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Even this article IMO subtly demonstrates the mindset that leads nontechnical founders to not think they need a technical cofounder, by phrasing the search for

Even this article IMO subtly demonstrates the mindset that leads nontechnical founders to not think they need a technical cofounder, by phrasing the search for one as “recruiting” as if they were a subordinate or code monkey. It should be a partner relationship, not a subordinate relationship. This mindset that technical cofounders are essentially “coders” (a term I hate) is very prevalent among inexperienced nontechnical founders. I know I’m preaching to the choir here but a lot of technical people have deep industry/business/product knowledge and have social skills. It is very frustrating when some Ivy League 25 year old PM/management consultant tries to pitch you on their vision while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of.

welfare 3y ago
Completely agree, I'm waiting for the article on "Why you need a business-oriented co-founder and how technical founders can recruit one"...
- thelittlenag 3y ago
  +1 on that!
- debacle 3y ago
  The problem is that you don't. "Business" has been systematized in many ways, and more and more your "business" is just someone else's software.
- jdminhbg 3y ago
  > There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness. They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them. But for a startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will have to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing. [2] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > One is a combination of shyness and laziness. They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them. I think this is more complicated: the problem is not going out and talking to a bunch of strangers (which I would do if necessary, and I do claim that my tolerance of rejection is sufficiently high). The problem rather is (this is something that a friend, who works as a business consultant, explained to me): to make a successful sale, you need a salesperson "who thinks like the customer". Lots of programmers simply think very differently from how the typical programmers, and thus are bad salespersons concerning these customers. He really said that I have an insanely good intuition for what kind of software product would insanely help some specific industry, but also honestly told me that I (and honestly also he) would likely not be capable of selling such a product (if it existed) to a customer in this industry, simply because I think too differently from the decision makers in this industry.
lainga 3y ago
> while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of. I considered it a bit, and you know what, I'd wager that four-fifths of tech business dynamics flow from this statement. Technical expertise is the money printer onto which all manners of value extraction anchor themselves, like barnacles. If not at the creation, then, for a time, it is good. And then it happens anyway 5-10 years down the line. That said, there are different failure modes for purely technical people not understanding business. But the market doesn't seem to reward them the same way. Root cause is outside the scope of this comment...
- _jal 3y ago
  Yep. I used to be more charitable, but I've taken to being very short with founder wannabes who act like this. Bluntly, if they refuse to look past their preconceptions to see who they're actually talking to, why should I? This is made easier knowing founders with those sorts of blinders are likely going to fail anyway, so you don't want to be in the blast radius when it happens.
- gary_0 3y ago
  > That said, there are different failure modes for purely technical people not understanding business. A common one, I think, is technical people thinking management or business expertise is easy (or even beneath them) because they're so smart in other areas--and any problems they might have can surely be solved with the same tools they use to solve engineering problems, right? Which is kind of the flip side of the attitude of the kind of nontechnical founders we're talking about. Another thing I'm facing myself (as a technical person) is when I've successfully dipped a toe into a management role, I was lucky enough that the people I was leading were all also technical people whose personalities were mostly in line with mine. But I've had to remind myself that if I put myself in a leadership position again, it won't always be that simple...
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    The biggest business gap seems to be assuming other people won't screw you over, given enough money on the table and the opportunity. I assume most MBAs already know this. Lots of technical people learn the hard way.
paulddraper 3y ago
:shrug: CEOs get recruited too, i don't understand the problem
dogman144 3y ago
Heading over to MIT to “find a coder” is something you’ll hear from HBS aspiring founders. I also deeply agree with the other part - there’s a class of technical leaders who have that depth and choose to work with technology as the primary day to day. But, they also don’t have HBS MBAs often. Good VCs look for these founders I think, but otherwise the cultural treatment of that type can aspire one to get a MBA just to fix or re-align the perception.
speby 3y ago
This is pretty well said. I tend to agree and as a founder of multiple companies, as a well an engineering-background co-founder myself, I have definitely had interactions with "non-technical" founders looking for people (like me) and totally got the vibe of the needing a "technical co-founder" because they just need some "coder" as if that's the missing key to success (or whatever). That said, there are plenty of very smart, driven, people who are not software engineers who don't think of a technical co-founder that way. So it'd be wrong to paint with a super wide brush on this.
- TuringNYC 3y ago
