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The answer to the eternal question: “Where do I find a technical cofounder?”

95 points by hailpixel 12y ago

visakanv 12y ago
I can't seem to load the page... That said while we're on this topic, I've always enjoyed Drew Houston's take on it:http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-find-good-technical-co-founders http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-find-good-technical-co-founder... "Unfortunately this is a classic problem. "How do I find a really hot single girl to go out with?" * Good technical people will have ideas of their own that they're excited about, and working for a non-technical founder who, by the way, doesn't know or appreciate the difficulty or time it takes to make something well-engineered and undervalues you from an ownership standpoint, gets old quickly. * People who are not hands-on building the product at the very early stage of the startup are usually not terribly useful until later, because building the product is most of the real work early on. * Good engineers have a wealth of compelling opportunities at any given time, so it gets even worse if the non-technical founder is inexperienced, or hasn't already brought a lot to the table (funding, etc.) See, for example, http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-12.html#e2010-12-01T15_45_40.htm http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-1... one view of how technical people perceive "idea guys" who "just need a programmer." So, what can you do? * One is look for a technical cofounder, not just an early employee, and give commensurate equity. Again, bear in mind that frankly he or she will be more valuable than you at this phase. * Two is learn to code enough to bang out a prototype -- this will also make you a better engineering manager if you can appreciate the technical craft and can empathize with engineers. And there are tools like Balsamiq that can help create reasonable mockups that can convey your idea without writing code. * Three, search the far corners of the earth for talent -- maybe you'll get lucky and find a CS student who hasn't been jaded by bad experiences with arrangements like this. Or, if the technology you need developed isn't rocket science, you can try outsourcing, which is its own Pandora's box. Derek Sivers has a good post on managing that: http://sivers.org/how2hire http://sivers.org/how2hire Good times, but this is what business cofounders bring to the table, right? They figure shit out, and it's hard work. Hiring the early team is just the beginning."
- hailpixel 12y ago
  Sorry about the page timeout, I'm sorting about that out now.
- gregd 12y ago
  Which could explain why they're looking for a technical cofounder..
- piato 12y ago
  "* Two is learn to code enough to bang out a prototype -- this will also make you a better engineering manager if you can appreciate the technical craft and can empathize with engineers. And there are tools like Balsamiq that can help create reasonable mockups that can convey your idea without writing code." I've always been confused by how this is meant to help - could you explain further? I've always been a technical founder, but I've never had any idea how to find a technical co-founder - as you correctly say, good technical people will have their idea they're excited about! So I'm always skeptical that "make a prototype" would work to convince anyone, but perhaps it would - is there some hidden pool of good engineers who exist in some weird fugue state of "show me a cool semi-working website and I'm on-board", outside of, like, 1st year CS?
  - giaour 12y ago
    That way you can demonstrate that you at least know what you want a finished product to roughly look like and do.
  - visakanv 12y ago
    I can talk about something completely different– I'm a writer, and I work with visual designers. They much, much prefer it when I can give them a terrible sketch of an idea rather than a lengthy diatribe about what I want. Because it's far easier for them to apply their design sensibilities to a crappy sketch than to a cloud of words. Similarly- I don't think it's "show me a cool semi-working website and I'm on-board", but more of- "Show me something that I recognize immediately as a really good idea, even though it's kind of crappy in execution." I'm reminded of what Jong-Moon Kim wrote about Pixar movies: http://jiggity.com/kitchen.html http://jiggity.com/kitchen.html > Pixar uses a structure known as a braintrust to delicately examine works-in-progress. The braintrust is composed of some of the best storytellers of our generation who take a supreme effort in understanding the director's intent before offering suggestions. > What's most incredible is that this feedback from the world-class cabal is merely suggestive and the director has the power to reject changes. The braintrust is aware of the danger of heavy-handed feedback squashing the soul of the product. > New ideas are delicate and brittle. What starts off as a ugly, tangential feature later grows up to become a fundamental part of the final product.
volent 12y ago
Cached version : http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BXa1Cn2TzMIJ:www.hailpixel.com/articles/technical-cofounders+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BXa1Cn2...
rhapsodyv 12y ago
And the answer to the eternal question: “Where do I find a salesperson cofounder?” ? :-/
- groktor 12y ago
  or alternatively, "where do I find a good marketing/bus dev co-founder?"
rkwasny 12y ago
I've got a different question: "Where do I find a non-technical cofounder?" It seems people that understand tech but also have sales/management skills are a rare scarcity.
- sixQuarks 12y ago
  what are you going to do with a non-technical cofounder that has "sales/management" skills? That implies that you already have a product built. A truly valuable non-technical cofounder will be a product developer, not a sales/management guy. The most valuable type of marketing is baked into product development.
  - brudgers 12y ago
    A sales/management type can work on developing and qualifying leads; communicating with legal, accounting, and insurance consultants; and raising outside investment to the extent these are appropriate to the business model. Even more importantly they add slack. This means there's someone to take out the trash and stock the refrigerator with Diet Coke, Caffeine Free Coke, and almond milk.
    - hga 12y ago
      Of course a large fraction of these types are too proud to do that. One thing I always look for, in every member of a startup, is that they aren't too proud "to sweep the floors" if needed.
      - brudgers 12y ago
        The idea of slack entails the possibility that a programming ninja can wash the coffee mugs while the sales/administrative person is head down in payables for last month. Above jumping into the dumpster to retrieve a dollar isn't limited to one skill set.
        hga 12y ago
mvonthron 12y ago
When I meet such people in meetups, all I hear is "I am the next Zuckerberg but I have no idea how things work. Where do I find someone to do the work for me?"
- aram 12y ago
  Same here unfortunately. Most people I heard asking that question had no clue about technology, and more importantly, never showed interest in understanding the basics. My feeling was that they thought of such partnership as a way to get someone work for free.
- krampian 12y ago
