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The main problems I see in 99% of the cases of a founder looking for a technical co-founder are: 1. The founder sees themselves as the ideas person but doesn’t

by JCM9 3y ago

The main problems I see in 99% of the cases of a founder looking for a technical co-founder are: 1. The founder sees themselves as the ideas person but doesn’t have the situational awareness to recognize that their ideas aren’t that unique. 2. The founder doesn’t understand that the value in a startup isn’t the idea but the ability to execute and build on that idea. For every very successful startup in X space there were 10x more with the same general idea but that failed to execute. The founder wants someone to built it for them but wants credit/equity for having the idea. In 99% of cases the value is created by the builders (technical cofounder) which instantly creates awkwardness of the founder wanting far more equity, credit, and control than their contributions warrant For the above reasons I’d avoid 99% of asks for a technical co-founder like the plague.

bastawhiz 3y ago
> sees themselves as the ideas person More importantly, most businesses don't need an "ideas person". They need someone who knows how to run a business. You need a total of one decent idea to start and run a business. You need tens of thousands of little hard choices, emails, and sales calls to keep the business successful, and that means getting your hands dirty. Ideas are not valuable.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  CTO = Builder first, then lead the building of both the technical systems and engineering culture. CEO = Sales and funding, maybe product owner very early days but quickly handing off to experienced product folks as soon as too painful to continue with rest of workload. (n=1 from my experience at a hyper growth startup)
  - RangerScience 3y ago
    I've been at more than a few startups (one that could be called some form of high+ growth, although it was ultimately unsuccessful), and this tracks. People do what they know; CTOs know how to build, CEOs (usually/often) know how to "business develop", marketers market, PMs design... People do what they know.
- incangold 3y ago
  This. Over and over. Founders also underestimate the degree to which good technologists who’ve worked at several startups also understand the business. I’ve watched friends who are CTOs get in to the same conflicts over and over with founders and product owners. The founders and product owners throw out 10 different ideas and push small dev teams to execute on all of them. There’s no focus or strategy, it’s just throwing ideas against the wall. Expensive-to-maintain ideas with no uptake are held on too for way too long. Expensive-to-create but sexy ideas are prioritised over cheap-to-create ideas with obvious potential for customer retention or up-sell. CTOs are often the ones taking about disciplined experimentation to find product/market fit against head-in-the-clouds founders with a vague, uncommunicated vision. I repeatedly see founders ignoring solid advice until, if they’re lucky, experienced boards say the same things as the ignored CTO. So often founders seem to think they’re a fictionalised version Steve Jobs, not understanding that Apple’s success was as much down to gritty, detailed engineering as a single visionary. And of course not understanding that they themselves are usually not visionary geniuses. These impressions are from a small sample of maybe 10 CTOs, but some of them had the same experience at consecutive startups before learning how to screen companies better. We need more founders who care about the unglamorous nuts and bolts. Or at least value the people who do.
  - sharemywin 3y ago
    I'd rather find someone with marketing and sales experience than anything else. Good sales people can hone in on the parts that part. They want to invest in the things that make selling easier.
    - user_7832 3y ago
      > I'd rather find someone with marketing and sales experience than anything else. Good sales people can hone in on the parts that part. They want to invest in the things that make selling easier. Would you say this is true even if you are not interested in scaling fast and are okay with a slower "organic" growth? (For context I have a few ideas I'd like to make a startup out of eventually, and I'm okay bootstrapping to a low/mid-volume high-niche area. I don't intend for the startup to really have massive profits, as long as I can keep it net profit and carve out a name in the niche I'll be happy.)
- pc86 3y ago
  Honestly I don't even believe you need a decent idea. There are thousands of boring businesses, including in software, that make a ton of money. Pick something that already makes money and do it slightly better. Idea not needed (other than "do it slightly better" which IMO is much more in the "how to run a business" camp than the "ideas person" camp). Forgive the ideological soapbox/tangent but this is really what capitalism is all about. You find a way to do something slightly better, faster cheaper - maybe all three - and you can have a successful business.
  - sharemywin 3y ago
    find one pain point or use case that resonates with at least a subset of people.
  - balder1991 3y ago
    I really think this is the way. The world is full of shitty software made by bloated companies who can’t sell it cheaper, and you just need to be able to do it better and cheaper to win the clients. The problem is just that a sufficiently mature product has been battle tested already, so it’s difficult at the beginning.
    - fendy3002 3y ago
      The problem is actually higher ups network and or sales/marketing. You'll be amazed at how those CEOs and sales people can sell trashes at diamond value. Tech cofounder will need them as CEO cofounders.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    But also, do your research; the world doesn't need yet another todo or note taking app with cloud storage as payment model. Another angle is to build software for a non-software industry you happen to be involved in, or that family or friends are at. Unfortunately for a lot of developers, IT is their corner already so there's a lot of startups that make tools for developers, which is a heavily competitive space. Other industries have a set of software they already use; CRM, inventory management, point-of-sale, websites / webshops, customer support, etc. One interesting niche that isn't actually a niche was telecom, the soft- and hardware running the mobile network. Very invisible to a lot of developers, but I think it's ripe for disruption as it's currently dominated by old companies like Nokia, Ericcson and Oracle. The company I worked for had an idea, but were IMO still too old-fashioned and not eager enough - happy with slow and steady growth, etc. That said, they were using mid- to late 2000's tech for their front-end and C for back-end, surely there's ways to improve on that. I made an attempt but I didn't get enough support / people from the company itself, so after 2.5 years of trying to build a new configuration system which was the USP of their business on my own I called it quits. The size and complexity of that was more than I've ever worked on, and that was usually in teams of 6-10 people, if not multiple teams.