  >> That said, there are plenty of very smart, driven, people who are not software engineers who don't think of a technical co-founder that way. So it'd be wrong to paint with a super wide brush on this. Agree, I think business co-founders can add tremendous value. But that value needs to be shown -- upfront. Otherwise, why would any technologist sink hundreds of hours on a mere promise? Business co-founders should have already drawn out solutions, spoken to customers, perhaps gotten conditional sales POs from friends/contacts, raised funding, set up VC meetings, etc. But a Business co-founder who hasnt done any of these, and just wants the upside after a bunch of technical work is done, isnt the type of Business co-founder you want.
TuringNYC 3y ago
>> It is very frustrating when some Ivy League 25 year old PM/management consultant tries to pitch you on their vision while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of. I get calls weekly from people seeking technical co-founders. The biggest thing most CTO candidates dont realize is the power they have -- unless the "business co-founder" is actually bringing something to the table. I'd LOVE to work with a "Business co-founder" who actually brings Purchase Orders, Funding, Transact-able Relationships, prior wins (esp publicly verifiable wins). That would be a dream. It makes no sense to work with a "Business co-founder" who wants ME to put in hundreds of hours of technical work -- upfront -- often for equity "e.g., free" -- and retains the right to take all the upside and has none of the downside. Why would I need a "Business Co-Founder" at all in that case, I might as well be the only founder and recruit later. I see tons of friends burnt by these types of "deals." The biggest red-flag is when the "Business co-founder" still has a job and no real skin in the game.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- WendyTheWillow 3y ago
  I have substantially less exposure to this space than you seem to, but even when trying to start projects with friends, this holds true. So often, I get pitched by pals who think the idea is what they've done, and at that point, it's up to me to "code up." What I would love to hear is, "I've been talking with these three businesses already, and they seem interested." or even, "I'm really worried about the sales and marketing side of things, so that's the problem I'm going to focus on." Nobody's ever come even close to that. It takes zero coding to have those things already started, and yet nobody even goes down that path before looking for a "code monkey."
  - TuringNYC 3y ago
    >> Nobody's ever come even close to that. It takes zero coding to have those things already started, and yet nobody even goes down that path before looking for a "code monkey." In a sense you are lucky in a situation like this -- that have self-selected themselves out w/o any effort from you. Technologists dont need anyone with that little motivation sharing equity. Better to know that at the start.
csa 3y ago
> This mindset that technical cofounders are essentially “coders” (a term I hate) is very prevalent among inexperienced nontechnical founders. I know I’m preaching to the choir here but a lot of technical people have deep industry/business/product knowledge and have social skills. It is very frustrating when some Ivy League 25 year old PM/management consultant tries to pitch you on their vision while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of. This is nicely worded, but I would like to expand on it. This is coming from someone who is a businessperson who programs — I’ve been programming since I was 10, but I’ve never had the job of a programmer. tl;dr - I think that both programmers and business people can be delusional about their value add, but folks who can do both are easier to work with, and folks who can do both have more opportunities than just hyper-growth startups. In generalities, there are four groups of folks on the tech-business continuum. 1. Pure tech folks with little or no business acumen. Some of these folks think “sales” or “marketing” are fighting words. I find many of these folks very difficult to do business with. To be charitable to the “Ivy League” folks you refer to, they have probably met enough of these pure tech folks (some of whom are actually idiot savants) such that they erroneously over-generalize to think that all tech folks are like these pure tech folks. 2. Tech folks with business acumen. The business side usually comes from experience. I think pg advocates for tech folks who do start ups to develop into this. Overall much easier to do business with, but sometimes they make product-oriented decisions that miss the forest for the trees. The best tech businesses come from this group, but they get outclassed on the business side unless they embrace the business side aggressively (Zuck and Gates being prime examples). I think the “Ivy League” folks lose a lot of business due to lack of respect for this group. 3. Business folks with tech acumen (this is me). Great at taking over tech business that are poorly run and optimizing them either as a c-suite executive or as a buyer (this is what I do). While I don’t refer to programmers as “coders”, and I don’t treat programmers as idiot-savants, I know how to find and pay programmers to solve my business problems. Interestingly, I run into some programmers who are doing commodity work who want a percentage of the business. My offer is always the same — zero. I’m not building a startup or complex software. Their skills are largely fungible to me, since most of the value is in finding the solution rather than the nuts and bolts of development. The exception is for folks in group 2 who want to move to group 3, but at that point they become a businessperson rather than a programmer. 