12 ms·

70 First Co-Founder Dates

80 points by abeaclark 5y ago

BayAreaEscapee 5y ago
> 95% of people I talked to were non-technical. Many were actively searching for a technical co-founder or early engineer. I’m convinced that me being technical is the single biggest contributor to the high response rate. That would be the most painful part of all this for me. If I were forming a startup, I don't think I would consider pairing with someone non-technical. My personal idea of hell is having a bunch of marketing people spew buzzwords while I write and debug all the code.
- erik_landerholm 5y ago
  I guess it would depend on what it is, but I would think anything I would be interested in would need more than one technical person from the beginning…everything I’ve ever started has.
- jollybean 5y ago
  This is a really unhealthy perspective for so many reasons. Almost all successful startups have good business leadership, sometimes from a technical founder, but usually not.
- halpert 5y ago
  That can definitely be a problem, but having someone who can actually sell your product is invaluable.
  - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
    Yup, but make sure they can sell the product, not sell you. Also, never give up control of the finances - abdicating that responsibility means you will probably get screwed. You need to be technical about ensuring your efforts are not stolen.
- joshgachnang 5y ago
  I suppose it depends on the kind of product your building. My non-technical cofounder (medical field) does so much that I wouldn't enjoy, like trying to secure contracts with health care companies, funding, working through all the nuts and bolts of setting up being a provider, finding patients, etc. Comparatively, I feel like the tech part is the easier part. I know (generally) what we have to build, and I'm confident I can build it and build up a team as we scale.
- abeaclark 5y ago
  There are certainly advantages to both routes. I think there are a lot of business skills that are just as important, possibly even more important than the technical skills. fwiw, my original plan was to be a solo founder. I ended up killing that idea a few months in because I missed some of the key red flags a business focused person likely would have caught.
  - user_7832 5y ago
    > I ended up killing that idea a few months in because I missed some of the key red flags a business focused person likely would have caught. Could you give a few examples of such flags? I'm pretty curious as someone hoping to be a technical solo-founder myself. Do you think that some management training would have caught some/most of these?
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  I think you might draw benefit from this essay: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-abstraction-layer-2/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-ab...
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Someone has to do it. Usually you pair with someone who is stronger in areas you are weaker. In your case you are going to have to do it now.. is that what you really want?
- happimess 5y ago
  If your non-technical cofounder only knows a handful of marketing buzzwords, you should jump ship and find a better partner. My personal idea of hell is cold-calling randos all day, trying to get them to pay me for half-finished software.
- yread 5y ago
  As a solo technical founder my idea of hell is kissing frogs, doing all the follow ups, figuring out taxes, doing demos, managing freelancers and debugging code. But 100%, no boards, no arguments is nice. But just last year I've messed up so many things a "real" CEO would have managed...
vmception 5y ago
Technical directors are merely tolerating all the “ideas guys” with no skills and no capital. We should cut them out and relegate these marketers to a contract role, and exclusively pursue business models where customers don’t derive confidence from a CEO sales guy. Mainly because they waste our time, they can’t even judge the character of people in their network assuming they even have a network, and take way too much equity in a conversation that would be better off avoided.
- erik_landerholm 5y ago
  You just have to find technical people that can do both to some level that is good enough to prove your mvp has legs. After you raise money as long as you can stick to all technical people do it…as long as you can.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- smallerfish 5y ago
  My father in law (who had a successful exit back in the 90s with an actual silicon business) is a strong advocate of engineer startup CEOs. ~"Non tech people aren't going to learn technology; it's very doable for a tech person to learn necessary sales and finance skills." Having spent the last N years with sales cofounders, I wish I'd taken that advice on board earlier. (Though, there's certainly value in learning sales from skilled practitioners.)
  - long_time_gone 5y ago
    An assumption seemingly embedded in this comment is that technical people can learn sales, but sales people can't learn technology. It would be interesting to unpack that concept with actual data.
  - jimbokun 5y ago
    > "Non tech people aren't going to learn technology; it's very doable for a tech person to learn necessary sales and finance skills." I think this is a good summary of the initial Y Combinator investment philosophy.
wieuca 5y ago
sailingparrot 5y ago
Kudos to you for doing this, but just thinking about having 70 intro meetings in a single week makes me want to curl up in a ball in my closet.
- abeaclark 5y ago
  It was super painful tbh. I am so glad I had 0 meetings the following week. It took a bit to rebound. But honestly much nicer to just get it done and move on.
  - ramraj07 5y ago
