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My advice still holds, and yes, it is also completely reasonable. You found a terrible co-founder. A terrible co-founder, business or otherwise, will generate

My advice still holds, and yes, it is also completely reasonable. You found a terrible co-founder. A terrible co-founder, business or otherwise, will generate terrible outcomes. One thing that is very important to understand is that a great business co-founder is as rare (if not rarer) than a great technical co-founder. If you happen to find someone like that, having an attitude that they won't do any work, and they won't "do much meaningful work", will not endear them to you. If they're a great business co-founder, they will have nearly unlimited options, much like great technical co-founders. They might also have great market knowledge, plenty of inside connections, and experience on what to do, and how to do it. And as you brought it up, experience on how to get to product market fit. All of which is invaluable. Further, and please don't take this the wrong way, but their experience in connecting with and evaluating people might have prevented you from choosing the clearly incompetent person that you ended up selecting.

michaelq 12y ago
Rather than dismissing my cofounder as terrible, I encourage you to consider the possibility that advice like yours, which we followed in cofounding the company, set him up for failure. Having specialization early on was a mistake. It was a difficult situation, and it wasn't entirely his fault that there was, for long stretches of time, little for him to do. A startup cycle goes something like this: initial theory -> MVP -> validation of theory using MVP -> iterating to product-market fit -> scale Even in that highly oversimplified flow, there are a lot of shifts from "product mode" to "development mode". Most of these steps must happen sequentially. If only half of the team is fully engaged in any given step, you get a lot of slack. There's a joke that first startups should hire a bunch of developers to build the product. Then they should fire the developers and hire a bunch of salespeople to sell the product. Which begs the question - why not just hire developers who can sell, and avoid paying all that unemployment? Larger organizations can get away with having specialists onboard. Smaller organizations (2-3 people) can't afford this luxury. Your advice would hold for a later stage startup, but it is unreasonable advice for an early stage startup.
- jason_tko 12y ago
  It seems as though you're coming at this with a very different world view and set of experiences than me, which is fine. Maybe we can learn something from each other. To give two sentences of background, I've been running businesses for 13 years, and running a startup for 4 years. The first business I built by myself from nothing, and the second I built alongside my technical co-founder. Firstly I'm concerned that you seem to think that I'm suggesting finding a 'specialist' business co-founder. Being a co-founder is the exact opposite of specialisation. If you're a co-founder period, you do ANYTHING it takes to move things forward, no exceptions, ifs, ands or buts. Also, without meaning to be picky, I believed you identified your co-founder as terrible. Someone who, as you described, believes that doing 'thought experiments' and trying to get twitter followers is the appropriate thing that a business co-founder should be doing in an early stage startup, is objectively a terrible business co-founder. If your business co-founder is doing his job properly, there should never be any slack. Exactly the same as a technical co-founder. Companies, especially early stage companies, can and must be doing product mode and develop mode simultaneously. I've never heard that joke, but as you grow your company and get more customers on board, who have more requirements, it's pretty important to have both salespeople and developers working in tandem to build out a company. I agree with you that larger organisations can afford having specialists and smaller organisations cannot.
  - michaelq 12y ago
    How did you build the product that your first business sold without a technical person onboard? You coded it yourself. Thus, you have technical skills. 9 years later, when you were looking for a cofounder, you decided to go with a technical cofounder. You can talk all you want, but at the end of the day, you chose to bring on a second technical cofounder (the first being yourself) over the business cofounder that you are recommending the OP seek out. N.b. by technical cofounder, I don't necessarily mean someone with a PhD in Computer Vision. I mean someone who can productively write API integrations and use whatever tools are needed (e.g. Rails, Meteor, Xcode) to build the product.
    - jason_tko 12y ago

michaelq 12y ago

Rather than dismissing my cofounder as terrible, I encourage you to consider the possibility that advice like yours, which we followed in cofounding the company, set him up for failure. Having specialization early on was a mistake. It was a difficult situation, and it wasn't entirely his fault that there was, for long stretches of time, little for him to do. A startup cycle goes something like this: initial theory -> MVP -> validation of theory using MVP -> iterating to product-market fit -> scale Even in that highly oversimplified flow, there are a lot of shifts from "product mode" to "development mode". Most of these steps must happen sequentially. If only half of the team is fully engaged in any given step, you get a lot of slack. There's a joke that first startups should hire a bunch of developers to build the product. Then they should fire the developers and hire a bunch of salespeople to sell the product. Which begs the question - why not just hire developers who can sell, and avoid paying all that unemployment? Larger organizations can get away with having specialists onboard. Smaller organizations (2-3 people) can't afford this luxury. Your advice would hold for a later stage startup, but it is unreasonable advice for an early stage startup.

jason_tko 12y ago
It seems as though you're coming at this with a very different world view and set of experiences than me, which is fine. Maybe we can learn something from each other. To give two sentences of background, I've been running businesses for 13 years, and running a startup for 4 years. The first business I built by myself from nothing, and the second I built alongside my technical co-founder. Firstly I'm concerned that you seem to think that I'm suggesting finding a 'specialist' business co-founder. Being a co-founder is the exact opposite of specialisation. If you're a co-founder period, you do ANYTHING it takes to move things forward, no exceptions, ifs, ands or buts. Also, without meaning to be picky, I believed you identified your co-founder as terrible. Someone who, as you described, believes that doing 'thought experiments' and trying to get twitter followers is the appropriate thing that a business co-founder should be doing in an early stage startup, is objectively a terrible business co-founder. If your business co-founder is doing his job properly, there should never be any slack. Exactly the same as a technical co-founder. Companies, especially early stage companies, can and must be doing product mode and develop mode simultaneously. I've never heard that joke, but as you grow your company and get more customers on board, who have more requirements, it's pretty important to have both salespeople and developers working in tandem to build out a company. I agree with you that larger organisations can afford having specialists and smaller organisations cannot.
- michaelq 12y ago
  How did you build the product that your first business sold without a technical person onboard? You coded it yourself. Thus, you have technical skills. 9 years later, when you were looking for a cofounder, you decided to go with a technical cofounder. You can talk all you want, but at the end of the day, you chose to bring on a second technical cofounder (the first being yourself) over the business cofounder that you are recommending the OP seek out. N.b. by technical cofounder, I don't necessarily mean someone with a PhD in Computer Vision. I mean someone who can productively write API integrations and use whatever tools are needed (e.g. Rails, Meteor, Xcode) to build the product.
  - jason_tko 12y ago