4. Business folks with no tech acumen. These are the “Ivy League” folks (and a lot of VCs, tbh). These are the “idea people”, the people who are clueless about tech and tech development, often the people who are also bad at business, but they happen to have access to money and/or critical buyers. Fwiw, many of these folks treat other business people even worse than programmers — they just treat most people like idiots, sans the savant. I sometimes have a hard time doing business with these folks, because they frequently don’t know the value (or lack thereof) of their business, and/or they are only looking for suckers to do business with. Many/most of these folks are all style and no substance. If they had some substance, they would be in group 3 (or try to be). Obviously these are people on a continuum that are separated into somewhat arbitrary groups. That said, these archetypes exist. How do these archetypes matter for tech businesses? If you’re in group 1, you’re at the mercy of whatever business person you can work with. You hope that you end up more like Woz than most of the pure tech folks who get restructured out as the business grows. I strongly recommend that the pure tech folks focus on getting paid primarily in cash rather than equity, since any non-benevolent business person will structure out the tech person’s equity as soon as possible. If you are in group 2, you are in a strong position to develop a successful startup or successful tech business. Just realize that you are a cog in the VC machine, and they only value you for your potential to hit home runs. You can make more reliable money (think 8 or 9 figures) in a “lifestyle business”, but it is not likely you will become a billionaire… unless you shift to group 3. If you are in group 3, you need to realize that most of your value will be by doing very boring shit. Billionaire status is possible, but it will be a boring trip, and you are not likely to appear in any sexy tech write ups unless you engage in aggressive self-promotion in these areas (some should, most probably shouldn’t). The biggest mistake I see group 3 folks make is to think that they are in group 2, especially if/when they try to develop a consumer-oriented product without getting a group 2 cofounder. Group 4… well, group 4 is what they are. There is some jiujitsu by which their egos and ignorance can be used for greater good. If you engage with these folks, I would only do so with that type of interaction in mind. If you engage with them on their terms, you will almost certainly lose. Why did I write all of this? To clarify options for various level of tech people. The HN/Ycombinator narrative to push for technical co-founders is very valid for start ups (the pg kind that are built to grow fast), but there many other ways to make money as a tech person or a tech-oriented business person than start ups (especially now in the 20s compared to the 90s or 00s), and some/many of these are more reliable ways to get to a “fuck you money” level. I don’t think a lot of highly skilled tech folks realize this.
gumballindie 3y ago
They types still didn't learn that google, microsoft and every single disruptor out there has been founded and brought to riches by technical people. Business minded folks survive for a while, make a few millions, but never reach the levels of these companies. Quite the contrary - companies of this level plunge once business folks dominate. But that's good. Once google's dead others will take its place, and will be likely founded by technical people.
- testmasterflex 3y ago
  What about Amazon? Bezos first hire was a coder for the site and have him 5% IIRC
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Good point - he apparently has a major in CS or something among the lines.
tfehring 3y ago
Dalton says basically the same thing in the video. Lightly edited excerpt from the YouTube transcript (starting around 11:28): What often happens - again, to go deep on this - is that the way they'll pitch the person is that they'll pitch them their idea, like, "I'm an idea guy, I've got a great idea, do you want to be my worker bee to go do all my ideas?" And of course the person that's the best person you've ever worked with does not want to sit in a cage and do all of the work that you give them. And instead I'm like, well have you asked them if they have startup ideas? And then you sell yourself, where you can come together, come up with the idea together, as co-owners, and it's shocking how often that appears to have never occurred to someone. Like they think the idea of finding a tech co-founder is to find someone who will basically submit to their whims and be, like, their assistant, and that's not the move.
darajava 3y ago
What term do you prefer over “coder”? I’ve had this issue with pretty much any term for what I essentially do. I don’t like “developer”, “programmer”, “techie”, “IT… guy”? (The last two being particularly bad) Even “engineer” is a bit strange to me and I feel it doesn’t really fit, so I actually never knew what to call myself.
- TuringNYC 3y ago
  Partner.
j45 3y ago
Over the years, when I meet a non-technical founder looking for a technical founder, I ask them if they're ok owning as little of the startup that they offer to the technical person, until they can deliver sales. Technical people, in large do deliver a product and something that works. It might not be what the market wants, or the right thing, but speed of iteration, is again technical, and something the technical founder uniquely must bring. There is a video from YC that says they can see it from a mile away when the non-technical founders have taken advantage of the technical person, founder or not, by not giving them equity equal to the difference they make. I couldn't agree more.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  This is an interesting idea — variable vesting based on milestones. It would be a great way to reduce risk, though of course there are issues that could arise that would make this complicated. For example, if the technical person vests based on hitting certain product-related goals, does he get penalized if part of the dev team gets hired by another company, which makes it harder for him to hit the milestones? Or for the non-technical cofounder, if the economy goes into a tailspin, and it's much harder to make sales than the cofounders anticipated, should he not vest, even if he's doing everything he can? But overall, I think this is a really intriguing idea. Points could be assigned for what each founder is bringing to the table (concrete idea, market research, cash), and they would get some vested stock for that. Then the rest of the founder's shares could be put into a pool and vested to particular founders that hit their milestones. You wouldn't want to make it too adversarial, but it's possible the benefits of incentive alignment would overcome the downsides of the zero-sum game thinking that the system could engender.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - levleontiev 3y ago