Apreche 3y ago
Not to mention the fact, people who can execute have plenty of their own ideas already. People who only have ideas are not economically valuable. If someone wants to get money out, they have to contribute capital or labor. Ideas are neither.
- couchand 3y ago
  Ideas are like currency: you can find them on both sides of the balance sheet.
- dkarl 3y ago
  Nobody should bring just ideas. Ideally a non-technical founder would bring whatever skills are required to guide the evolution of the idea. Engineers like to assume product-led growth guided by data, where the external human factors that determine success or failure can be explored in a BI tool, but there are a lot of B2B domains where engaging with customers to understand their business and understand their buying process, understand who buys the software and what their incentives are, is how you learn what to build.
sharemywin 3y ago
the business person needs to bring sales and marketing to the project. building something no one wants or knows about is just wasting time. if your resourceful enough to bring a list of potential buyers no you'll be able to get developers interested.
- em-bee 3y ago
  this. bring me people/businesses with a problem, and i'll help you build a solution.
pc86 3y ago
Back in 2010 or so I had a series of meetings with someone about being a technical cofounder for them. I wasn't super passionate about the domain (don't even remember what it was at this point) but it was interesting enough and I had just enough technical experience at the time to think I could pull it off. We had everything figured out in broad strokes until we realized that of the 80/20 equity split, we both thought we were getting the 80. His exact words were "I just gave you this great idea why would I only get 20%?" Anyone who sees themselves as an "ideas person" as if that is a defining or valuable characteristic is a cancer.
- Wojtkie 3y ago
  "Ideas person" sounds awfully close to "thought leader". Just a bunch of butt-sniffers
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Honestly people who think their ideas are hot shit and worth 80% of a business need to fuck off. I can understand a people person and a tech person working together; one person handles the business and finance side, sets up meetings with investors and all that while the other does the implementation side. These are separate and both complicated affairs already; if a founder takes all that on board, great, you get a share. But you don't earn a share for an idea. Anyone can come up with a dozen ideas in an hour's time. It's low energy, low effort and you don't get a pat on the back for having an idea.
  - pc86 3y ago
    That is basically what I told him and we parted ways. I don't know what he's doing now but at some point he was shilling some "put your business card on a website!" nonsense.
- TuringNYC 3y ago
  You are lucky, best to avoid this situation immediately.
- icedchai 3y ago
  I was in this situation once. I joined, recruited the team, built the product... only to discover he couldn't sell it. Sales were abysmal. He could raise money and "sell the dream" though. That only goes on for so long without results. He also refused to pivot after 5 years of slow growth. Company nearly went broke and was "acquired" by one of the investors for pennies on the dollar. I say never again... but, I like early stage companies. Maybe not that early.
throwaway828 3y ago
I feel worth saying about 1: a non technology/software technical co-founder can still be technical but deep in their domain of expertise.
bitexploder 3y ago
Steve Jobs has a great quote about this, from The Lost Interview: “… it's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people "here's this great idea" then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get in the subtleties of it. And you also find there's tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can't make electrons do. There are certain things you can't make plastic do or glass do. Or factories do, or robots do. And as you get in to all these things, designing a product is keeping 5000 things in your brain, these concepts. And fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. It's that process that is the magic."
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  Which is all somewhat ironic coming from Steve Jobs.
  - pavlov 3y ago
    Why? Do you think Jobs was a hands-off idea man who let others sweat the details?
    - Workaccount2 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - edouard-harris 3y ago
        I'd suggest reading the book Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda, which makes it clear that this wasn't the case.
      - 3y ago
cwillu 3y ago
It's not 1 great idea, it's thousands of good ideas, more or less on demand. “Mr. [Founder] is new to the business of having ideas, and so when he has one, he becomes proud of himself for having it. He has not yet had enough ideas to unflinchingly discard those that are beautiful in some aspects and impractical in others; he has not yet acquired confidence in his own ability to think of better ideas as he requires them. What we are seeing here is not Mr. [Founder]'s best idea, I fear, but rather his only idea.” --https://hpmor.com/chapter/78 https://hpmor.com/chapter/78
- TuringNYC 3y ago
  I met a "Business Co-Founder" once who cornered me at an industry dinner and literally said to me with a straight face -- "very few people in the world have the product vision I have, very few people can see 10 years into the future" The person had never run a business, never been a product manager, never built a product, could not code. I almost choked on my coffee but tried to be cordial. Confidence is a hell of a drug.
  - htrp 3y ago
    "Leadership" is a hell of a drug.
  - fl0ki 3y ago
    And just like that, the server forfeited his tip.
random99292 3y ago