  That would be an easy one to answer - Zuckerberg did all the coding and hired a non-technical founder. More aggravating are the ones who think they're the next Steve Jobs and just need their Woz.
- visakanv 12y ago
  It's always strange to me (or sad, I guess) to me when people with ideas want to start businesses without being terrified by their own incompetence and ignorance. I think that's usually a sign that a person doesn't actually feel very strongly about the problem they're solving, and that's a red flag. If you really, truly care about solving some problem, it should drive you crazy that there's something that you have no idea anything about. IMHO.
- deleted 12y ago
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- madaxe_again 12y ago
  I so often have "I have this idea X, blah blah, what should I do?!?!" And my response, every time is : "Stop talking about it and do it - or don't." I mean, if you're not prepared to knuckle down and do the work yourself - do you actually believe in what you're doing? These words were said to a very drunk me in a bar in London some 12 years ago, while I was fucking about with my first botched trainer-wheels startup (social networking for the elite - got serious traction, but we lost interest), and was garrulously asking some poor fucker what he thought I should do about idea X. That was his off-the-cuff response, but I've lived by it since.
aidos 12y ago
Seems like good advice. I'm in the fortunate position of being on the technical side and, I suspect like a lot of technical people, I've turned down plenty of 'opportunities' from ideas people. If you were coming to me hoping to get me on board with your idea, offering anything other than equal footing on the equity side would be a total non-starter. In the majority of cases even that would probably be a crappy deal. One thing with this: "If you just need someone who can understand your vision and create the software which allows it to function, you are searching for an employee." I guess it depends on how technical your product is but I think in the beginning you need to have serious commitment from the technical team. They really need to care about getting the product right or dropping what they're doing on the weekend to deal with a support request. It could mean the difference between life and death for your company.
k__ 12y ago
I'm not a founder, only a developer, but non-technical people asked me if I want to be their cofounder. Most of the time they are teams of a few business people who do marketing and biz-dev. When they tell me about their idea, I often think that the only bad thing about their idea is the part, where the company has to supply 4 people, where only one of them can build something. Also they often see a technical cofounder as a work-horse and not a partner...
- mgkimsal 12y ago
  Almost inevitably, there will be 3-4 people vying for their ideas to be implemented, sometimes conflicting with each other, sometimes conflicting with what's actually possible technically, and the sole dev guy will end up caught in the middle of all this - not unlike corp work, really. And yeah, they'll almost never see you as an actual CO-founder or equal in any way. I've seen that happen (equality) but more often than not, the situation you described. If you can't "sell" something until every single pixel is perfect and it scales up to instagram levels on day one and everything else is in place because you "only get one shot at impressing person X (or... first customer)"... you're doing something wrong.
madaxe_again 12y ago
You don't. They find you. Technical co-founders are necessarily naïve. Why? Because once they've been one once, they don't want to be one again. The only "serial" technical co-founders I've encountered have usually failed to get to the MVP stage of any of the companies they've founded, and thus don't know the hell their path leads to. I speak from first-hand experience. I would sooner chew my own legs off than do this again. Not because I dislike my company, or don't like what I do today, but because it's traumatic, and I've no desire to go through it again. It costs you years of your life, you don't get sleep, or friends, and at the end of it all, nobody will thank you, they'll just resent you, as those that were there from the start never realised just how much the technical co-founder did to make things work in the early days (not so fond memories of not leaving my desk for 9 grim, sticky days), and those that started later don't see the technical co-founder getting as involved in the technology as much, and thus view them as disconnected. Damned either way. If you get someone in with experience, they'll tell you to get bent, won't do the death-marches that you often need to get the ball rolling, and will want to be paid their worth, rather than nothing. So yeah - your only hope is to get to know technical folks while they're still learning, and get them in then - otherwise they'll know better and will refuse your poisoned chalice.
- lettergram 12y ago
  I commented below, but personally every time someone comes to me with an idea I ask for 75% equity. Usually people scoff and walk away, but sometimes people are willing to negotiate. To me it's always amazing how little equity some technical cofounders obtain. Ideas, like talk, is pretty cheap. Coding for years is pretty damn expensive.
  - nissimk 12y ago
    Maybe I'm being naive, but there can be something else that the non-technical founder brings that is equally valuable to the tech stuff: paying customers. If they have actual customers that are ready to pay, then the deal may be worth it even for less than equal share of equity. Another is cash investment (not relationships with investors, real cash of their own that they are willing to invest). I think most of these non-technical founders just have a fantasy about a product idea and it really is worthless. But if they have a good network of contacts and people ringing their phone for whatever they want you to build then that is some value. If these idea people are so sure of their ideas, they can finance development using freelancers and they don't need a technical cofounder. If technical cofounder is just doublespeak for programmer willing to work for free + equity, only someone very naive will take it.
skyboxone 12y ago
Ask them: how much time do you waste endlessly commenting on ridiculous articles on Hacker News? If it's anything more than zero, they are a poser and fake.
puppetmaster3 12y ago
May I also ask: how do I get a paycheck, w/o working? Also, how do I get someone to work for me for free, and I'll mange the cap table? And last: is it possible in non fantasy world to be gainfully employed, but not even know HTML?
lordnacho 12y ago
I met a business guy who explained his attitude to tech guys to me, over a number of meeting about starting a venture. - Tech guys can just sit back once the website is built and cash in forever, while the marketing and business guys have to keep on the ball. - You can rent an army of developers in Eastern Europe for no money at all. He had 30 guys doing his one-pager color split testing for him. - All the value is in the marketing and supply chain. He's 80% of the value and feels screwed giving the tech people 25%. Funnily enough we never got that one launched.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- brianwawok 12y ago
  Flip side is most tech guys think the business guy is an idiot. people suck at realizing other disciplines have worth.
  - api 12y ago
    Everyone thinking every other kind of role is worthless is one of the things I've persistently seen ruin and even kill companies.