    >does he get penalized if part of the dev team gets hired by another company, which makes it harder for him to hit the milestones? Of course yes. The part of executive responsibility is to maintain the team and calculate the riscs .
matheusmoreira 3y ago
Why is disrespect for technical people so deeply rooted? It's like they think we're beneath them.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
That’s because the people with money are not the people who actually do the things. The people with money are the Ivy League 25-year-old PM management consultants. Since everyone seems to prefer more money over more freedom, us nerds keep agreeing to or putting ourselves in positions where we are depending on non technical people for money. I hate doing money stuff, I like building stuff There are people who don’t like building stuff but like doing money stuff. Which one do you think is going to get more money? Which one has the power over the other one? It’s totally inverted and changing this is going to take a century or more to fix
robocat 3y ago
> mindset that technical cofounders are essentially “coders” Business people usually think techos as commodity workers: Buy a geek like you would a house cleaner. Good discussion on that topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38402515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38402515 It's really weird given how many tech founders have shown the value of tech talent by creating billion dollar companies. Why can't they see it? Then again look in a mirror and techos tend to believe business people are total trash. Yes, many executives and salespeople are useless manglement and pointy-haired-bosses (just like there are useless engineers). But don't miss the valuable management gems. Techos: don't make the same mistakes as described about the non-techs in the vid by ignoring a 10x engineer. There are 10x non-techs too.
jacquesm 3y ago
Not to mention that you take approximately the same risk minus a couple of hundred K in total comp per year but - tadaaaa - in return you get 0.0025% stock that will vest over the next five years.
smearth 3y ago
May I ask what a non-technical founder should look for in a technical co-founder? I have two customers for slightly different businesses. The deals are made, I am building MVP's myself and JVing with established tech companies to get products to market. I have a supply chain with a 30% cost advantage with customers. and I have a hardware software system that significantly improves hire businesses that has customers and development partnerships with research organisations and funding applications in progress. Both have customers and large B2B growth potential. I am building the MVP's myself while selling and JVing as necessary but would happily partner equally with a technical expert in Microsoft365 and PostgreSQL and PostGIS. I'm an expert in business design and love technology without being talented or experienced building it. Someone with a business mind and opinions plus the technical skills to build an MVP and hire a technology team would be perfect. I can license my way to market but it will a clunkier more painful start. If I could work with someone who has deep experience with making microsoft365 work smoothly, for small volumes of data and a small number of users initially, then they would add value to both businesses instantly. My question is should I grind through this myself with JV's where needed using architects on contract for the tricky bits and build the technical knowledge to be a really good technical work partner enabling recruitment of a better technical co-founder or should I recruit the best technical-cofounder I can and get on with growing the businesses. I would happily take a smaller salary from cashflow than a technical co-founder initially, recognising their market value remuneration as soon as the business is able - likely early year 2. I would even consider technical guidance/mentoring for some equity if someone was interested. And I know you are supposed to focus on one thing at a time but the software for the two business systems is similar, and I have systems and people to drive the sales and management for both so will offering a technical-co founder 2 bites at 2 potential rapid growth businesses make them think they were increasing or reducing their odds of success? What questions would I ask to make sure the partnership will be enjoyable for the technical co-founder? Are there any books/experts on keeping technical co-founders happy?
- timita 3y ago
  > May I ask what a non-technical founder should look for in a technical co-founder? Breadth of expertise, ability to learn quickly, open minded when it comes to technology. Loves to work with clients and solve their problems more than they love the tech. The B2B and PostGIS part caught my eye. I'm technical, but leading both the business and the technical sides of my spatial analytics company. I would be happy to share at least some of my technical knowledge. From infrastructure, DevOps, through database and data layer, and all the way to the frontend - I've been doing this for years and there could be a thing or two that may be useful to you. On the other hand, I can always do better when it comes to B2B sales, so I am looking to learn too. Maybe we can have a chat sometimes. Would like to connect?
benreesman 3y ago
It would be nice(-er) if people said: "Look, my parents know people, my classmates and their parents know people, and while we unfortunately can't let you past the bike room, we'd like to work with you". Show me a meritocracy and I'll show you the winners corrupting it for their friends and kids.