The problem isn't the ideas. It's the fact that these ideas people want you to validate the idea for them by building out the product. Well then, their idea is basically worthless.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I've been shipping software, my entire adult life. It's what I do. My stuff tends to be pretty good. Sometimes, I give exactly what was asked for, which might not be so good, but what I make, works; even if rather ugly. If I'm allowed to work iteratively, with a good creative, we can make something very good. I don't usually come up with uniquely original ideas, myself, but I'm really good at turning vague ideas into reality. I Make Stuff Happen. I've been doing that, since I was in my early 20s. What I have encountered, is that folks put no value, whatsoever on that ability. Like, to the point of being downright insulting. They don't like the cold wash of reality, bringing their lofty ideals into the world of the achievable. I've been told that I'm a "negative naysayer," but nothing could be farther from the truth. I want the thing to happen, and recognize the hurdles that need to be vaulted. When I was younger, and part of much larger organizations, I had to eat the disrespect poo. Nowadays, not so much. I guess folks think I'm a cranky old prima donna, but I won't accept being treated like crap. I'm quite aware of the sheer value of what I can do.
- opyate 3y ago
  Those are the same kind of folks who put "I want a Facebook clone" on Upwork for £300.
- fxtentacle 3y ago
  Fully agree, most non-technical people have no way of measuring the value created by a good developer, so they assume it must be insignificant. I typically try to encourage my potential future clients to shop around and maybe ask a famous consultancy for a quote. After they recover from the shock, they are then much nicer to work with.
TuringNYC 3y ago
You have a great list, but as a potential (and very reluctant) technical co-founder candidate, i'll two more major items to the list: 3. UPFRONT RISK: If you are doing this with sweat equity (no salary) then the Technical Co-Founder is taking almost all the risk. They are putting in all the time upfront, before the Business Co-Founder does. Smart Business Co-Founder would sell the idea to potential customers also, or get POs, or raise funding to pay for the technical effort, or invest their own $ to pay for the technical effort. However, a situation where one co founder (technical) puts in all the effort while the other gets a free option to put in effort later, is a very bad setup. 4. LEVERAGE: The Business Co-Founder essentially gets more leverage the more work the Technical Co-Founder does -- because now there is sunk-cost and a psychological shackle. The Technical Co-Founder just wants to be done with the build-out so the business can proceed and make money -- but the Business Co-Founder has every incentive to expand the MVP more and more since they are putting in no effort (possibly have not quit their job either) and wants more and more before the system can be sold. ADVISE TO POTENTIAL TECHNICAL CO-FOUNDERS - You be the "Business Co-Founder" also, no need for another person - If there is a Business Co-Founder, equal out the contribution at every stage. A PRD is not enough to equal out a build-out. Some ways to equal out the contributions: - Business Co-Founder has proven record that attracts success guaranteed (e.g., prior major exits, IPOs, huge online following, extreme case would be Elon -- i'll be a technical co-founder for him any day :-) - Business Co-Founder sells concept to clients, gets Purchase Orders before build-out - Business Co-Founder gets huge list of potential customers, ideally with pre-orders - Business Co-Founder raises funding and pays technical co-founder for upfront effort - Business Co-Founder puts down their own money (or takes a loan) to pay Technical Co-Founder for upfront build
gadders 3y ago
What value would you put on marketing and selling the product? I always assumed that is what the non-technical founder would take care of. Ideas are important. Building a product is important. Both achieve nothing unless you can actually sell what you have built.
- TuringNYC 3y ago
  >> What value would you put on marketing and selling the product? I always >> Both achieve nothing unless you can actually sell what you have built. I both agree with you and disagree. As a technologist, I agree sales are the only thing that matter. Most technical things are easy to me, and ultimately they are just code unless they can be monetized. But I disagree on the value question -- they are only valuable if they are being done before the build-out. If there is just a promise of sales after free upfront effort from a technical co-founder, then the value is tenuous. A good Business Co-Founder would be selling early, ideally at concept phase, such that there is no question of value becuase you already have pre-sales or purchase orders.
  - gadders 3y ago
    If the non-tech guys says "Here is my idea for a product, please build it" that is worth very little. If the non-tech guy says "Here is my idea for a product. I've been working in this domain for 15 years and I know what the pain points are. I have XX customers that have expressed an interest and paid a deposit (or committed to pay once the company starts)." then that I think is worth something.
snarf21 3y ago
Ideas are nothing but a (potential) head start, execution is everything.
jimbokun 3y ago
I think the real value of a non technical founder is: 1. Discovering the real requirements to make the product succeed. 2. Being really really good at sales. Technical people often lack those skills, and even if they build the best product in the world, it’s worthless without someone who can get it in front of the right people and convince them to pay for it.
- bckr 3y ago
  Number 1. is so important. I want to be able to build, to use the technical skills that I have, and not waste a ton of effort building something no one wants. I like coding but not enough to do it without solving anyone’s problems! A CEO who knows a bunch of stuff I don’t know about the domain, who talks to users more than me, and who sits her ass down and researches the hell out of stuff to bring me back useful knowledge—I’m glad to have.
  - lazide 3y ago
    #1 often comes from #2, or at least is much much much easier to do if you have someone who is doing #2. Technical folks often dramatically underestimate sales for the same reason that sales dramatically underestimates technical folks - they require very different mindsets, and almost everyone is insecure about it on one side or the other.
renegade-otter 3y ago
"It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.) To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until I see their execution." https://blog.codinghorror.com/cultivate-teams-not-ideas/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/cultivate-teams-not-ideas/
safety1st 3y ago