    Why not whittle down 50% of the meetings? Sure you probably can’t guess who to cut out but you could have done 10 meetings, figure out what works for you and cut out the rest accordingly? Good idea still, I’m interested in doing something similar. Do you recommend any methods?
    - abeaclark 5y ago
      Yeah - I considered this. There were probably 10% of people I could tell that wouldn't lead anywhere. Some of it was trying to not allow my own biases to cloud things. Some of it was hoping to offer a hand up to others who may not get as much attention. Some of it was wanting to just run an experiment and see what happened. I think the best method is finding a good community to start from. As I alluded to, YC matching has not done this for me. The other thing is to pay attention to why you didn't like a given cofounder/idea. I identified a handful of industries that just were not for me (hadn't realized this consciously previously)
      - vgel 5y ago
        > I think the best method is finding a good community to start from. As I alluded to, YC matching has not done this for me. My glean from the article was that Cambrian has a group for this, but they seem to be focused on fintech -- do you know if there's a similar high-quality community for biotech?
jacquesm 5y ago
And the best bit: non-technical co-founders usually seem to believe that they should end up with 98% or so of the equity, because after all, you're a mere technician.
- atlasunshrugged 5y ago
  I think that's only super novice or very sociopathic people
- abeaclark 5y ago
  This is a common misconception. If someone says they want to bring you in as a cofounder, they almost always will think of you as a significant equity partner.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    That's only usual if the product is weak, your rep is high or if you have a relationship. To be an equal you need equal equity but it is not that simple. Two friends holding 66% can dilute you, move your work into another company assgin a low value and cut you out. The many ways to get screwed is extremely high.
  - halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
    I got an offer from a startup as the first dev hire (CTO/Directorish) and got an absolutely laughable equity percentage. It was insultingly low. Promptly passed and thankfully broke into FAANG where I'm going to be making probably more than even if that startup had been successful with the equity split they were going to give me.
    - abeaclark 5y ago
      Yes, cofounder and first dev is a huge difference in equity. Strange that it works this way, but it does. Like 40% down to 2%
    - pyb 5y ago
      Some shiftier startups have started to use the term "founding engineer" in their recruitment materials. I doesn't mean "cofounder" at all. Rather, it's a new, confusing term for "1st engineering hire" where you get hardly any equity and still most of the responsibility and workload associated with a cofounder role.
lysecret 5y ago
Some early comments criticizing some kind of caricature of a know nothing business guy spewing marketing buzzwords. OK. I don't deny these people exists, and admittedly, I have a B2B point of view. But early, cold B2B sales is hell and i have deep admiration for anyone doing it well. By far the biggest risk of early stage startups is to build something great, that nobody wants. And in my experience the risk of that increases by a good amount with 2 technical founders. I say this as a technical person as well (as i guess 99.999% of people here are)
- abeaclark 5y ago
  Completely agree. Building tech is only half (maybe less than half?) of the equation. Bringing on the right business partner is crucial.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Some early comments criticizing some kind of caricature of a know nothing business guy spewing marketing buzzwords. If these people are also your customers, it's actually extremely valuable to have someone who speaks that language on your sales team. Obviously they need to have more than just the ability to speak the buzzwords. You need to ensure they're aligned with your goals and not simply trying to talk their way into extracting as much money from your company as possible. But if you're selling to the B2B buzzword companies, you're going to struggle without someone who can speak the B2B buzzword language.
- hibikir 5y ago
  Early B2B sales are definitely hell. I have seen many B2B startup failures up close, and many of them fail because they run out of usable leads, because they just can't convert them. The problem is that figuring out who is going to be a good salesman for your very small startup is far harder than finding early developers. Someone that has done a lot of business sales for a more successful company is using a different skillset, because they have a good brand behind them. Same when you hire from big consultancy: Executives aren't afraid that they are taking a gamble with McKinsey. I've seen way too many cases where technical cofounders just believe that someone that can use the right buzzwords is as good as any other, and then end up with a defunct sales pipeline. Or you can end up with someone that is great at selling their skills and charisma to technical founders, or even VCs but what you need to convince said people is different than convincing, say, retail executives. The same guy that might be great at raising your seed round, or your series A, might not really be successful at convincing early customers, or knowing what you have to change in your product to be better for said sales. This can fail later too: I have seen companies with a series B, 20+ people in product design and sales, that might not get sales to their name in two years, and then there are major layoffs that don't cut a single salesman, because said sales team's top skill was selling their competence to the executive team. So it's not that it's easy to be good at sales or product in an early startup, but that interviewing for that is really hard, and that by the time you know whether someone is good or not, your startup is probably in trouble. If this wasn't the case, we'd see far more success in B2B than we see.