welfare 3y ago

Completely agree, I'm waiting for the article on "Why you need a business-oriented co-founder and how technical founders can recruit one"...

thelittlenag 3y ago
+1 on that!
debacle 3y ago
The problem is that you don't. "Business" has been systematized in many ways, and more and more your "business" is just someone else's software.
jdminhbg 3y ago
> There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness. They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them. But for a startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will have to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing. [2] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > One is a combination of shyness and laziness. They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them. I think this is more complicated: the problem is not going out and talking to a bunch of strangers (which I would do if necessary, and I do claim that my tolerance of rejection is sufficiently high). The problem rather is (this is something that a friend, who works as a business consultant, explained to me): to make a successful sale, you need a salesperson "who thinks like the customer". Lots of programmers simply think very differently from how the typical programmers, and thus are bad salespersons concerning these customers. He really said that I have an insanely good intuition for what kind of software product would insanely help some specific industry, but also honestly told me that I (and honestly also he) would likely not be capable of selling such a product (if it existed) to a customer in this industry, simply because I think too differently from the decision makers in this industry.

lainga 3y ago

> while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of. I considered it a bit, and you know what, I'd wager that four-fifths of tech business dynamics flow from this statement. Technical expertise is the money printer onto which all manners of value extraction anchor themselves, like barnacles. If not at the creation, then, for a time, it is good. And then it happens anyway 5-10 years down the line. That said, there are different failure modes for purely technical people not understanding business. But the market doesn't seem to reward them the same way. Root cause is outside the scope of this comment...

_jal 3y ago
Yep. I used to be more charitable, but I've taken to being very short with founder wannabes who act like this. Bluntly, if they refuse to look past their preconceptions to see who they're actually talking to, why should I? This is made easier knowing founders with those sorts of blinders are likely going to fail anyway, so you don't want to be in the blast radius when it happens.
gary_0 3y ago
> That said, there are different failure modes for purely technical people not understanding business. A common one, I think, is technical people thinking management or business expertise is easy (or even beneath them) because they're so smart in other areas--and any problems they might have can surely be solved with the same tools they use to solve engineering problems, right? Which is kind of the flip side of the attitude of the kind of nontechnical founders we're talking about. Another thing I'm facing myself (as a technical person) is when I've successfully dipped a toe into a management role, I was lucky enough that the people I was leading were all also technical people whose personalities were mostly in line with mine. But I've had to remind myself that if I put myself in a leadership position again, it won't always be that simple...
- ethbr1 3y ago
  The biggest business gap seems to be assuming other people won't screw you over, given enough money on the table and the opportunity. I assume most MBAs already know this. Lots of technical people learn the hard way.

paulddraper 3y ago

:shrug: CEOs get recruited too, i don't understand the problem

dogman144 3y ago

Heading over to MIT to “find a coder” is something you’ll hear from HBS aspiring founders. I also deeply agree with the other part - there’s a class of technical leaders who have that depth and choose to work with technology as the primary day to day. But, they also don’t have HBS MBAs often. Good VCs look for these founders I think, but otherwise the cultural treatment of that type can aspire one to get a MBA just to fix or re-align the perception.

speby 3y ago

This is pretty well said. I tend to agree and as a founder of multiple companies, as a well an engineering-background co-founder myself, I have definitely had interactions with "non-technical" founders looking for people (like me) and totally got the vibe of the needing a "technical co-founder" because they just need some "coder" as if that's the missing key to success (or whatever). That said, there are plenty of very smart, driven, people who are not software engineers who don't think of a technical co-founder that way. So it'd be wrong to paint with a super wide brush on this.

TuringNYC 3y ago
>> That said, there are plenty of very smart, driven, people who are not software engineers who don't think of a technical co-founder that way. So it'd be wrong to paint with a super wide brush on this. Agree, I think business co-founders can add tremendous value. But that value needs to be shown -- upfront. Otherwise, why would any technologist sink hundreds of hours on a mere promise? Business co-founders should have already drawn out solutions, spoken to customers, perhaps gotten conditional sales POs from friends/contacts, raised funding, set up VC meetings, etc. But a Business co-founder who hasnt done any of these, and just wants the upside after a bunch of technical work is done, isnt the type of Business co-founder you want.