The article felt like a list of very predictable things that a hot shit young programmer who's steeped in the startup world's groupthink would have floating around in his head. Here is IMHO a more real world take on the question (can you find a technical co-founder?). * There are three problems in business. They are 1) Distribution (sales), 2) Product/Service (the thing being sold), and 3) Operations (broad but lets say e.g. Legal, Accounting, HR). * In very small business (e.g. startups) the Ops is not a ton of work yet, so in practice we talk about having potentially two founders, one needs to deliver a product, one needs to deliver the distribution. * If you can provably bring the distribution on day one you will have zero problems finding a technical co-founder. In fact you'll have so many options you probably won't need a co-founder, you can just hire someone on a nice package. * If you can't provably bring the distribution you are borderline worthless. That's the nature of sales, it is an uncomplicated discipline. In sales you produce or you're out. So the author of the post kind of addresses this when he asks why you as the non-technical founder don't have the money to just hire. That part's more or less right. The "biz" founder with distribution already lined up is more valuable than the technical founder. Yeah the tech founder is more valuable than the biz guy who can't produce.
commandlinefan 3y ago
"no, no, you do all the work and I keep all the money. What's your problem? You're _technical_, that's the way this works!"
mannyv 3y ago
"their ideas aren’t that unique" A successful business consists of customers and money, not unique ideas. I would say that the idea behind a business is one of the least useful things of a business. It helps with marketing, recruitment, and sales, but really, the idea itself is irrelevant. Execution counts for much, much more. In fact, the idea that ideas must be unique is the #1 problem with startups. There's plenty of space in the market for companies doing what other companies are doing, but just better.
- lazide 3y ago
  The challenge is, a lot of 'non-technical founders' are obsessed with the idea and consider it their 'golden ticket' reason for getting everything, and completely discount actual execution. Often the attitude is because 'execution is someone else's problem who doesn't matter much, I can just pay them peanuts'. Which is why all the hate from the engineering side, because they aren't looking for a technical co-founder but someone to do all the actual work while being told they don't matter. Often while being paid like they don't matter either.
roncesvalles 3y ago
The idea is worth less than nothing. If your idea is any good, someone with more resources than you will just copy it faster than you can say Mississippi.
throw4847285 3y ago
Unfortunately, you're wrong on both counts. 1. The founder being unaware that their ideas aren't unique is a feature not a bug. If Silicon Valley stopped reinventing the wheel, it would cease to exist. 2. The idea is what matters because ideas (and charisma) convince investors, and the goal is to make money, not a product.
cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
A very Hacker News comment. Not all execution is technical. 99% of the time, you aren’t building something that technically impressive, so I’d say that most execution isn’t. You’re probably building some CRUD database app and are throwing your VC funded development team at solving your own flavour of the same old scaling issues that they all solved at their last startups. To categorise 99%+ of serious^ nontechnical cofounders as just* contributing an idea and not meaningfully and positively contributing to some aspects of the actual execution very much paints you as having one of the typical shortcomings of a developer: you think that nothing else matters.
eschneider 3y ago
OTOH, there are a lot of things a non-technical founder can bring to the table that makes a co-founder request a lot more interesting. A non-technical cofounder with a track record in getting funding, in sales, or in marketing _can_ bring a lot to the table. There's hella lots of things that have to get done besides building a product to make a successful company, and if a non-technical cofounder can nail those things, and you can work with them, it could be a good arrangement.
borplk 3y ago
One way I can put it is that a non-technical co-founder must bring tangible business skills, that's what they provide, not "the idea". If a technical founder is sitting down and writing code until 2am on the weekends the non-technical founder better be making phone calls and sending emails, etc... The inexperienced "idea guy" thinks by sharing "the idea" they have done their part and are just now going to sit and watch as the "the programmer" implements it.
mistermann 3y ago
> The main problems I see in 99% of the cases of a founder looking for a technical co-founder are: Some problems I commonly see in people's analysis of situations: - believing themselves to know things which are unknowable ("the ideas person doesn’t have the situational awareness to recognize that their ideas aren’t that unique", "value in a startup isn’t the idea but the ability to execute and build on that idea", etc). - representing (and I suspect perceiving) subjective, heuristic based opinions ("aren’t that unique") as facts. - using inadequate variable types when describing (and I suspect perceiving) the problem space ("the value", "wants credit/equity for having the idea"). - making up facts ("In 99% of cases") This entire thread (as are most threads when the prompt is of a certain class of topic) is chock full of all of these, and many of the people in this subreddit are arguably genuine "The Experts" on this sort of thing...which is (or can be) kinda funny if you think about it for more than a few seconds. And yes, I do realize that I "should" just "know what you meant"....except: how should I go about doing that? And if these silly delusional founders should not believe silly delusional things, should that rule not extend to everyone?
bcaxis 3y ago
> 2. The founder doesn’t understand that the value in a startup isn’t the idea but the ability to execute and build on that idea. The best startups have both. You can execute, great. But if you have poor industry understanding and no idea what is going to work in that space. Let alone something that is going to revolutionize the space. It is, similarly, not going to work. Your industry expert need to have 20-30 years in the space. Understand it from the ground up. That guy is actually valuable. It's not one idea, it's comprehensive understanding of all the current struggles in the space.
ericmcer 3y ago
The non-tech founder needs to do the sales/marketing stuff. Managing social media, meeting with prospective users, translating feedback into product requirements. They should be taking every little thing we work on, whether its a napkin sketch or a working MVP and putting it in front of people so we can steer the product as intelligently as possible. If they do all that they are more than lifting their weight. That would make me almost feel like a slouch just doing the coding.
pg_1234 3y ago
>> The main problems I see in 99% of the cases of a founder looking for a technical co-founder are: >> 1. The founder sees themselves as the ideas person but ... Ideas are like assholes ... everybody has one and they're usually full of shit.
edpichler 3y ago
I totally agree. I have tons of ideas written in my notebook here. They are worthless. Many self-proclaimed "idea-guys" do not understand this. Execution is everything.