  - mgkimsal 12y ago
    Many (most?) of the business guys who you end up talking with in those situations are idiots. The ones that can execute often already are, and aren't wasting their time doing cofounder dating. Likewise by the time you're scrounging around looking for technical cofounders, you're at meetups and startup weekends, and most capable technical folks never end up going to those - they're either happy in their current situation, or working on something of their own.
    - hnnewguy 12y ago
      >The ones that can execute often already are, and aren't wasting their time doing cofounder dating. The same can be said about programmers, I guess. What a horrible attitude. FYI: many startups fail because the founders don't have a clue that a business involves far more than writing code. Sometimes you need "people skills", and when you think you're God's gift to a business, you're probably lacking there.
lettergram 12y ago
Having spoken to 10 - 20 of these people myself (business majors at my University always tried to convince CS majors to do their ideas). Some of the post was decent advice, you have to befriend technical cofounders first (i.e. grow). Something I would add though, if you are a non-technical cofounder it needs to be either equal equity footing (if you are bringing a fair amount of sales/marketing). Otherwise, forget it, I would want 60 - 70% equity. Without my ability to code, you've got nothing. It seems a lot of technical founders sell themselves short in this regard. Finally, for me, it's always been hell finding a decent designer. The two I talk with regularly are outrageously busy, but usually they can help out. It took me a year or two to find these guys and now we have some synergy, but finding a designer is hell.
- Bahamut 12y ago
  Sounds about right for what I would ask for, and I have never found a company. Crunch time is already bad enough at a lot of companies, but an extended one to get the first product even out is probably the worst of them all - the compensation needs to reflect that value.
plehoux 12y ago
You become one yourself.
bsdpython 12y ago
How to attract a technical cofounder? Have several of the following... 1. Previous success at starting a company 2. A budget 3. Previous success at raising funds 4. If it's B2B, have industry connections and sales experience 5. If it's B2C, some serious expertise in the field 6. Some sort of evidence that you are a true hustler and not starting a company because you are bored with your day job
veb 12y ago
I know this is a bit snarky, but honestly: ask. It is the startup world, there's risks everywhere. Find someone, and if you kick off well with them, then go ahead and try. If you spend too much time bothering about details like the perfect technical cofounder or non-technical cofounder... chances are you're not putting your time and effort into your actual startup. In my experience, it's simply been the potential of something that attracts people who actually have a passionate interest. They're the best people. Technical or not.
rasz_pl 12y ago
Ideas are worthless, its all in the execution. If all you have is cute ideas go scam people on the Kickstarter.
bitL 12y ago
I am running multiple eCommerce businesses as a tech guy where I provide a platform that can be plugged straight to another business area with minimal costs - to take care of those areas I usually find a business person and offer a generous 50/50 split in equity and rights as I want everyone to feel useful and in control. What I noticed from some bad examples of business guys I tried something with is that some of them 1) don't have a clue nor willingness to improve 2) are very frustrated they don't own the additional 1% to be completely in charge 3) try to restrict the flow of business information towards me 4) treat tech as an easy thing that must work 100% on autopilot while they don't do much at all. Whenever this happens I give those persons an out; we can shut the business down immediately (for me it's just another business test that didn't go well and it needs to be resolved ASAP as I don't like to waste time) or those things must change. It's difficult to find a business person that doesn't want to become super rich in like one year and that really wants to treat the business as an equal partnership and have fun growing it. If you find one, stick with them, it's pure gold.
mrfusion 12y ago
On the other side of it, what's the best way for a technical founder to find a sales/business guy? (Has HN discussed that before?)
- bryanlarsen 12y ago
  You grow them, just like the article says. I think this applies as much or even more to sales and/or bizdev than to technical co-founders.
xchaotic 12y ago
Easy, pay me more than the competition (big corporates, public sector etc) Because of the increased risk of default, you have to offer more. So convince seed/angel funders and then seek me
leroy_masochist 12y ago
Here are my observations as an initially non-technical person working on a relatively technical side-project that requires the help of others: 1. Non-technical people (myself included) often have a bit of a complex about being non-technical. They are well-steeped in the YC/Stanford/Valley zeitgeist and believe their project won't be taken seriously if it doesn't have legitimate engineering talent on the founding team. Depending on the product and the team's growth strategy, this may or may not actually be true. 2. I would posit that fear of not finding a technical cofounder (FONFATC, I just coined an acronym) is really three related, but distinct fears: a. Fear of not being able to get the MVP / beta / 1.0 versions built. b. Fear of not being able to raise money to grow because VC's won't take your team seriously if you don't have a technical cofounder. c. Fear of not being able to recruit good engineers as you scale from, say, 3 people to 15 people. (The reasoning being, good engineers are going to have doubts about working for an organization that doesn't have a technical cofounder; both in terms of not wanting to be supervised by people who don't understand the technical fundamentals and in terms of working in a non-engineer-centric culture). 3. Non-technical people in some cases spend more time trying to find/recruit a technical cofounder than they would have to spend to learn the necessary technical skills to build a basic MVP. Not 1.0, ready-to-ship-to-paying-customers product, but MVP. Getting technical people to join your project is a less painful proposition once you have a product, even a crappy one. 4. Technical friends might not be willing to join your project as a cofounder, for reasons including: you can't pay them the salary they want/need; they're working on their own thing; they don't want to quit their sweet job; they think your idea is dumb. Even in these cases, you can get a lot of help from them if they are in fact your friends. They may not be interested in getting on your cap table, but they'll probably do a monthly code review with you if you ask nicely.
kcorbitt 12y ago