TuringNYC 3y ago

>> It is very frustrating when some Ivy League 25 year old PM/management consultant tries to pitch you on their vision while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of. I get calls weekly from people seeking technical co-founders. The biggest thing most CTO candidates dont realize is the power they have -- unless the "business co-founder" is actually bringing something to the table. I'd LOVE to work with a "Business co-founder" who actually brings Purchase Orders, Funding, Transact-able Relationships, prior wins (esp publicly verifiable wins). That would be a dream. It makes no sense to work with a "Business co-founder" who wants ME to put in hundreds of hours of technical work -- upfront -- often for equity "e.g., free" -- and retains the right to take all the upside and has none of the downside. Why would I need a "Business Co-Founder" at all in that case, I might as well be the only founder and recruit later. I see tons of friends burnt by these types of "deals." The biggest red-flag is when the "Business co-founder" still has a job and no real skin in the game.

deleted 3y ago
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WendyTheWillow 3y ago
I have substantially less exposure to this space than you seem to, but even when trying to start projects with friends, this holds true. So often, I get pitched by pals who think the idea is what they've done, and at that point, it's up to me to "code up." What I would love to hear is, "I've been talking with these three businesses already, and they seem interested." or even, "I'm really worried about the sales and marketing side of things, so that's the problem I'm going to focus on." Nobody's ever come even close to that. It takes zero coding to have those things already started, and yet nobody even goes down that path before looking for a "code monkey."
- TuringNYC 3y ago
  >> Nobody's ever come even close to that. It takes zero coding to have those things already started, and yet nobody even goes down that path before looking for a "code monkey." In a sense you are lucky in a situation like this -- that have self-selected themselves out w/o any effort from you. Technologists dont need anyone with that little motivation sharing equity. Better to know that at the start.

csa 3y ago

> This mindset that technical cofounders are essentially “coders” (a term I hate) is very prevalent among inexperienced nontechnical founders. I know I’m preaching to the choir here but a lot of technical people have deep industry/business/product knowledge and have social skills. It is very frustrating when some Ivy League 25 year old PM/management consultant tries to pitch you on their vision while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of. This is nicely worded, but I would like to expand on it. This is coming from someone who is a businessperson who programs — I’ve been programming since I was 10, but I’ve never had the job of a programmer. tl;dr - I think that both programmers and business people can be delusional about their value add, but folks who can do both are easier to work with, and folks who can do both have more opportunities than just hyper-growth startups. In generalities, there are four groups of folks on the tech-business continuum. 1. Pure tech folks with little or no business acumen. Some of these folks think “sales” or “marketing” are fighting words. I find many of these folks very difficult to do business with. To be charitable to the “Ivy League” folks you refer to, they have probably met enough of these pure tech folks (some of whom are actually idiot savants) such that they erroneously over-generalize to think that all tech folks are like these pure tech folks. 2. Tech folks with business acumen. The business side usually comes from experience. I think pg advocates for tech folks who do start ups to develop into this. Overall much easier to do business with, but sometimes they make product-oriented decisions that miss the forest for the trees. The best tech businesses come from this group, but they get outclassed on the business side unless they embrace the business side aggressively (Zuck and Gates being prime examples). I think the “Ivy League” folks lose a lot of business due to lack of respect for this group. 3. Business folks with tech acumen (this is me). Great at taking over tech business that are poorly run and optimizing them either as a c-suite executive or as a buyer (this is what I do). While I don’t refer to programmers as “coders”, and I don’t treat programmers as idiot-savants, I know how to find and pay programmers to solve my business problems. Interestingly, I run into some programmers who are doing commodity work who want a percentage of the business. My offer is always the same — zero. I’m not building a startup or complex software. Their skills are largely fungible to me, since most of the value is in finding the solution rather than the nuts and bolts of development. The exception is for folks in group 2 who want to move to group 3, but at that point they become a businessperson rather than a programmer. 4. Business folks with no tech acumen. These are the “Ivy League” folks (and a lot of VCs, tbh). These are the “idea people”, the people who are clueless about tech and tech development, often the people who are also bad at business, but they happen to have access to money and/or critical buyers. Fwiw, many of these folks treat other business people even worse than programmers — they just treat most people like idiots, sans the savant. I sometimes have a hard time doing business with these folks, because they frequently don’t know the value (or lack thereof) of their business, and/or they are only looking for suckers to do business with. Many/most of these folks are all style and no substance. If they had some substance, they would be in group 3 (or try to be). Obviously these are people on a continuum that are separated into somewhat arbitrary groups. That said, these archetypes exist. How do these archetypes matter for tech businesses? If you’re in group 1, you’re at the mercy of whatever business person you can work with. You hope that you end up more like Woz than most of the pure tech folks who get restructured out as the business grows. I strongly recommend that the pure tech folks focus on getting paid primarily in cash rather than equity, since any non-benevolent business person will structure out the tech person’s equity as soon as possible. If you are in group 2, you are in a strong position to develop a successful startup or successful tech business. Just realize that you are a cog in the VC machine, and they only value you for your potential to hit home runs. You can make more reliable money (think 8 or 9 figures) in a “lifestyle business”, but it is not likely you will become a billionaire… unless you shift to group 3. If you are in group 3, you need to realize that most of your value will be by doing very boring shit. Billionaire status is possible, but it will be a boring trip, and you are not likely to appear in any sexy tech write ups unless you engage in aggressive self-promotion in these areas (some should, most probably shouldn’t). The biggest mistake I see group 3 folks make is to think that they are in group 2, especially if/when they try to develop a consumer-oriented product without getting a group 2 cofounder. Group 4… well, group 4 is what they are. There is some jiujitsu by which their egos and ignorance can be used for greater good. If you engage with these folks, I would only do so with that type of interaction in mind. If you engage with them on their terms, you will almost certainly lose. Why did I write all of this? To clarify options for various level of tech people. The HN/Ycombinator narrative to push for technical co-founders is very valid for start ups (the pg kind that are built to grow fast), but there many other ways to make money as a tech person or a tech-oriented business person than start ups (especially now in the 20s compared to the 90s or 00s), and some/many of these are more reliable ways to get to a “fuck you money” level. I don’t think a lot of highly skilled tech folks realize this.