by JCM9 3y ago

bastawhiz 3y ago

> sees themselves as the ideas person More importantly, most businesses don't need an "ideas person". They need someone who knows how to run a business. You need a total of one decent idea to start and run a business. You need tens of thousands of little hard choices, emails, and sales calls to keep the business successful, and that means getting your hands dirty. Ideas are not valuable.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
CTO = Builder first, then lead the building of both the technical systems and engineering culture. CEO = Sales and funding, maybe product owner very early days but quickly handing off to experienced product folks as soon as too painful to continue with rest of workload. (n=1 from my experience at a hyper growth startup)
- RangerScience 3y ago
  I've been at more than a few startups (one that could be called some form of high+ growth, although it was ultimately unsuccessful), and this tracks. People do what they know; CTOs know how to build, CEOs (usually/often) know how to "business develop", marketers market, PMs design... People do what they know.
incangold 3y ago
This. Over and over. Founders also underestimate the degree to which good technologists who’ve worked at several startups also understand the business. I’ve watched friends who are CTOs get in to the same conflicts over and over with founders and product owners. The founders and product owners throw out 10 different ideas and push small dev teams to execute on all of them. There’s no focus or strategy, it’s just throwing ideas against the wall. Expensive-to-maintain ideas with no uptake are held on too for way too long. Expensive-to-create but sexy ideas are prioritised over cheap-to-create ideas with obvious potential for customer retention or up-sell. CTOs are often the ones taking about disciplined experimentation to find product/market fit against head-in-the-clouds founders with a vague, uncommunicated vision. I repeatedly see founders ignoring solid advice until, if they’re lucky, experienced boards say the same things as the ignored CTO. So often founders seem to think they’re a fictionalised version Steve Jobs, not understanding that Apple’s success was as much down to gritty, detailed engineering as a single visionary. And of course not understanding that they themselves are usually not visionary geniuses. These impressions are from a small sample of maybe 10 CTOs, but some of them had the same experience at consecutive startups before learning how to screen companies better. We need more founders who care about the unglamorous nuts and bolts. Or at least value the people who do.
- sharemywin 3y ago
  I'd rather find someone with marketing and sales experience than anything else. Good sales people can hone in on the parts that part. They want to invest in the things that make selling easier.
  - user_7832 3y ago
    > I'd rather find someone with marketing and sales experience than anything else. Good sales people can hone in on the parts that part. They want to invest in the things that make selling easier. Would you say this is true even if you are not interested in scaling fast and are okay with a slower "organic" growth? (For context I have a few ideas I'd like to make a startup out of eventually, and I'm okay bootstrapping to a low/mid-volume high-niche area. I don't intend for the startup to really have massive profits, as long as I can keep it net profit and carve out a name in the niche I'll be happy.)
pc86 3y ago
Honestly I don't even believe you need a decent idea. There are thousands of boring businesses, including in software, that make a ton of money. Pick something that already makes money and do it slightly better. Idea not needed (other than "do it slightly better" which IMO is much more in the "how to run a business" camp than the "ideas person" camp). Forgive the ideological soapbox/tangent but this is really what capitalism is all about. You find a way to do something slightly better, faster cheaper - maybe all three - and you can have a successful business.
- sharemywin 3y ago
  find one pain point or use case that resonates with at least a subset of people.
- balder1991 3y ago
  I really think this is the way. The world is full of shitty software made by bloated companies who can’t sell it cheaper, and you just need to be able to do it better and cheaper to win the clients. The problem is just that a sufficiently mature product has been battle tested already, so it’s difficult at the beginning.
  - fendy3002 3y ago
    The problem is actually higher ups network and or sales/marketing. You'll be amazed at how those CEOs and sales people can sell trashes at diamond value. Tech cofounder will need them as CEO cofounders.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  But also, do your research; the world doesn't need yet another todo or note taking app with cloud storage as payment model. Another angle is to build software for a non-software industry you happen to be involved in, or that family or friends are at. Unfortunately for a lot of developers, IT is their corner already so there's a lot of startups that make tools for developers, which is a heavily competitive space. Other industries have a set of software they already use; CRM, inventory management, point-of-sale, websites / webshops, customer support, etc. One interesting niche that isn't actually a niche was telecom, the soft- and hardware running the mobile network. Very invisible to a lot of developers, but I think it's ripe for disruption as it's currently dominated by old companies like Nokia, Ericcson and Oracle. The company I worked for had an idea, but were IMO still too old-fashioned and not eager enough - happy with slow and steady growth, etc. That said, they were using mid- to late 2000's tech for their front-end and C for back-end, surely there's ways to improve on that. I made an attempt but I didn't get enough support / people from the company itself, so after 2.5 years of trying to build a new configuration system which was the USP of their business on my own I called it quits. The size and complexity of that was more than I've ever worked on, and that was usually in teams of 6-10 people, if not multiple teams.