DoreenMichele 5y ago
Gender 89% Male (Clearly a problem!) As a guess, women are uncomfortable with cofounder dating because too many of them have been burned by men trying to turn it into actual dating. I don't know how to solve such problems but I feel like that is a big hitch for women in business: How to keep it all business and not have it turn into some issue because some guy thinks you are hot.
- voakbasda 5y ago
  If a guy tries to turn it into an actual date, you have the information you need to make a decision: run like hell.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - whichdan 5y ago
    Sure, but managing that risk is still solely on the woman's side, so it's understandable that a cold message would intrinsically have lower value than it might to a man.
  - ketzo 5y ago
    Yeah, but imagine if you had that fear – or really, just the annoying worry – going into every potential cofounder. It would be exhausting, and I imagine that's why fewer women opt for the process at all.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  I'm friends with four female founders who would absolutely laugh at this stereotypical response. Women are fully capable of having strong backbones, high confidence, and efficient bullshit filters. Founding a company takes grit, from ANY gender, and I'm envious of the grit that founders I know bring. > 89% Male (Clearly a problem!) That's not a problem. That's a massive opportunity. For women, and for people to step up.
  - abeaclark 5y ago
mitko 5y ago
I went through an active search two years ago, and what I learned is that cofounder fit is super hard to find, and probably impossible to timebox. But I thought that similar to how zettelkasten allows your ideas to grow into essays, I could grow the size and strength of my network until it becomes extremely obvious that someone is a great fit. Furthermore, the best fit might be someone who is not on the cofounder market, that way I might be able to recruit them first. Interesting approach by OP. As a technical founder I am similarly taking the approach of meeting as many people as I can and sharing, building in public, being helpful, but not with the frame of cofounder dating. If we really vibe with someone, then we can take it further. Meanwhile I make progress on my idea that I find meaningful. Good luck on your journey, Abe!
- abeaclark 5y ago
  Thanks! I definitely agree with this. I feel fortunate to have met a few people that seem like they could be a great fit, but we are still early. It takes time and working together to really ensure a great cofounder pair. The experiment will continue!
m_herrlich 5y ago
How does one even get into the cofounder speed-dating circuit? My background is software engineer, SE manager, occasionally playing PM/TPM at a big company. I want to build something cool. Ideas are cheap, need someone who understands execution.
- julianeon 5y ago
  By using the two “dating sites” he mentions: Cambrian & YC Startup School. I’ve used the latter and can confirm there’s more than enough candidates for high quality, if you’re willing to search, read bios, and do (email) outreach.
- abeaclark 5y ago
  Yes, as the previous responder mentioned, finding the right community is the first step. But tbh, it's much harder than it feels like it should be. I think places like Human Capital or OnDeck are taking a cool hands-on approach to this. The thesis being, let's find the best people, help them find eachother, then invest.
dasil003 5y ago
There’s always so much disdain for non-technical co-founders in these discussions, but I think that’s too facile a conclusion. While it’s true technical people have a higher floor and can’t get by on bullshit, many strong technical people are terrible founders for a variety of reasons. However building a successful startup requires a certain kind of hustle and resourcefulness that is not limited to technical folks. We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water due to all the “idea guy” wannabes flooding the space. Someone who can sell, someone who can hustle, someone with strong charisma and story-telling skills—these are incredibly valuable traits that can form an amazing complement to a technical founder that wants to focus on building.
dblooman 5y ago
> 95% of people I talked to were non-technical One takeaway I found from my experience, using a combination of linkedin and ycombinator co-founder match is just how many non-technical think you are going to be an employee. One meeting was basically 10 minutes of me pitching my idea, then 20 minutes of them asking if I was interested in contract work on an idea that was a year in with no progress. One guy was even like, "look, i need a coder, I can pay you x", not a great way to end a co-founder date.
- abeaclark 5y ago
  Yes, this is an unfortunate truth. This is why I limited the meetings to 30min and made sure to ask explicitly about what they are looking for. If they phrase it as "early employee" or "head of eng" or anything other than cofounder, you're looking at a relationship where you are paid for your time, not respected as a cofounder
long_time_gone 5y ago
Someone with Pre-Sales experience in the B2B world might be a decent filter. In my experience, they are often the ones working with both the business buyer and the IT department to build a business case. They are usually comfortable switching contexts between the product's technology and the customer's problem.
andrew_ 5y ago