As a supporting anecdote, I'd like to share the story of how my non-technical cofounder found/"grew" me (or rather, grew the relationship), and why I think it worked. Last year I was in my final year of university. The school I graduated from, BYU, has a strong business program and a culture of entrepreneurship. A number of my friends and acquaintances contacted me with ideas for tech-empowered businesses they wanted to form, but I had the sense to stay away from anything that sounded like "I had this great idea for a business last week, why don't you build it for me and we'll see what happens." When my now-cofounder Sam approached me, it was a very different experience. It was obvious that he had put months of work into developing his idea on his own time, with mockups and tons of user testing of various ideas, and literally had gone as far as he could without actually building the product. Even after we decided to start working together, we spent several months contracting together for a 3rd party, before we finally decided to strike out on our own. When we eventually did form a startup, we split the equity 50-50 and we've both been working 110% since day 1. In retrospect, I didn't end up joining with Sam because the idea was much better than the other ones I'd heard about, or because he had access to connections or capital that I couldn't easily find myself. It was because he demonstrated clearly that he didn't consider the idea alone to be 80% of the value, respected what I brought to the table, and worked hard enough to bring his half to the table too. I guess my best advice to the non-technical looking for a cofounder (beyond learning as much as you can about the tech side of the business on your own) would be to try to find ways to demonstrate, through your actions, that you have what it takes to push a new company forward. The actions Sam took on his own, and when we first started working together, demonstrated that to my satisfaction, which is why I was more than happy to sign on as a cofounder.
- hga 12y ago
  I'd add that calling Sam "non-technical" stretches the definition a bit. Sure, he wasn't cutting code, but the sort of design work he did to prove and evolve his idea is also the sort of work a lot of us "technical" people do at various times. Sounds like he had a bucket-full of clues, including the equity distribution, which doesn't sound like it was hard to negotiate.
michaelochurch 12y ago
Tech cofounders might be in a state of frictional shortage. Before people argue with me (it's rare that I'd call engineering talent in a state of "shortage") I think it's important to note that fault lies with the business co-founders. By "frictional shortage", I mean that cultural factors (low social status of technical people, due to a half-century of us selling ourselves poorly) prevent the market (with equity a larger factor in this market than salaries, because tech base salaries are quite reasonable) from clearing. Right now, business co-founders trade 2-4 points higher on a 10-point scale. I'm a Tech 8, and a Biz 8 wouldn't, realistically speaking, mix with me. A Biz 6 would try to push me down to 5-10% equity, with the cliff and vesting that would make me more of an employee than co-founder anyway, and take the CEO job. A Biz 6 can deliver Sequoia on an idea, and a Biz 8 is turning away executive-level offers and board positions and 11-to-3, 7-figure jobs at VC funds. A Tech 8 is happy to break $140k and get interesting projects. I've written at length about this skew: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/an-insight-on-the-damaso-effect/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/an-insight-o... . Biz 8 have other, very lucrative, options. A Tech 8 who is objectively just as good at his job (and a harder job) doesn't have the same. The Tech 8+ drop out of the co-founder market around age 30 (and it's rare that someone even gets to Tech 8 before that age) because they get used to Biz 5's offering 2.5% equity to work on someone else's idea (as opposed to a shared idea with hard technical problems at the core). See, too many business co-founders want to charge so much for the investor-level contacts, like they're Marlo fucking Stanfield charging $10 million for "a connect", that people usually trickle out before they even get to the Tech 6+ (much less Tech 8+) level. Jeff Dean stays in-house at Google for a reason. Technical co-founders wouldn't be hard to find if the market could clear. They're hard to find because, while early-stage startups can't pay market salaries for understandable reasons, sociological factors keep equity amounts at shortage prices for good tech talent.
tkiley 12y ago
I'm the technical co-founder. My bizdev/sales co-founder found me when he read an article about my product. He'd considered building a business in the same market space, but lacked the technical resources, so when he discovered my fledgeling but ramen-profitable product, it was a natural fit. In the two years after we started working together, we grew our customer base about 40x. I'm not sure if this is a scaleable answer to the "where do I find a technical co-founder" question, but it has worked at least once. :) If you're a non-technical person looking for a startup opportunity, I'd recommend it.
eldude 12y ago
> A close friend once said that, in order of seriousness, relationships go “business partners, spouses, cats & dog.” Prioritizing cofounders over spouses surrenders Silicon Valley's moral authority and undermines its cultural leadership.[1] I've always found prioritizing cofounder over spouse a sad depressing commentary on priority of money over change by bad actors. Innumerable colleagues and VCs have quoted me unprompted, "You can divorce a wife, but you can't divorce a cofounder," leading me to doubt their integrity; It's only true if you prioritize your business over your vows. It is far more difficult to succeed when prioritizing family, but such is the burden of leadership. Moral authority, a prerequisite of true leadership, derives from such commitments. [1] Power derived when a leader embodies the values of their followers.
biomimic 12y ago
This depends highly on whether the company is funded or not.
deleted 12y ago
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graycat 12y ago
Two remarks: First, for non-technical founders, get technical yourself or at least get started: Get a computer, settle on Linux or Windows, get documentation, read, type in code, get it to work, and then build at least something simple. Second, for technical people considering being a technical co-founder, here are is a threat you should watch for: Basically, the people in the start up, especially the non-technical people, may believe that it is in their interest to block your entering the company or, if you enter, throttle or block your contributions and push you out of the company. Here those people may understand that what they are doing is bad for the company but believe that it is, still, good for them in the company. In the B-school subject organizational behavior, such behavior is called goal subordination because the person places the good of the company lower (subordinates it) to what they see as their own good. In particular, a non-technical person, might work hard to hire a technical person with the intention that the technical person will fail so that, then, the non-technical person can have an excuse for not being more technical themselves. Can such wacko things actually happen? Heck yes.
hiou 12y ago
The biggest problem I have with getting an offer to be a technical co-founder is that if this person's main interest is in business, why are the not already rich? A developer's main area of focus is not money so they are less apt to accumulate much, but if your central focus in life is business, then I can't really have a good feeling about your skills if you are not currently rich or have built a successful company. It's like saying you are a great developer but you don't have any software or code to show for it.

