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You could flip it and it would be just as true (that is, not at all): Speaking as a business guy, my default position is to be turned off by co-founding with a

You could flip it and it would be just as true (that is, not at all): Speaking as a business guy, my default position is to be turned off by co-founding with a technical guy unless they have an amazing track record. I like the advice of earning a business co-founder. I just wish more technical guys realized their code isn't that special, isn't a magic way of printing money and just coming up with the implementation doesn't entitle you to 75% of a two-man venture. It doesn't even really entitle you to an extra 10%. In the beginning, your job is probably going to be to find a place to host, writing alpha CRUD apps, buying computers, buying food, buying and assembling furniture and generally just making things work. That's all very unglamorous work but, depending on the venture, it's quite likely your (alleged) coding skills will be of very little value (until you've found a market). I don't think I'm alone (as a business guy) in generally finding technical guys to have an inflated sense of self-importance who often want to treat business people as an exchangeable/replaceable commodity.

deleted 15y ago
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ljlolel 15y ago
You start to make a good point but it starts to fall off. I can name innumerable potentially groundbreaking startups whose ideas seemed to be (and their competing companies proved to be) great, yet the technical shortcomings in the product caused them to fail. They were soundly beat by more technical teams that could build and scale a product better, often even led by very technical people. I'm talking about some truly great companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and (arguably) Facebook. Moreover, damoncali, if you have experience starting companies and building products and advising and observing others in doing so, then you also know that most products never ship. They never ship because the technical team can't build a product on a timeline. They can't figure out the problem, they don't code well enough to scale beyond 1000 lines of code, they don't know how to say NO to the business side clamoring for useless features, and so on. Yes, a lot of products get built and are useless and never sell, but far more are ideas floating in minds that are never even built to completion. A good technical team will execute, execute quickly, scale and be far ahead of most competition who doesn't value the technical side.
nupark2 15y ago
If your technical cofounder isn't the most important part of getting your startup off the ground, then your idea is probably not technically novel/interesting, an maybe you should hire it out to an external team. The difference in results across two developers can be incredibly pronounced; sometimes, those egos are very much earned. Personally, I started a company without a business guy and no external funding. It was incredibly difficult to do without external capital, but we own it, and we're not beholden to external interests. We've hit a million a year in revenue, and are poised to completely eclipse that. I've had to step up to effectively serve as CEO and CTO, but without the code, there'd be nothing to sell. I'm not claiming that 'business' doesn't matter, but rather, that compared to the people that imagine and then create the things you're going to sell, the usual business guy -- minus any other specific skills in the field in which he's working -- is a commodity.

deleted 15y ago

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ljlolel 15y ago

You start to make a good point but it starts to fall off. I can name innumerable potentially groundbreaking startups whose ideas seemed to be (and their competing companies proved to be) great, yet the technical shortcomings in the product caused them to fail. They were soundly beat by more technical teams that could build and scale a product better, often even led by very technical people. I'm talking about some truly great companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and (arguably) Facebook. Moreover, damoncali, if you have experience starting companies and building products and advising and observing others in doing so, then you also know that most products never ship. They never ship because the technical team can't build a product on a timeline. They can't figure out the problem, they don't code well enough to scale beyond 1000 lines of code, they don't know how to say NO to the business side clamoring for useless features, and so on. Yes, a lot of products get built and are useless and never sell, but far more are ideas floating in minds that are never even built to completion. A good technical team will execute, execute quickly, scale and be far ahead of most competition who doesn't value the technical side.

nupark2 15y ago

If your technical cofounder isn't the most important part of getting your startup off the ground, then your idea is probably not technically novel/interesting, an maybe you should hire it out to an external team. The difference in results across two developers can be incredibly pronounced; sometimes, those egos are very much earned. Personally, I started a company without a business guy and no external funding. It was incredibly difficult to do without external capital, but we own it, and we're not beholden to external interests. We've hit a million a year in revenue, and are poised to completely eclipse that. I've had to step up to effectively serve as CEO and CTO, but without the code, there'd be nothing to sell. I'm not claiming that 'business' doesn't matter, but rather, that compared to the people that imagine and then create the things you're going to sell, the usual business guy -- minus any other specific skills in the field in which he's working -- is a commodity.