I spoke with a very adept founder this last fall, who was looking for a technical cofounder to evaluate and build out the platform for the company. It was a compelling idea with clear need, B2B, well-wireframed, well thought out, and she (the founder) brought a litany of information about funding already in the works, contacts, market fit, and to-market strategy. I was thoroughly impressed, and I was on board. Unfortunately, we did not proceed. See, I have a family to provide for. I'm in my 40s. I'm not looking for or to build the next unicorn. What I'm looking for is the opportunity to build a consistent, stable, and yes evolving product that produces reliable baseline revenue, targeting reasonable growth. The founder wanted to work immediately towards unicorn status, with cofounders taking in a salary that was approximately half of what my current income stream provided. She is in her early 30s without dependents. For her, this is a reasonable risk that provides a good lifestyle. For me, that was an unthinkable risk to the detriment of my family, including young children in day care. She also wanted to build out a small engineering team paying roughly 60% of market rate - in this hiring environment. What that would mean was a team of inexperience or heading offshore, both of which were non-starters for me. All in all, I think she got some really bad advice from her SV peers. Her idea could have easily generated 100k MRR with a moderate amount of effort. I couldn't even put a number on the immense value of the data she would have been amassing as a side-effect of her idea. Our personalities were a match, we had the same philosophies and ideology was similar enough as to not provide room for conflict. We both thought the idea had incredible merit. At the end of the day, it was a generational divide that proved too large to overcome.
- tmp_anon_22 5y ago
  I agree with your conclusion and want to expand on a few points. > early 30s without dependents Its my observation that co-founders usually fall into this group for better or for worse. A natural consequence of this is that they often have less experience, a smaller network, and an entirely different risk profile that favors, go figure, high risk ventures. I believe this also makes many in this founder demographic easy prey for VCs and others with the ability to doll out predatory contracts - and makes the role largely unappealing. > a small engineering team paying roughly 60% of market rate So this has obvious consequences, but you also don't need to bake "good" software this early on. You can launch shit software, as long as its just not-shitty enough to lock-in a few lucrative clients early on. This validates your idea and allows you to hire the "good" engineers to build the """good""" software, or at least more scalable version, going forward. The real hit is on the CTO or VPE or technical lead who has to break their back making the in-experienced team work. That's a lot of stress that more often then not leads to huge amounts of burnout. > bad advice from her SV peers Yeah this sucks, everyone has advice to give and almost nobody takes responsibility for its fall-out. But being a SV founder is generally lucrative enough (even if its just in networking) that I have little sympathy for those who fall into the trappings of "greedy" bad SV advice (like underpaying your workers!). That's not just on the people giving advice, that's on the founder too. Distancing yourself from such behavior is a no-brainer.
supernova87a 5y ago
I'm not right now in a position to join an early stage startup, or even have my own idea about one -- but I'm very interested to hear about people's ideas or just see what topics are being discussed to know what's out there. What places / sites / channels of info are good to visit or tune into to get in touch with the startup world? Or just to find out what's new and interesting? I would have no idea how to even get 3 co-founder contacts from the article's description. I don't have a lot of personal contacts to do this (I suppose this is similar to someone who doesn't live in the Bay Area but wants to work there some day), so would be glad to hear any advice!
- abeaclark 5y ago
  The catalyst for me was joining a couple of communities. The best for me was Cambrian (https://www.cambrianhq.com/ https://www.cambrianhq.com/) because I am generally interested in fintech. Another option could be to sign up for YC Startup school (https://www.startupschool.org/ https://www.startupschool.org/) or apply for OnDeck (https://www.beondeck.com/ https://www.beondeck.com/)
  - supernova87a 5y ago
    Thanks!
  - algo_trader 5y ago
    I remember being turned off by OnDeck because they wanted a hefty "registration fee" and basically took anyone. This seems to be gone now (another bubble indicator? ;)?
gyulai 5y ago
> 95% of people I talked to were non-technical Made me think of https://dilbert.com/strip/2015-09-11 https://dilbert.com/strip/2015-09-11 The vast majority of the engineer/non-engineer speed dates that I remember from the Cambridge University entrepreneurship scene were basically versions of this. The other type was "A: Hi, nice to meet you! I have a great idea for a startup. Would you like to join me in implementing my idea?" "B: No! Because I have a better idea for a startup. Would you like to forget about your idea and instead join me in implementing my idea?" "A: No thanks, I still like my idea."
- abeaclark 5y ago
  Great comic! There are definitely ppl out there like this. I have a rubric of sorts I use to rank people and ideas. This makes it very easy to avoid the dilbert scenario. Some of these people are very advanced (have contracts / LOIs, MVP, funding)
avmich 5y ago
Man, you need to know how to talk :) . Another person with exactly same starting point - well, except Director, as one wouldn't get it in the first place - wouldn't be nearly as successful, in fact the picture could be almost exactly opposite.