95 points by hailpixel 12y ago

I can't seem to load the page... That said while we're on this topic, I've always enjoyed Drew Houston's take on it:http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-find-good-technical-co-founders http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-find-good-technical-co-founder... "Unfortunately this is a classic problem. "How do I find a really hot single girl to go out with?" * Good technical people will have ideas of their own that they're excited about, and working for a non-technical founder who, by the way, doesn't know or appreciate the difficulty or time it takes to make something well-engineered and undervalues you from an ownership standpoint, gets old quickly. * People who are not hands-on building the product at the very early stage of the startup are usually not terribly useful until later, because building the product is most of the real work early on. * Good engineers have a wealth of compelling opportunities at any given time, so it gets even worse if the non-technical founder is inexperienced, or hasn't already brought a lot to the table (funding, etc.) See, for example, http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-12.html#e2010-12-01T15_45_40.htm http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-1... one view of how technical people perceive "idea guys" who "just need a programmer." So, what can you do? * One is look for a technical cofounder, not just an early employee, and give commensurate equity. Again, bear in mind that frankly he or she will be more valuable than you at this phase. * Two is learn to code enough to bang out a prototype -- this will also make you a better engineering manager if you can appreciate the technical craft and can empathize with engineers. And there are tools like Balsamiq that can help create reasonable mockups that can convey your idea without writing code. * Three, search the far corners of the earth for talent -- maybe you'll get lucky and find a CS student who hasn't been jaded by bad experiences with arrangements like this. Or, if the technology you need developed isn't rocket science, you can try outsourcing, which is its own Pandora's box. Derek Sivers has a good post on managing that: http://sivers.org/how2hire http://sivers.org/how2hire Good times, but this is what business cofounders bring to the table, right? They figure shit out, and it's hard work. Hiring the early team is just the beginning."

hailpixel 12y ago
Sorry about the page timeout, I'm sorting about that out now.
gregd 12y ago
Which could explain why they're looking for a technical cofounder..
piato 12y ago
"* Two is learn to code enough to bang out a prototype -- this will also make you a better engineering manager if you can appreciate the technical craft and can empathize with engineers. And there are tools like Balsamiq that can help create reasonable mockups that can convey your idea without writing code." I've always been confused by how this is meant to help - could you explain further? I've always been a technical founder, but I've never had any idea how to find a technical co-founder - as you correctly say, good technical people will have their idea they're excited about! So I'm always skeptical that "make a prototype" would work to convince anyone, but perhaps it would - is there some hidden pool of good engineers who exist in some weird fugue state of "show me a cool semi-working website and I'm on-board", outside of, like, 1st year CS?
- giaour 12y ago
  That way you can demonstrate that you at least know what you want a finished product to roughly look like and do.
- visakanv 12y ago
  I can talk about something completely different– I'm a writer, and I work with visual designers. They much, much prefer it when I can give them a terrible sketch of an idea rather than a lengthy diatribe about what I want. Because it's far easier for them to apply their design sensibilities to a crappy sketch than to a cloud of words. Similarly- I don't think it's "show me a cool semi-working website and I'm on-board", but more of- "Show me something that I recognize immediately as a really good idea, even though it's kind of crappy in execution." I'm reminded of what Jong-Moon Kim wrote about Pixar movies: http://jiggity.com/kitchen.html http://jiggity.com/kitchen.html > Pixar uses a structure known as a braintrust to delicately examine works-in-progress. The braintrust is composed of some of the best storytellers of our generation who take a supreme effort in understanding the director's intent before offering suggestions. > What's most incredible is that this feedback from the world-class cabal is merely suggestive and the director has the power to reject changes. The braintrust is aware of the danger of heavy-handed feedback squashing the soul of the product. > New ideas are delicate and brittle. What starts off as a ugly, tangential feature later grows up to become a fundamental part of the final product.

volent 12y ago

Cached version : http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BXa1Cn2TzMIJ:www.hailpixel.com/articles/technical-cofounders+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BXa1Cn2...

rhapsodyv 12y ago

And the answer to the eternal question: “Where do I find a salesperson cofounder?” ? :-/

groktor 12y ago
or alternatively, "where do I find a good marketing/bus dev co-founder?"

rkwasny 12y ago

I've got a different question: "Where do I find a non-technical cofounder?" It seems people that understand tech but also have sales/management skills are a rare scarcity.

sixQuarks 12y ago
what are you going to do with a non-technical cofounder that has "sales/management" skills? That implies that you already have a product built. A truly valuable non-technical cofounder will be a product developer, not a sales/management guy. The most valuable type of marketing is baked into product development.
- brudgers 12y ago
  A sales/management type can work on developing and qualifying leads; communicating with legal, accounting, and insurance consultants; and raising outside investment to the extent these are appropriate to the business model. Even more importantly they add slack. This means there's someone to take out the trash and stock the refrigerator with Diet Coke, Caffeine Free Coke, and almond milk.
  - hga 12y ago
    Of course a large fraction of these types are too proud to do that. One thing I always look for, in every member of a startup, is that they aren't too proud "to sweep the floors" if needed.
    - brudgers 12y ago
      The idea of slack entails the possibility that a programming ninja can wash the coffee mugs while the sales/administrative person is head down in payables for last month. Above jumping into the dumpster to retrieve a dollar isn't limited to one skill set.
      - hga 12y ago

mvonthron 12y ago

When I meet such people in meetups, all I hear is "I am the next Zuckerberg but I have no idea how things work. Where do I find someone to do the work for me?"