Apreche 3y ago

Not to mention the fact, people who can execute have plenty of their own ideas already. People who only have ideas are not economically valuable. If someone wants to get money out, they have to contribute capital or labor. Ideas are neither.

couchand 3y ago
Ideas are like currency: you can find them on both sides of the balance sheet.
dkarl 3y ago
Nobody should bring just ideas. Ideally a non-technical founder would bring whatever skills are required to guide the evolution of the idea. Engineers like to assume product-led growth guided by data, where the external human factors that determine success or failure can be explored in a BI tool, but there are a lot of B2B domains where engaging with customers to understand their business and understand their buying process, understand who buys the software and what their incentives are, is how you learn what to build.

sharemywin 3y ago

the business person needs to bring sales and marketing to the project. building something no one wants or knows about is just wasting time. if your resourceful enough to bring a list of potential buyers no you'll be able to get developers interested.

em-bee 3y ago
this. bring me people/businesses with a problem, and i'll help you build a solution.

pc86 3y ago

Back in 2010 or so I had a series of meetings with someone about being a technical cofounder for them. I wasn't super passionate about the domain (don't even remember what it was at this point) but it was interesting enough and I had just enough technical experience at the time to think I could pull it off. We had everything figured out in broad strokes until we realized that of the 80/20 equity split, we both thought we were getting the 80. His exact words were "I just gave you this great idea why would I only get 20%?" Anyone who sees themselves as an "ideas person" as if that is a defining or valuable characteristic is a cancer.

Wojtkie 3y ago
"Ideas person" sounds awfully close to "thought leader". Just a bunch of butt-sniffers
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Honestly people who think their ideas are hot shit and worth 80% of a business need to fuck off. I can understand a people person and a tech person working together; one person handles the business and finance side, sets up meetings with investors and all that while the other does the implementation side. These are separate and both complicated affairs already; if a founder takes all that on board, great, you get a share. But you don't earn a share for an idea. Anyone can come up with a dozen ideas in an hour's time. It's low energy, low effort and you don't get a pat on the back for having an idea.
- pc86 3y ago
  That is basically what I told him and we parted ways. I don't know what he's doing now but at some point he was shilling some "put your business card on a website!" nonsense.
TuringNYC 3y ago
You are lucky, best to avoid this situation immediately.
icedchai 3y ago
I was in this situation once. I joined, recruited the team, built the product... only to discover he couldn't sell it. Sales were abysmal. He could raise money and "sell the dream" though. That only goes on for so long without results. He also refused to pivot after 5 years of slow growth. Company nearly went broke and was "acquired" by one of the investors for pennies on the dollar. I say never again... but, I like early stage companies. Maybe not that early.

throwaway828 3y ago

I feel worth saying about 1: a non technology/software technical co-founder can still be technical but deep in their domain of expertise.

bitexploder 3y ago

Steve Jobs has a great quote about this, from The Lost Interview: “… it's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people "here's this great idea" then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get in the subtleties of it. And you also find there's tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can't make electrons do. There are certain things you can't make plastic do or glass do. Or factories do, or robots do. And as you get in to all these things, designing a product is keeping 5000 things in your brain, these concepts. And fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. It's that process that is the magic."

iamacyborg 3y ago
Which is all somewhat ironic coming from Steve Jobs.
- pavlov 3y ago
  Why? Do you think Jobs was a hands-off idea man who let others sweat the details?
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - edouard-harris 3y ago
      I'd suggest reading the book Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda, which makes it clear that this wasn't the case.
    - 3y ago

cwillu 3y ago

It's not 1 great idea, it's thousands of good ideas, more or less on demand. “Mr. [Founder] is new to the business of having ideas, and so when he has one, he becomes proud of himself for having it. He has not yet had enough ideas to unflinchingly discard those that are beautiful in some aspects and impractical in others; he has not yet acquired confidence in his own ability to think of better ideas as he requires them. What we are seeing here is not Mr. [Founder]'s best idea, I fear, but rather his only idea.” --https://hpmor.com/chapter/78 https://hpmor.com/chapter/78

TuringNYC 3y ago
I met a "Business Co-Founder" once who cornered me at an industry dinner and literally said to me with a straight face -- "very few people in the world have the product vision I have, very few people can see 10 years into the future" The person had never run a business, never been a product manager, never built a product, could not code. I almost choked on my coffee but tried to be cordial. Confidence is a hell of a drug.
- htrp 3y ago
  "Leadership" is a hell of a drug.
- fl0ki 3y ago
  And just like that, the server forfeited his tip.

random99292 3y ago

The problem isn't the ideas. It's the fact that these ideas people want you to validate the idea for them by building out the product. Well then, their idea is basically worthless.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I've been shipping software, my entire adult life. It's what I do. My stuff tends to be pretty good. Sometimes, I give exactly what was asked for, which might not be so good, but what I make, works; even if rather ugly. If I'm allowed to work iteratively, with a good creative, we can make something very good. I don't usually come up with uniquely original ideas, myself, but I'm really good at turning vague ideas into reality. I Make Stuff Happen. I've been doing that, since I was in my early 20s. What I have encountered, is that folks put no value, whatsoever on that ability. Like, to the point of being downright insulting. They don't like the cold wash of reality, bringing their lofty ideals into the world of the achievable. I've been told that I'm a "negative naysayer," but nothing could be farther from the truth. I want the thing to happen, and recognize the hurdles that need to be vaulted. When I was younger, and part of much larger organizations, I had to eat the disrespect poo. Nowadays, not so much. I guess folks think I'm a cranky old prima donna, but I won't accept being treated like crap. I'm quite aware of the sheer value of what I can do.

opyate 3y ago
Those are the same kind of folks who put "I want a Facebook clone" on Upwork for £300.
fxtentacle 3y ago
Fully agree, most non-technical people have no way of measuring the value created by a good developer, so they assume it must be insignificant. I typically try to encourage my potential future clients to shop around and maybe ask a famous consultancy for a quote. After they recover from the shock, they are then much nicer to work with.