gumballindie 3y ago

They types still didn't learn that google, microsoft and every single disruptor out there has been founded and brought to riches by technical people. Business minded folks survive for a while, make a few millions, but never reach the levels of these companies. Quite the contrary - companies of this level plunge once business folks dominate. But that's good. Once google's dead others will take its place, and will be likely founded by technical people.

testmasterflex 3y ago
What about Amazon? Bezos first hire was a coder for the site and have him 5% IIRC
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Good point - he apparently has a major in CS or something among the lines.

tfehring 3y ago

Dalton says basically the same thing in the video. Lightly edited excerpt from the YouTube transcript (starting around 11:28): What often happens - again, to go deep on this - is that the way they'll pitch the person is that they'll pitch them their idea, like, "I'm an idea guy, I've got a great idea, do you want to be my worker bee to go do all my ideas?" And of course the person that's the best person you've ever worked with does not want to sit in a cage and do all of the work that you give them. And instead I'm like, well have you asked them if they have startup ideas? And then you sell yourself, where you can come together, come up with the idea together, as co-owners, and it's shocking how often that appears to have never occurred to someone. Like they think the idea of finding a tech co-founder is to find someone who will basically submit to their whims and be, like, their assistant, and that's not the move.

darajava 3y ago

What term do you prefer over “coder”? I’ve had this issue with pretty much any term for what I essentially do. I don’t like “developer”, “programmer”, “techie”, “IT… guy”? (The last two being particularly bad) Even “engineer” is a bit strange to me and I feel it doesn’t really fit, so I actually never knew what to call myself.

TuringNYC 3y ago
Partner.

j45 3y ago

Over the years, when I meet a non-technical founder looking for a technical founder, I ask them if they're ok owning as little of the startup that they offer to the technical person, until they can deliver sales. Technical people, in large do deliver a product and something that works. It might not be what the market wants, or the right thing, but speed of iteration, is again technical, and something the technical founder uniquely must bring. There is a video from YC that says they can see it from a mile away when the non-technical founders have taken advantage of the technical person, founder or not, by not giving them equity equal to the difference they make. I couldn't agree more.

gnicholas 3y ago
This is an interesting idea — variable vesting based on milestones. It would be a great way to reduce risk, though of course there are issues that could arise that would make this complicated. For example, if the technical person vests based on hitting certain product-related goals, does he get penalized if part of the dev team gets hired by another company, which makes it harder for him to hit the milestones? Or for the non-technical cofounder, if the economy goes into a tailspin, and it's much harder to make sales than the cofounders anticipated, should he not vest, even if he's doing everything he can? But overall, I think this is a really intriguing idea. Points could be assigned for what each founder is bringing to the table (concrete idea, market research, cash), and they would get some vested stock for that. Then the rest of the founder's shares could be put into a pool and vested to particular founders that hit their milestones. You wouldn't want to make it too adversarial, but it's possible the benefits of incentive alignment would overcome the downsides of the zero-sum game thinking that the system could engender.
- deleted 3y ago
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- levleontiev 3y ago
  >does he get penalized if part of the dev team gets hired by another company, which makes it harder for him to hit the milestones? Of course yes. The part of executive responsibility is to maintain the team and calculate the riscs .