80 points by abeaclark 5y ago

> 95% of people I talked to were non-technical. Many were actively searching for a technical co-founder or early engineer. I’m convinced that me being technical is the single biggest contributor to the high response rate. That would be the most painful part of all this for me. If I were forming a startup, I don't think I would consider pairing with someone non-technical. My personal idea of hell is having a bunch of marketing people spew buzzwords while I write and debug all the code.

erik_landerholm 5y ago
I guess it would depend on what it is, but I would think anything I would be interested in would need more than one technical person from the beginning…everything I’ve ever started has.
jollybean 5y ago
This is a really unhealthy perspective for so many reasons. Almost all successful startups have good business leadership, sometimes from a technical founder, but usually not.
halpert 5y ago
That can definitely be a problem, but having someone who can actually sell your product is invaluable.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  Yup, but make sure they can sell the product, not sell you. Also, never give up control of the finances - abdicating that responsibility means you will probably get screwed. You need to be technical about ensuring your efforts are not stolen.
joshgachnang 5y ago
I suppose it depends on the kind of product your building. My non-technical cofounder (medical field) does so much that I wouldn't enjoy, like trying to secure contracts with health care companies, funding, working through all the nuts and bolts of setting up being a provider, finding patients, etc. Comparatively, I feel like the tech part is the easier part. I know (generally) what we have to build, and I'm confident I can build it and build up a team as we scale.
abeaclark 5y ago
There are certainly advantages to both routes. I think there are a lot of business skills that are just as important, possibly even more important than the technical skills. fwiw, my original plan was to be a solo founder. I ended up killing that idea a few months in because I missed some of the key red flags a business focused person likely would have caught.
- user_7832 5y ago
  > I ended up killing that idea a few months in because I missed some of the key red flags a business focused person likely would have caught. Could you give a few examples of such flags? I'm pretty curious as someone hoping to be a technical solo-founder myself. Do you think that some management training would have caught some/most of these?
MauranKilom 5y ago
I think you might draw benefit from this essay: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-abstraction-layer-2/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-ab...
ipaddr 5y ago
Someone has to do it. Usually you pair with someone who is stronger in areas you are weaker. In your case you are going to have to do it now.. is that what you really want?
happimess 5y ago
If your non-technical cofounder only knows a handful of marketing buzzwords, you should jump ship and find a better partner. My personal idea of hell is cold-calling randos all day, trying to get them to pay me for half-finished software.
yread 5y ago
As a solo technical founder my idea of hell is kissing frogs, doing all the follow ups, figuring out taxes, doing demos, managing freelancers and debugging code. But 100%, no boards, no arguments is nice. But just last year I've messed up so many things a "real" CEO would have managed...

vmception 5y ago

Technical directors are merely tolerating all the “ideas guys” with no skills and no capital. We should cut them out and relegate these marketers to a contract role, and exclusively pursue business models where customers don’t derive confidence from a CEO sales guy. Mainly because they waste our time, they can’t even judge the character of people in their network assuming they even have a network, and take way too much equity in a conversation that would be better off avoided.

erik_landerholm 5y ago
You just have to find technical people that can do both to some level that is good enough to prove your mvp has legs. After you raise money as long as you can stick to all technical people do it…as long as you can.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
smallerfish 5y ago
My father in law (who had a successful exit back in the 90s with an actual silicon business) is a strong advocate of engineer startup CEOs. ~"Non tech people aren't going to learn technology; it's very doable for a tech person to learn necessary sales and finance skills." Having spent the last N years with sales cofounders, I wish I'd taken that advice on board earlier. (Though, there's certainly value in learning sales from skilled practitioners.)
- long_time_gone 5y ago
  An assumption seemingly embedded in this comment is that technical people can learn sales, but sales people can't learn technology. It would be interesting to unpack that concept with actual data.
- jimbokun 5y ago
  > "Non tech people aren't going to learn technology; it's very doable for a tech person to learn necessary sales and finance skills." I think this is a good summary of the initial Y Combinator investment philosophy.

wieuca 5y ago

sailingparrot 5y ago

Kudos to you for doing this, but just thinking about having 70 intro meetings in a single week makes me want to curl up in a ball in my closet.

