project. Just keep your day job until you're making enough money with your side project before you leave!
- git-pull 9y ago
  > This comment makes it seems like it's a foregone conclusion your business will be a success. Startups are a game of optimism. The mindset is: in it to win it. It's totally OK to be visualizing the finish line and your equity turning into a Tesla, house, or yacht. And you're all sharing the success. It's a huge motivator. > And, while I'm on that subject. DON'T leave your day job when you start your side project. Just keep your day job until you're making enough money with your side project before you leave! You can't survive in this field on a 4 hour work week. Let's be a bit more generous and assume we've built a savings with full time job first. What is the other founder bringing to the table while the programmer produces tangibles? Billing code, dashboard, homepage, getting users, retaining users, design/ux, debugging, customer service/support. This takes months of grueling work. You have to go all-in. And a co-founder that's less than 100% is a serious red flag. Why would I want to share ownership with someone who saw this as a side project, when I view it as center of my life? Get what I mean?
  - jv22222 9y ago
    Don't get me wrong I think having a co-founder is often a bad idea. I just don't like any of the reasons you mentioned. Hmm. Let's see. 1) It’s very hard to convince a cofounder to join an unproven business. And that is going to waste a lot of your time looking for someone. When you could be building your business instead. 2) You likely won’t need to build anything to validate your product if you use duct-taping, wizard of oz, lean startup. And after it's validated, well, just go ahead and build the mvp using the minimal toolset. 3) You can hire someone from a site like Upwork and in many cases they will be a lot cheaper than you are and still pretty good. 4) With frameworks like rails, laravel, bootstrap and a mountain of plugins it's pretty easy to build products that can make money in your spare time (10h week). > Billing code, dashboard, homepage, getting users, retaining users, design/ux, debugging, customer service/support. This takes months of grueling work. If any of those things are grueling for you: a) Are you sure this is the right game for ya? ;) b) Are you sure someone didn't already make a lib for that? c) Outsource them! Edit: If the main reason you want a co-founder is because you don't want to go it alone then you could fix that by joining a site like indi-hackers and talking to other founders as you work on your stuff. Maybe join a mastermind group. Etc.

godzillabrennus 9y ago

There is so much truth to this. Just because someone is a good programmer doesn’t mean they will be a good partner in a venture.

jnordwick 9y ago

Why is this specific to being a programmer? This applies equally to every start up entrepreneur, from artists to inventor. And if you only waited until you have a firm financial backing behind you and you alone with nobody to split risk with, we wouldn't have very many start ups.

git-pull 9y ago
> And if you only waited until you have a firm financial backing behind you and you alone with nobody to split risk with, we wouldn't have very many start ups. A programmer doesn't have to wait. Try to take it from a programmer's perspective: We already have ideas. There's a huge supply of programmers. One's that'd be happy to write an MVP for that inventor/artist/etc in exchange for 20k. But I guarantee you there's zero programmers waiting around, saying to themselves, "If only I had a visionary come along to give me an idea" Programmer's get used to it. But at least once per year many of us hear something like, "I have a vision", "I got this idea, psst", because you can guarantee 99% of the time, they're not willing to put any cash into it themselves. What I get is a person bossing me around, while I don't get paid, and I absorb all the risk of their idea. > This applies equally to every start up entrepreneur, from artists to inventor. If I take on a co-founder, co-hacker, inventor, what do I get? What role do they play? The "ideas guy". My above post was based on the assumption they have a 50% split. But since they view themselves as the unique, creative force behind everything, they want 51%. Maybe more. Now, this co-founder thing would make sense if we laid transparent ground rules up front: while all this comes into formation, am I getting paid while I'm crafting this "vision"? Programmers are in a unique position when it comes to tech startups. They can bootstrap by themselves. The burden lies on the prospective co-founder to balance that contribution through something more than dictating and having ideas. That usually is them going out and raising a seed or self-funding.
- dyim 9y ago
  "But I guarantee you there's zero programmers waiting around, saying to themselves, 'If only I had a visionary come along to give me an idea'" My co-founder and I are both technical. For the first year of our company - as we built and sold things - we were constantly thinking "damn, life would sure be a lot easier if we had a killer idea. We would pay millions for an idea that we could execute on." It's super important. Everyone has ideas, but most ideas are frankly not that great. Our ideas certainly weren't. Then we found a better idea, got some traction, etc. Life's good. But if great ideas truly were a dime a dozen, we would've had much more fun in 2016 :) Furthermore, if you take on a co-founder, here's what you get: one founder can focus on building the product, while the other founder focuses on figuring out what variation of the product is most needed by the outside world. It is very difficult for one person to do both. These require two fairly different skillsets, and both benefit from having technical experience - the former for obvious reasons; the latter because it's much easier to know what's buildable if you've built stuff before.