matheusmoreira 3y ago

Why is disrespect for technical people so deeply rooted? It's like they think we're beneath them.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

That’s because the people with money are not the people who actually do the things. The people with money are the Ivy League 25-year-old PM management consultants. Since everyone seems to prefer more money over more freedom, us nerds keep agreeing to or putting ourselves in positions where we are depending on non technical people for money. I hate doing money stuff, I like building stuff There are people who don’t like building stuff but like doing money stuff. Which one do you think is going to get more money? Which one has the power over the other one? It’s totally inverted and changing this is going to take a century or more to fix

robocat 3y ago

> mindset that technical cofounders are essentially “coders” Business people usually think techos as commodity workers: Buy a geek like you would a house cleaner. Good discussion on that topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38402515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38402515 It's really weird given how many tech founders have shown the value of tech talent by creating billion dollar companies. Why can't they see it? Then again look in a mirror and techos tend to believe business people are total trash. Yes, many executives and salespeople are useless manglement and pointy-haired-bosses (just like there are useless engineers). But don't miss the valuable management gems. Techos: don't make the same mistakes as described about the non-techs in the vid by ignoring a 10x engineer. There are 10x non-techs too.

jacquesm 3y ago

Not to mention that you take approximately the same risk minus a couple of hundred K in total comp per year but - tadaaaa - in return you get 0.0025% stock that will vest over the next five years.

smearth 3y ago

May I ask what a non-technical founder should look for in a technical co-founder? I have two customers for slightly different businesses. The deals are made, I am building MVP's myself and JVing with established tech companies to get products to market. I have a supply chain with a 30% cost advantage with customers. and I have a hardware software system that significantly improves hire businesses that has customers and development partnerships with research organisations and funding applications in progress. Both have customers and large B2B growth potential. I am building the MVP's myself while selling and JVing as necessary but would happily partner equally with a technical expert in Microsoft365 and PostgreSQL and PostGIS. I'm an expert in business design and love technology without being talented or experienced building it. Someone with a business mind and opinions plus the technical skills to build an MVP and hire a technology team would be perfect. I can license my way to market but it will a clunkier more painful start. If I could work with someone who has deep experience with making microsoft365 work smoothly, for small volumes of data and a small number of users initially, then they would add value to both businesses instantly. My question is should I grind through this myself with JV's where needed using architects on contract for the tricky bits and build the technical knowledge to be a really good technical work partner enabling recruitment of a better technical co-founder or should I recruit the best technical-cofounder I can and get on with growing the businesses. I would happily take a smaller salary from cashflow than a technical co-founder initially, recognising their market value remuneration as soon as the business is able - likely early year 2. I would even consider technical guidance/mentoring for some equity if someone was interested. And I know you are supposed to focus on one thing at a time but the software for the two business systems is similar, and I have systems and people to drive the sales and management for both so will offering a technical-co founder 2 bites at 2 potential rapid growth businesses make them think they were increasing or reducing their odds of success? What questions would I ask to make sure the partnership will be enjoyable for the technical co-founder? Are there any books/experts on keeping technical co-founders happy?

timita 3y ago
> May I ask what a non-technical founder should look for in a technical co-founder? Breadth of expertise, ability to learn quickly, open minded when it comes to technology. Loves to work with clients and solve their problems more than they love the tech. The B2B and PostGIS part caught my eye. I'm technical, but leading both the business and the technical sides of my spatial analytics company. I would be happy to share at least some of my technical knowledge. From infrastructure, DevOps, through database and data layer, and all the way to the frontend - I've been doing this for years and there could be a thing or two that may be useful to you. On the other hand, I can always do better when it comes to B2B sales, so I am looking to learn too. Maybe we can have a chat sometimes. Would like to connect?

benreesman 3y ago

It would be nice(-er) if people said: "Look, my parents know people, my classmates and their parents know people, and while we unfortunately can't let you past the bike room, we'd like to work with you". Show me a meritocracy and I'll show you the winners corrupting it for their friends and kids.