TuringNYC 3y ago

You have a great list, but as a potential (and very reluctant) technical co-founder candidate, i'll two more major items to the list: 3. UPFRONT RISK: If you are doing this with sweat equity (no salary) then the Technical Co-Founder is taking almost all the risk. They are putting in all the time upfront, before the Business Co-Founder does. Smart Business Co-Founder would sell the idea to potential customers also, or get POs, or raise funding to pay for the technical effort, or invest their own $ to pay for the technical effort. However, a situation where one co founder (technical) puts in all the effort while the other gets a free option to put in effort later, is a very bad setup. 4. LEVERAGE: The Business Co-Founder essentially gets more leverage the more work the Technical Co-Founder does -- because now there is sunk-cost and a psychological shackle. The Technical Co-Founder just wants to be done with the build-out so the business can proceed and make money -- but the Business Co-Founder has every incentive to expand the MVP more and more since they are putting in no effort (possibly have not quit their job either) and wants more and more before the system can be sold. ADVISE TO POTENTIAL TECHNICAL CO-FOUNDERS - You be the "Business Co-Founder" also, no need for another person - If there is a Business Co-Founder, equal out the contribution at every stage. A PRD is not enough to equal out a build-out. Some ways to equal out the contributions: - Business Co-Founder has proven record that attracts success guaranteed (e.g., prior major exits, IPOs, huge online following, extreme case would be Elon -- i'll be a technical co-founder for him any day :-) - Business Co-Founder sells concept to clients, gets Purchase Orders before build-out - Business Co-Founder gets huge list of potential customers, ideally with pre-orders - Business Co-Founder raises funding and pays technical co-founder for upfront effort - Business Co-Founder puts down their own money (or takes a loan) to pay Technical Co-Founder for upfront build

gadders 3y ago

What value would you put on marketing and selling the product? I always assumed that is what the non-technical founder would take care of. Ideas are important. Building a product is important. Both achieve nothing unless you can actually sell what you have built.

TuringNYC 3y ago
>> What value would you put on marketing and selling the product? I always >> Both achieve nothing unless you can actually sell what you have built. I both agree with you and disagree. As a technologist, I agree sales are the only thing that matter. Most technical things are easy to me, and ultimately they are just code unless they can be monetized. But I disagree on the value question -- they are only valuable if they are being done before the build-out. If there is just a promise of sales after free upfront effort from a technical co-founder, then the value is tenuous. A good Business Co-Founder would be selling early, ideally at concept phase, such that there is no question of value becuase you already have pre-sales or purchase orders.
- gadders 3y ago
  If the non-tech guys says "Here is my idea for a product, please build it" that is worth very little. If the non-tech guy says "Here is my idea for a product. I've been working in this domain for 15 years and I know what the pain points are. I have XX customers that have expressed an interest and paid a deposit (or committed to pay once the company starts)." then that I think is worth something.

snarf21 3y ago

Ideas are nothing but a (potential) head start, execution is everything.

jimbokun 3y ago

I think the real value of a non technical founder is: 1. Discovering the real requirements to make the product succeed. 2. Being really really good at sales. Technical people often lack those skills, and even if they build the best product in the world, it’s worthless without someone who can get it in front of the right people and convince them to pay for it.

bckr 3y ago
Number 1. is so important. I want to be able to build, to use the technical skills that I have, and not waste a ton of effort building something no one wants. I like coding but not enough to do it without solving anyone’s problems! A CEO who knows a bunch of stuff I don’t know about the domain, who talks to users more than me, and who sits her ass down and researches the hell out of stuff to bring me back useful knowledge—I’m glad to have.
- lazide 3y ago
  #1 often comes from #2, or at least is much much much easier to do if you have someone who is doing #2. Technical folks often dramatically underestimate sales for the same reason that sales dramatically underestimates technical folks - they require very different mindsets, and almost everyone is insecure about it on one side or the other.

renegade-otter 3y ago

"It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.) To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until I see their execution." https://blog.codinghorror.com/cultivate-teams-not-ideas/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/cultivate-teams-not-ideas/

safety1st 3y ago

The article felt like a list of very predictable things that a hot shit young programmer who's steeped in the startup world's groupthink would have floating around in his head. Here is IMHO a more real world take on the question (can you find a technical co-founder?). * There are three problems in business. They are 1) Distribution (sales), 2) Product/Service (the thing being sold), and 3) Operations (broad but lets say e.g. Legal, Accounting, HR). * In very small business (e.g. startups) the Ops is not a ton of work yet, so in practice we talk about having potentially two founders, one needs to deliver a product, one needs to deliver the distribution. * If you can provably bring the distribution on day one you will have zero problems finding a technical co-founder. In fact you'll have so many options you probably won't need a co-founder, you can just hire someone on a nice package. * If you can't provably bring the distribution you are borderline worthless. That's the nature of sales, it is an uncomplicated discipline. In sales you produce or you're out. So the author of the post kind of addresses this when he asks why you as the non-technical founder don't have the money to just hire. That part's more or less right. The "biz" founder with distribution already lined up is more valuable than the technical founder. Yeah the tech founder is more valuable than the biz guy who can't produce.

