> I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets: A relative of a friend is a Dr. that had a good idea for a useful

> I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets: A relative of a friend is a Dr. that had a good idea for a useful product and hired a consultant to build it. After about 18 months and a little over $1M had been invested, the consultant wanted more money and I got pulled in to review everything. What I found was: 1. Work was farmed to an offshore team that made terrible technical decisions and were unable to produce working software 2. Consultant and the offshore team took many detours to increase scope and add lots of new, useful features. Of course, they did this before completing existing ones, so the result was a bloated application with about 20 features at the 80% state. Only logging in actually worked. 3. Too much infrastructure too early. High availability, redundant infrastructure up and running at AWS for a cool $10-15k/month. Keep in mind the product hadn't even gotten to MVP and that's also close to the $20k/month my own startup was spending at AWS for a messaging app for full geo-redundancy w/over 2M active users and capable of handling 1B messages/month. In short, the Dr. got taken for a huge ride. My advice was to make sure that they were able to get their hands on all of the source code and other IP and then wind it all down.