abeaclark 5y ago
It was super painful tbh. I am so glad I had 0 meetings the following week. It took a bit to rebound. But honestly much nicer to just get it done and move on.
- ramraj07 5y ago
  Why not whittle down 50% of the meetings? Sure you probably can’t guess who to cut out but you could have done 10 meetings, figure out what works for you and cut out the rest accordingly? Good idea still, I’m interested in doing something similar. Do you recommend any methods?
  - abeaclark 5y ago
    Yeah - I considered this. There were probably 10% of people I could tell that wouldn't lead anywhere. Some of it was trying to not allow my own biases to cloud things. Some of it was hoping to offer a hand up to others who may not get as much attention. Some of it was wanting to just run an experiment and see what happened. I think the best method is finding a good community to start from. As I alluded to, YC matching has not done this for me. The other thing is to pay attention to why you didn't like a given cofounder/idea. I identified a handful of industries that just were not for me (hadn't realized this consciously previously)
    - vgel 5y ago
      > I think the best method is finding a good community to start from. As I alluded to, YC matching has not done this for me. My glean from the article was that Cambrian has a group for this, but they seem to be focused on fintech -- do you know if there's a similar high-quality community for biotech?

jacquesm 5y ago

And the best bit: non-technical co-founders usually seem to believe that they should end up with 98% or so of the equity, because after all, you're a mere technician.

atlasunshrugged 5y ago
I think that's only super novice or very sociopathic people
abeaclark 5y ago
This is a common misconception. If someone says they want to bring you in as a cofounder, they almost always will think of you as a significant equity partner.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  That's only usual if the product is weak, your rep is high or if you have a relationship. To be an equal you need equal equity but it is not that simple. Two friends holding 66% can dilute you, move your work into another company assgin a low value and cut you out. The many ways to get screwed is extremely high.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
  I got an offer from a startup as the first dev hire (CTO/Directorish) and got an absolutely laughable equity percentage. It was insultingly low. Promptly passed and thankfully broke into FAANG where I'm going to be making probably more than even if that startup had been successful with the equity split they were going to give me.
  - abeaclark 5y ago
    Yes, cofounder and first dev is a huge difference in equity. Strange that it works this way, but it does. Like 40% down to 2%
  - pyb 5y ago
    Some shiftier startups have started to use the term "founding engineer" in their recruitment materials. I doesn't mean "cofounder" at all. Rather, it's a new, confusing term for "1st engineering hire" where you get hardly any equity and still most of the responsibility and workload associated with a cofounder role.

lysecret 5y ago

Some early comments criticizing some kind of caricature of a know nothing business guy spewing marketing buzzwords. OK. I don't deny these people exists, and admittedly, I have a B2B point of view. But early, cold B2B sales is hell and i have deep admiration for anyone doing it well. By far the biggest risk of early stage startups is to build something great, that nobody wants. And in my experience the risk of that increases by a good amount with 2 technical founders. I say this as a technical person as well (as i guess 99.999% of people here are)

abeaclark 5y ago
Completely agree. Building tech is only half (maybe less than half?) of the equation. Bringing on the right business partner is crucial.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Some early comments criticizing some kind of caricature of a know nothing business guy spewing marketing buzzwords. If these people are also your customers, it's actually extremely valuable to have someone who speaks that language on your sales team. Obviously they need to have more than just the ability to speak the buzzwords. You need to ensure they're aligned with your goals and not simply trying to talk their way into extracting as much money from your company as possible. But if you're selling to the B2B buzzword companies, you're going to struggle without someone who can speak the B2B buzzword language.
hibikir 5y ago
Early B2B sales are definitely hell. I have seen many B2B startup failures up close, and many of them fail because they run out of usable leads, because they just can't convert them. The problem is that figuring out who is going to be a good salesman for your very small startup is far harder than finding early developers. Someone that has done a lot of business sales for a more successful company is using a different skillset, because they have a good brand behind them. Same when you hire from big consultancy: Executives aren't afraid that they are taking a gamble with McKinsey. I've seen way too many cases where technical cofounders just believe that someone that can use the right buzzwords is as good as any other, and then end up with a defunct sales pipeline. Or you can end up with someone that is great at selling their skills and charisma to technical founders, or even VCs but what you need to convince said people is different than convincing, say, retail executives. The same guy that might be great at raising your seed round, or your series A, might not really be successful at convincing early customers, or knowing what you have to change in your product to be better for said sales. This can fail later too: I have seen companies with a series B, 20+ people in product design and sales, that might not get sales to their name in two years, and then there are major layoffs that don't cut a single salesman, because said sales team's top skill was selling their competence to the executive team. So it's not that it's easy to be good at sales or product in an early startup, but that interviewing for that is really hard, and that by the time you know whether someone is good or not, your startup is probably in trouble. If this wasn't the case, we'd see far more success in B2B than we see.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