commandlinefan 3y ago

"no, no, you do all the work and I keep all the money. What's your problem? You're _technical_, that's the way this works!"

mannyv 3y ago

"their ideas aren’t that unique" A successful business consists of customers and money, not unique ideas. I would say that the idea behind a business is one of the least useful things of a business. It helps with marketing, recruitment, and sales, but really, the idea itself is irrelevant. Execution counts for much, much more. In fact, the idea that ideas must be unique is the #1 problem with startups. There's plenty of space in the market for companies doing what other companies are doing, but just better.

lazide 3y ago
The challenge is, a lot of 'non-technical founders' are obsessed with the idea and consider it their 'golden ticket' reason for getting everything, and completely discount actual execution. Often the attitude is because 'execution is someone else's problem who doesn't matter much, I can just pay them peanuts'. Which is why all the hate from the engineering side, because they aren't looking for a technical co-founder but someone to do all the actual work while being told they don't matter. Often while being paid like they don't matter either.

roncesvalles 3y ago

The idea is worth less than nothing. If your idea is any good, someone with more resources than you will just copy it faster than you can say Mississippi.

throw4847285 3y ago

Unfortunately, you're wrong on both counts. 1. The founder being unaware that their ideas aren't unique is a feature not a bug. If Silicon Valley stopped reinventing the wheel, it would cease to exist. 2. The idea is what matters because ideas (and charisma) convince investors, and the goal is to make money, not a product.

cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago

A very Hacker News comment. Not all execution is technical. 99% of the time, you aren’t building something that technically impressive, so I’d say that most execution isn’t. You’re probably building some CRUD database app and are throwing your VC funded development team at solving your own flavour of the same old scaling issues that they all solved at their last startups. To categorise 99%+ of serious^ nontechnical cofounders as just* contributing an idea and not meaningfully and positively contributing to some aspects of the actual execution very much paints you as having one of the typical shortcomings of a developer: you think that nothing else matters.

eschneider 3y ago

OTOH, there are a lot of things a non-technical founder can bring to the table that makes a co-founder request a lot more interesting. A non-technical cofounder with a track record in getting funding, in sales, or in marketing _can_ bring a lot to the table. There's hella lots of things that have to get done besides building a product to make a successful company, and if a non-technical cofounder can nail those things, and you can work with them, it could be a good arrangement.

borplk 3y ago

One way I can put it is that a non-technical co-founder must bring tangible business skills, that's what they provide, not "the idea". If a technical founder is sitting down and writing code until 2am on the weekends the non-technical founder better be making phone calls and sending emails, etc... The inexperienced "idea guy" thinks by sharing "the idea" they have done their part and are just now going to sit and watch as the "the programmer" implements it.

mistermann 3y ago

> The main problems I see in 99% of the cases of a founder looking for a technical co-founder are: Some problems I commonly see in people's analysis of situations: - believing themselves to know things which are unknowable ("the ideas person doesn’t have the situational awareness to recognize that their ideas aren’t that unique", "value in a startup isn’t the idea but the ability to execute and build on that idea", etc). - representing (and I suspect perceiving) subjective, heuristic based opinions ("aren’t that unique") as facts. - using inadequate variable types when describing (and I suspect perceiving) the problem space ("the value", "wants credit/equity for having the idea"). - making up facts ("In 99% of cases") This entire thread (as are most threads when the prompt is of a certain class of topic) is chock full of all of these, and many of the people in this subreddit are arguably genuine "The Experts" on this sort of thing...which is (or can be) kinda funny if you think about it for more than a few seconds. And yes, I do realize that I "should" just "know what you meant"....except: how should I go about doing that? And if these silly delusional founders should not believe silly delusional things, should that rule not extend to everyone?

bcaxis 3y ago

> 2. The founder doesn’t understand that the value in a startup isn’t the idea but the ability to execute and build on that idea. The best startups have both. You can execute, great. But if you have poor industry understanding and no idea what is going to work in that space. Let alone something that is going to revolutionize the space. It is, similarly, not going to work. Your industry expert need to have 20-30 years in the space. Understand it from the ground up. That guy is actually valuable. It's not one idea, it's comprehensive understanding of all the current struggles in the space.

ericmcer 3y ago

The non-tech founder needs to do the sales/marketing stuff. Managing social media, meeting with prospective users, translating feedback into product requirements. They should be taking every little thing we work on, whether its a napkin sketch or a working MVP and putting it in front of people so we can steer the product as intelligently as possible. If they do all that they are more than lifting their weight. That would make me almost feel like a slouch just doing the coding.

pg_1234 3y ago

>> The main problems I see in 99% of the cases of a founder looking for a technical co-founder are: >> 1. The founder sees themselves as the ideas person but ... Ideas are like assholes ... everybody has one and they're usually full of shit.

edpichler 3y ago

I totally agree. I have tons of ideas written in my notebook here. They are worthless. Many self-proclaimed "idea-guys" do not understand this. Execution is everything.