aram 12y ago
Same here unfortunately. Most people I heard asking that question had no clue about technology, and more importantly, never showed interest in understanding the basics. My feeling was that they thought of such partnership as a way to get someone work for free.
krampian 12y ago
That would be an easy one to answer - Zuckerberg did all the coding and hired a non-technical founder. More aggravating are the ones who think they're the next Steve Jobs and just need their Woz.
visakanv 12y ago
It's always strange to me (or sad, I guess) to me when people with ideas want to start businesses without being terrified by their own incompetence and ignorance. I think that's usually a sign that a person doesn't actually feel very strongly about the problem they're solving, and that's a red flag. If you really, truly care about solving some problem, it should drive you crazy that there's something that you have no idea anything about. IMHO.
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madaxe_again 12y ago
I so often have "I have this idea X, blah blah, what should I do?!?!" And my response, every time is : "Stop talking about it and do it - or don't." I mean, if you're not prepared to knuckle down and do the work yourself - do you actually believe in what you're doing? These words were said to a very drunk me in a bar in London some 12 years ago, while I was fucking about with my first botched trainer-wheels startup (social networking for the elite - got serious traction, but we lost interest), and was garrulously asking some poor fucker what he thought I should do about idea X. That was his off-the-cuff response, but I've lived by it since.

aidos 12y ago

Seems like good advice. I'm in the fortunate position of being on the technical side and, I suspect like a lot of technical people, I've turned down plenty of 'opportunities' from ideas people. If you were coming to me hoping to get me on board with your idea, offering anything other than equal footing on the equity side would be a total non-starter. In the majority of cases even that would probably be a crappy deal. One thing with this: "If you just need someone who can understand your vision and create the software which allows it to function, you are searching for an employee." I guess it depends on how technical your product is but I think in the beginning you need to have serious commitment from the technical team. They really need to care about getting the product right or dropping what they're doing on the weekend to deal with a support request. It could mean the difference between life and death for your company.

k__ 12y ago

I'm not a founder, only a developer, but non-technical people asked me if I want to be their cofounder. Most of the time they are teams of a few business people who do marketing and biz-dev. When they tell me about their idea, I often think that the only bad thing about their idea is the part, where the company has to supply 4 people, where only one of them can build something. Also they often see a technical cofounder as a work-horse and not a partner...

mgkimsal 12y ago
Almost inevitably, there will be 3-4 people vying for their ideas to be implemented, sometimes conflicting with each other, sometimes conflicting with what's actually possible technically, and the sole dev guy will end up caught in the middle of all this - not unlike corp work, really. And yeah, they'll almost never see you as an actual CO-founder or equal in any way. I've seen that happen (equality) but more often than not, the situation you described. If you can't "sell" something until every single pixel is perfect and it scales up to instagram levels on day one and everything else is in place because you "only get one shot at impressing person X (or... first customer)"... you're doing something wrong.

madaxe_again 12y ago

You don't. They find you. Technical co-founders are necessarily naïve. Why? Because once they've been one once, they don't want to be one again. The only "serial" technical co-founders I've encountered have usually failed to get to the MVP stage of any of the companies they've founded, and thus don't know the hell their path leads to. I speak from first-hand experience. I would sooner chew my own legs off than do this again. Not because I dislike my company, or don't like what I do today, but because it's traumatic, and I've no desire to go through it again. It costs you years of your life, you don't get sleep, or friends, and at the end of it all, nobody will thank you, they'll just resent you, as those that were there from the start never realised just how much the technical co-founder did to make things work in the early days (not so fond memories of not leaving my desk for 9 grim, sticky days), and those that started later don't see the technical co-founder getting as involved in the technology as much, and thus view them as disconnected. Damned either way. If you get someone in with experience, they'll tell you to get bent, won't do the death-marches that you often need to get the ball rolling, and will want to be paid their worth, rather than nothing. So yeah - your only hope is to get to know technical folks while they're still learning, and get them in then - otherwise they'll know better and will refuse your poisoned chalice.

lettergram 12y ago
I commented below, but personally every time someone comes to me with an idea I ask for 75% equity. Usually people scoff and walk away, but sometimes people are willing to negotiate. To me it's always amazing how little equity some technical cofounders obtain. Ideas, like talk, is pretty cheap. Coding for years is pretty damn expensive.
- nissimk 12y ago
  Maybe I'm being naive, but there can be something else that the non-technical founder brings that is equally valuable to the tech stuff: paying customers. If they have actual customers that are ready to pay, then the deal may be worth it even for less than equal share of equity. Another is cash investment (not relationships with investors, real cash of their own that they are willing to invest). I think most of these non-technical founders just have a fantasy about a product idea and it really is worthless. But if they have a good network of contacts and people ringing their phone for whatever they want you to build then that is some value. If these idea people are so sure of their ideas, they can finance development using freelancers and they don't need a technical cofounder. If technical cofounder is just doublespeak for programmer willing to work for free + equity, only someone very naive will take it.

skyboxone 12y ago

Ask them: how much time do you waste endlessly commenting on ridiculous articles on Hacker News? If it's anything more than zero, they are a poser and fake.

puppetmaster3 12y ago

May I also ask: how do I get a paycheck, w/o working? Also, how do I get someone to work for me for free, and I'll mange the cap table? And last: is it possible in non fantasy world to be gainfully employed, but not even know HTML?

lordnacho 12y ago

I met a business guy who explained his attitude to tech guys to me, over a number of meeting about starting a venture. - Tech guys can just sit back once the website is built and cash in forever, while the marketing and business guys have to keep on the ball. - You can rent an army of developers in Eastern Europe for no money at all. He had 30 guys doing his one-pager color split testing for him. - All the value is in the marketing and supply chain. He's 80% of the value and feels screwed giving the tech people 25%. Funnily enough we never got that one launched.