Gender 89% Male (Clearly a problem!) As a guess, women are uncomfortable with cofounder dating because too many of them have been burned by men trying to turn it into actual dating. I don't know how to solve such problems but I feel like that is a big hitch for women in business: How to keep it all business and not have it turn into some issue because some guy thinks you are hot.

voakbasda 5y ago
If a guy tries to turn it into an actual date, you have the information you need to make a decision: run like hell.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- whichdan 5y ago
  Sure, but managing that risk is still solely on the woman's side, so it's understandable that a cold message would intrinsically have lower value than it might to a man.
- ketzo 5y ago
  Yeah, but imagine if you had that fear – or really, just the annoying worry – going into every potential cofounder. It would be exhausting, and I imagine that's why fewer women opt for the process at all.
andrew_ 5y ago
I'm friends with four female founders who would absolutely laugh at this stereotypical response. Women are fully capable of having strong backbones, high confidence, and efficient bullshit filters. Founding a company takes grit, from ANY gender, and I'm envious of the grit that founders I know bring. > 89% Male (Clearly a problem!) That's not a problem. That's a massive opportunity. For women, and for people to step up.
- abeaclark 5y ago

mitko 5y ago

I went through an active search two years ago, and what I learned is that cofounder fit is super hard to find, and probably impossible to timebox. But I thought that similar to how zettelkasten allows your ideas to grow into essays, I could grow the size and strength of my network until it becomes extremely obvious that someone is a great fit. Furthermore, the best fit might be someone who is not on the cofounder market, that way I might be able to recruit them first. Interesting approach by OP. As a technical founder I am similarly taking the approach of meeting as many people as I can and sharing, building in public, being helpful, but not with the frame of cofounder dating. If we really vibe with someone, then we can take it further. Meanwhile I make progress on my idea that I find meaningful. Good luck on your journey, Abe!

abeaclark 5y ago
Thanks! I definitely agree with this. I feel fortunate to have met a few people that seem like they could be a great fit, but we are still early. It takes time and working together to really ensure a great cofounder pair. The experiment will continue!

m_herrlich 5y ago

How does one even get into the cofounder speed-dating circuit? My background is software engineer, SE manager, occasionally playing PM/TPM at a big company. I want to build something cool. Ideas are cheap, need someone who understands execution.

julianeon 5y ago
By using the two “dating sites” he mentions: Cambrian & YC Startup School. I’ve used the latter and can confirm there’s more than enough candidates for high quality, if you’re willing to search, read bios, and do (email) outreach.
abeaclark 5y ago
Yes, as the previous responder mentioned, finding the right community is the first step. But tbh, it's much harder than it feels like it should be. I think places like Human Capital or OnDeck are taking a cool hands-on approach to this. The thesis being, let's find the best people, help them find eachother, then invest.

dasil003 5y ago

There’s always so much disdain for non-technical co-founders in these discussions, but I think that’s too facile a conclusion. While it’s true technical people have a higher floor and can’t get by on bullshit, many strong technical people are terrible founders for a variety of reasons. However building a successful startup requires a certain kind of hustle and resourcefulness that is not limited to technical folks. We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water due to all the “idea guy” wannabes flooding the space. Someone who can sell, someone who can hustle, someone with strong charisma and story-telling skills—these are incredibly valuable traits that can form an amazing complement to a technical founder that wants to focus on building.

dblooman 5y ago

> 95% of people I talked to were non-technical One takeaway I found from my experience, using a combination of linkedin and ycombinator co-founder match is just how many non-technical think you are going to be an employee. One meeting was basically 10 minutes of me pitching my idea, then 20 minutes of them asking if I was interested in contract work on an idea that was a year in with no progress. One guy was even like, "look, i need a coder, I can pay you x", not a great way to end a co-founder date.

abeaclark 5y ago
Yes, this is an unfortunate truth. This is why I limited the meetings to 30min and made sure to ask explicitly about what they are looking for. If they phrase it as "early employee" or "head of eng" or anything other than cofounder, you're looking at a relationship where you are paid for your time, not respected as a cofounder

long_time_gone 5y ago

Someone with Pre-Sales experience in the B2B world might be a decent filter. In my experience, they are often the ones working with both the business buyer and the IT department to build a business case. They are usually comfortable switching contexts between the product's technology and the customer's problem.