robbrown451 9y ago

And yet, so many successful companies were started by more than one person. Caution is advisable, but simply working by yourself isn't for most people. It's quite possible to start working with someone tentatively, and get to know them and trust them as time goes on, as well as to protect yourself and your project legally once it gets further along.

tinbad 9y ago

To me your comment seems to highlight how important it is to have good safeguards in place when founding (any) company. I’ve seen (and experienced first hand) things go south even when people knew and trusted each other for years/decades for an infinite amount of reasons: people change, you may not know them as well as you think, success/failure puts immense pressure and makes people irrational, etc. etc. Have basic safeguards in place like backups, paper trials, make sure you have good contracts that cover what happens if one of you leaves, can’t work, doesn’t perform, etc. make sure you have an independent board member further along, etc.

jv22222 9y ago

This comment makes it seems like it's a foregone conclusion your business will be a success. Yet, the odds of success are _very_ small... If you have a co-founder... or if you don't have a co-founder. In other words, it will probably be nothing to do with your co-founder that you end up on the street! And, while I'm on that subject. DON'T leave your day job when you start your side project. Just keep your day job until you're making enough money with your side project before you leave!

git-pull 9y ago
> This comment makes it seems like it's a foregone conclusion your business will be a success. Startups are a game of optimism. The mindset is: in it to win it. It's totally OK to be visualizing the finish line and your equity turning into a Tesla, house, or yacht. And you're all sharing the success. It's a huge motivator. > And, while I'm on that subject. DON'T leave your day job when you start your side project. Just keep your day job until you're making enough money with your side project before you leave! You can't survive in this field on a 4 hour work week. Let's be a bit more generous and assume we've built a savings with full time job first. What is the other founder bringing to the table while the programmer produces tangibles? Billing code, dashboard, homepage, getting users, retaining users, design/ux, debugging, customer service/support. This takes months of grueling work. You have to go all-in. And a co-founder that's less than 100% is a serious red flag. Why would I want to share ownership with someone who saw this as a side project, when I view it as center of my life? Get what I mean?
- jv22222 9y ago
  Don't get me wrong I think having a co-founder is often a bad idea. I just don't like any of the reasons you mentioned. Hmm. Let's see. 1) It’s very hard to convince a cofounder to join an unproven business. And that is going to waste a lot of your time looking for someone. When you could be building your business instead. 2) You likely won’t need to build anything to validate your product if you use duct-taping, wizard of oz, lean startup. And after it's validated, well, just go ahead and build the mvp using the minimal toolset. 3) You can hire someone from a site like Upwork and in many cases they will be a lot cheaper than you are and still pretty good. 4) With frameworks like rails, laravel, bootstrap and a mountain of plugins it's pretty easy to build products that can make money in your spare time (10h week). > Billing code, dashboard, homepage, getting users, retaining users, design/ux, debugging, customer service/support. This takes months of grueling work. If any of those things are grueling for you: a) Are you sure this is the right game for ya? ;) b) Are you sure someone didn't already make a lib for that? c) Outsource them! Edit: If the main reason you want a co-founder is because you don't want to go it alone then you could fix that by joining a site like indi-hackers and talking to other founders as you work on your stuff. Maybe join a mastermind group. Etc.