deleted 12y ago
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brianwawok 12y ago
Flip side is most tech guys think the business guy is an idiot. people suck at realizing other disciplines have worth.
- api 12y ago
  Everyone thinking every other kind of role is worthless is one of the things I've persistently seen ruin and even kill companies.
- mgkimsal 12y ago
  Many (most?) of the business guys who you end up talking with in those situations are idiots. The ones that can execute often already are, and aren't wasting their time doing cofounder dating. Likewise by the time you're scrounging around looking for technical cofounders, you're at meetups and startup weekends, and most capable technical folks never end up going to those - they're either happy in their current situation, or working on something of their own.
  - hnnewguy 12y ago
    >The ones that can execute often already are, and aren't wasting their time doing cofounder dating. The same can be said about programmers, I guess. What a horrible attitude. FYI: many startups fail because the founders don't have a clue that a business involves far more than writing code. Sometimes you need "people skills", and when you think you're God's gift to a business, you're probably lacking there.

lettergram 12y ago

Having spoken to 10 - 20 of these people myself (business majors at my University always tried to convince CS majors to do their ideas). Some of the post was decent advice, you have to befriend technical cofounders first (i.e. grow). Something I would add though, if you are a non-technical cofounder it needs to be either equal equity footing (if you are bringing a fair amount of sales/marketing). Otherwise, forget it, I would want 60 - 70% equity. Without my ability to code, you've got nothing. It seems a lot of technical founders sell themselves short in this regard. Finally, for me, it's always been hell finding a decent designer. The two I talk with regularly are outrageously busy, but usually they can help out. It took me a year or two to find these guys and now we have some synergy, but finding a designer is hell.

Bahamut 12y ago
Sounds about right for what I would ask for, and I have never found a company. Crunch time is already bad enough at a lot of companies, but an extended one to get the first product even out is probably the worst of them all - the compensation needs to reflect that value.

plehoux 12y ago

You become one yourself.

bsdpython 12y ago

How to attract a technical cofounder? Have several of the following... 1. Previous success at starting a company 2. A budget 3. Previous success at raising funds 4. If it's B2B, have industry connections and sales experience 5. If it's B2C, some serious expertise in the field 6. Some sort of evidence that you are a true hustler and not starting a company because you are bored with your day job

veb 12y ago

I know this is a bit snarky, but honestly: ask. It is the startup world, there's risks everywhere. Find someone, and if you kick off well with them, then go ahead and try. If you spend too much time bothering about details like the perfect technical cofounder or non-technical cofounder... chances are you're not putting your time and effort into your actual startup. In my experience, it's simply been the potential of something that attracts people who actually have a passionate interest. They're the best people. Technical or not.

rasz_pl 12y ago

Ideas are worthless, its all in the execution. If all you have is cute ideas go scam people on the Kickstarter.

bitL 12y ago

I am running multiple eCommerce businesses as a tech guy where I provide a platform that can be plugged straight to another business area with minimal costs - to take care of those areas I usually find a business person and offer a generous 50/50 split in equity and rights as I want everyone to feel useful and in control. What I noticed from some bad examples of business guys I tried something with is that some of them 1) don't have a clue nor willingness to improve 2) are very frustrated they don't own the additional 1% to be completely in charge 3) try to restrict the flow of business information towards me 4) treat tech as an easy thing that must work 100% on autopilot while they don't do much at all. Whenever this happens I give those persons an out; we can shut the business down immediately (for me it's just another business test that didn't go well and it needs to be resolved ASAP as I don't like to waste time) or those things must change. It's difficult to find a business person that doesn't want to become super rich in like one year and that really wants to treat the business as an equal partnership and have fun growing it. If you find one, stick with them, it's pure gold.

mrfusion 12y ago

On the other side of it, what's the best way for a technical founder to find a sales/business guy? (Has HN discussed that before?)

bryanlarsen 12y ago
You grow them, just like the article says. I think this applies as much or even more to sales and/or bizdev than to technical co-founders.

xchaotic 12y ago

Easy, pay me more than the competition (big corporates, public sector etc) Because of the increased risk of default, you have to offer more. So convince seed/angel funders and then seek me

leroy_masochist 12y ago

Here are my observations as an initially non-technical person working on a relatively technical side-project that requires the help of others: 1. Non-technical people (myself included) often have a bit of a complex about being non-technical. They are well-steeped in the YC/Stanford/Valley zeitgeist and believe their project won't be taken seriously if it doesn't have legitimate engineering talent on the founding team. Depending on the product and the team's growth strategy, this may or may not actually be true. 2. I would posit that fear of not finding a technical cofounder (FONFATC, I just coined an acronym) is really three related, but distinct fears: a. Fear of not being able to get the MVP / beta / 1.0 versions built. b. Fear of not being able to raise money to grow because VC's won't take your team seriously if you don't have a technical cofounder. c. Fear of not being able to recruit good engineers as you scale from, say, 3 people to 15 people. (The reasoning being, good engineers are going to have doubts about working for an organization that doesn't have a technical cofounder; both in terms of not wanting to be supervised by people who don't understand the technical fundamentals and in terms of working in a non-engineer-centric culture). 3. Non-technical people in some cases spend more time trying to find/recruit a technical cofounder than they would have to spend to learn the necessary technical skills to build a basic MVP. Not 1.0, ready-to-ship-to-paying-customers product, but MVP. Getting technical people to join your project is a less painful proposition once you have a product, even a crappy one. 4. Technical friends might not be willing to join your project as a cofounder, for reasons including: you can't pay them the salary they want/need; they're working on their own thing; they don't want to quit their sweet job; they think your idea is dumb. Even in these cases, you can get a lot of help from them if they are in fact your friends. They may not be interested in getting on your cap table, but they'll probably do a monthly code review with you if you ask nicely.