andrew_ 5y ago

I spoke with a very adept founder this last fall, who was looking for a technical cofounder to evaluate and build out the platform for the company. It was a compelling idea with clear need, B2B, well-wireframed, well thought out, and she (the founder) brought a litany of information about funding already in the works, contacts, market fit, and to-market strategy. I was thoroughly impressed, and I was on board. Unfortunately, we did not proceed. See, I have a family to provide for. I'm in my 40s. I'm not looking for or to build the next unicorn. What I'm looking for is the opportunity to build a consistent, stable, and yes evolving product that produces reliable baseline revenue, targeting reasonable growth. The founder wanted to work immediately towards unicorn status, with cofounders taking in a salary that was approximately half of what my current income stream provided. She is in her early 30s without dependents. For her, this is a reasonable risk that provides a good lifestyle. For me, that was an unthinkable risk to the detriment of my family, including young children in day care. She also wanted to build out a small engineering team paying roughly 60% of market rate - in this hiring environment. What that would mean was a team of inexperience or heading offshore, both of which were non-starters for me. All in all, I think she got some really bad advice from her SV peers. Her idea could have easily generated 100k MRR with a moderate amount of effort. I couldn't even put a number on the immense value of the data she would have been amassing as a side-effect of her idea. Our personalities were a match, we had the same philosophies and ideology was similar enough as to not provide room for conflict. We both thought the idea had incredible merit. At the end of the day, it was a generational divide that proved too large to overcome.

tmp_anon_22 5y ago
I agree with your conclusion and want to expand on a few points. > early 30s without dependents Its my observation that co-founders usually fall into this group for better or for worse. A natural consequence of this is that they often have less experience, a smaller network, and an entirely different risk profile that favors, go figure, high risk ventures. I believe this also makes many in this founder demographic easy prey for VCs and others with the ability to doll out predatory contracts - and makes the role largely unappealing. > a small engineering team paying roughly 60% of market rate So this has obvious consequences, but you also don't need to bake "good" software this early on. You can launch shit software, as long as its just not-shitty enough to lock-in a few lucrative clients early on. This validates your idea and allows you to hire the "good" engineers to build the """good""" software, or at least more scalable version, going forward. The real hit is on the CTO or VPE or technical lead who has to break their back making the in-experienced team work. That's a lot of stress that more often then not leads to huge amounts of burnout. > bad advice from her SV peers Yeah this sucks, everyone has advice to give and almost nobody takes responsibility for its fall-out. But being a SV founder is generally lucrative enough (even if its just in networking) that I have little sympathy for those who fall into the trappings of "greedy" bad SV advice (like underpaying your workers!). That's not just on the people giving advice, that's on the founder too. Distancing yourself from such behavior is a no-brainer.

supernova87a 5y ago

I'm not right now in a position to join an early stage startup, or even have my own idea about one -- but I'm very interested to hear about people's ideas or just see what topics are being discussed to know what's out there. What places / sites / channels of info are good to visit or tune into to get in touch with the startup world? Or just to find out what's new and interesting? I would have no idea how to even get 3 co-founder contacts from the article's description. I don't have a lot of personal contacts to do this (I suppose this is similar to someone who doesn't live in the Bay Area but wants to work there some day), so would be glad to hear any advice!

abeaclark 5y ago
The catalyst for me was joining a couple of communities. The best for me was Cambrian (https://www.cambrianhq.com/ https://www.cambrianhq.com/) because I am generally interested in fintech. Another option could be to sign up for YC Startup school (https://www.startupschool.org/ https://www.startupschool.org/) or apply for OnDeck (https://www.beondeck.com/ https://www.beondeck.com/)
- supernova87a 5y ago
  Thanks!
- algo_trader 5y ago
  I remember being turned off by OnDeck because they wanted a hefty "registration fee" and basically took anyone. This seems to be gone now (another bubble indicator? ;)?

gyulai 5y ago

> 95% of people I talked to were non-technical Made me think of https://dilbert.com/strip/2015-09-11 https://dilbert.com/strip/2015-09-11 The vast majority of the engineer/non-engineer speed dates that I remember from the Cambridge University entrepreneurship scene were basically versions of this. The other type was "A: Hi, nice to meet you! I have a great idea for a startup. Would you like to join me in implementing my idea?" "B: No! Because I have a better idea for a startup. Would you like to forget about your idea and instead join me in implementing my idea?" "A: No thanks, I still like my idea."

abeaclark 5y ago
Great comic! There are definitely ppl out there like this. I have a rubric of sorts I use to rank people and ideas. This makes it very easy to avoid the dilbert scenario. Some of these people are very advanced (have contracts / LOIs, MVP, funding)

avmich 5y ago

Man, you need to know how to talk :) . Another person with exactly same starting point - well, except Director, as one wouldn't get it in the first place - wouldn't be nearly as successful, in fact the picture could be almost exactly opposite.