kcorbitt 12y ago

As a supporting anecdote, I'd like to share the story of how my non-technical cofounder found/"grew" me (or rather, grew the relationship), and why I think it worked. Last year I was in my final year of university. The school I graduated from, BYU, has a strong business program and a culture of entrepreneurship. A number of my friends and acquaintances contacted me with ideas for tech-empowered businesses they wanted to form, but I had the sense to stay away from anything that sounded like "I had this great idea for a business last week, why don't you build it for me and we'll see what happens." When my now-cofounder Sam approached me, it was a very different experience. It was obvious that he had put months of work into developing his idea on his own time, with mockups and tons of user testing of various ideas, and literally had gone as far as he could without actually building the product. Even after we decided to start working together, we spent several months contracting together for a 3rd party, before we finally decided to strike out on our own. When we eventually did form a startup, we split the equity 50-50 and we've both been working 110% since day 1. In retrospect, I didn't end up joining with Sam because the idea was much better than the other ones I'd heard about, or because he had access to connections or capital that I couldn't easily find myself. It was because he demonstrated clearly that he didn't consider the idea alone to be 80% of the value, respected what I brought to the table, and worked hard enough to bring his half to the table too. I guess my best advice to the non-technical looking for a cofounder (beyond learning as much as you can about the tech side of the business on your own) would be to try to find ways to demonstrate, through your actions, that you have what it takes to push a new company forward. The actions Sam took on his own, and when we first started working together, demonstrated that to my satisfaction, which is why I was more than happy to sign on as a cofounder.

hga 12y ago
I'd add that calling Sam "non-technical" stretches the definition a bit. Sure, he wasn't cutting code, but the sort of design work he did to prove and evolve his idea is also the sort of work a lot of us "technical" people do at various times. Sounds like he had a bucket-full of clues, including the equity distribution, which doesn't sound like it was hard to negotiate.

michaelochurch 12y ago

Tech cofounders might be in a state of frictional shortage. Before people argue with me (it's rare that I'd call engineering talent in a state of "shortage") I think it's important to note that fault lies with the business co-founders. By "frictional shortage", I mean that cultural factors (low social status of technical people, due to a half-century of us selling ourselves poorly) prevent the market (with equity a larger factor in this market than salaries, because tech base salaries are quite reasonable) from clearing. Right now, business co-founders trade 2-4 points higher on a 10-point scale. I'm a Tech 8, and a Biz 8 wouldn't, realistically speaking, mix with me. A Biz 6 would try to push me down to 5-10% equity, with the cliff and vesting that would make me more of an employee than co-founder anyway, and take the CEO job. A Biz 6 can deliver Sequoia on an idea, and a Biz 8 is turning away executive-level offers and board positions and 11-to-3, 7-figure jobs at VC funds. A Tech 8 is happy to break $140k and get interesting projects. I've written at length about this skew: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/an-insight-on-the-damaso-effect/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/an-insight-o... . Biz 8 have other, very lucrative, options. A Tech 8 who is objectively just as good at his job (and a harder job) doesn't have the same. The Tech 8+ drop out of the co-founder market around age 30 (and it's rare that someone even gets to Tech 8 before that age) because they get used to Biz 5's offering 2.5% equity to work on someone else's idea (as opposed to a shared idea with hard technical problems at the core). See, too many business co-founders want to charge so much for the investor-level contacts, like they're Marlo fucking Stanfield charging $10 million for "a connect", that people usually trickle out before they even get to the Tech 6+ (much less Tech 8+) level. Jeff Dean stays in-house at Google for a reason. Technical co-founders wouldn't be hard to find if the market could clear. They're hard to find because, while early-stage startups can't pay market salaries for understandable reasons, sociological factors keep equity amounts at shortage prices for good tech talent.

tkiley 12y ago

I'm the technical co-founder. My bizdev/sales co-founder found me when he read an article about my product. He'd considered building a business in the same market space, but lacked the technical resources, so when he discovered my fledgeling but ramen-profitable product, it was a natural fit. In the two years after we started working together, we grew our customer base about 40x. I'm not sure if this is a scaleable answer to the "where do I find a technical co-founder" question, but it has worked at least once. :) If you're a non-technical person looking for a startup opportunity, I'd recommend it.

eldude 12y ago

> A close friend once said that, in order of seriousness, relationships go “business partners, spouses, cats & dog.” Prioritizing cofounders over spouses surrenders Silicon Valley's moral authority and undermines its cultural leadership.[1] I've always found prioritizing cofounder over spouse a sad depressing commentary on priority of money over change by bad actors. Innumerable colleagues and VCs have quoted me unprompted, "You can divorce a wife, but you can't divorce a cofounder," leading me to doubt their integrity; It's only true if you prioritize your business over your vows. It is far more difficult to succeed when prioritizing family, but such is the burden of leadership. Moral authority, a prerequisite of true leadership, derives from such commitments. [1] Power derived when a leader embodies the values of their followers.

biomimic 12y ago

This depends highly on whether the company is funded or not.

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graycat 12y ago

Two remarks: First, for non-technical founders, get technical yourself or at least get started: Get a computer, settle on Linux or Windows, get documentation, read, type in code, get it to work, and then build at least something simple. Second, for technical people considering being a technical co-founder, here are is a threat you should watch for: Basically, the people in the start up, especially the non-technical people, may believe that it is in their interest to block your entering the company or, if you enter, throttle or block your contributions and push you out of the company. Here those people may understand that what they are doing is bad for the company but believe that it is, still, good for them in the company. In the B-school subject organizational behavior, such behavior is called goal subordination because the person places the good of the company lower (subordinates it) to what they see as their own good. In particular, a non-technical person, might work hard to hire a technical person with the intention that the technical person will fail so that, then, the non-technical person can have an excuse for not being more technical themselves. Can such wacko things actually happen? Heck yes.

hiou 12y ago

The biggest problem I have with getting an offer to be a technical co-founder is that if this person's main interest is in business, why are the not already rich? A developer's main area of focus is not money so they are less apt to accumulate much, but if your central focus in life is business, then I can't really have a good feeling about your skills if you are not currently rich or have built a successful company. It's like saying you are a great developer but you don't have any software or code to show for it.