
Ask HN: As a dev/designer business owner, do your partners try to “manage” you? - vyle_and_vyrtue
Usually startups have a tech person and a sales person. I&#x27;m curious if because tech people needing to be in production mode, and not necessarily in strategy meetings, does that relationship get abused? Where the person who is doing the work is not the person making the decisions.
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davismwfl
You are either a co-founder or an employee, and if you are a co-founder acting
like an employee you are at fault as much as the other co-founder(s).

If you are a co-founder then you should be in strategy meetings and helping to
set direction. Just because you are the technical person doesn't mean you are
excluded, in fact you are critical to those meetings. Any person who tells you
otherwise is not being honest and doesn't have the company or your best
interest in mind. It frustrates me to no end when I hear a founder say to a
technical leader or other co-founder that they are more needed writing some
arbitrary piece of code than in a strategy meeting where product, company or
client decisions are being made. A single decision made in a meeting excluding
the technical leadership can lead to chaos and cause friction where none need
be, not to mention waste more time correcting then even a 1-2 hour long
meeting. Excluding decision makers and leadership is always a mistake when
strategy is involved. There are however plenty of sales & marketing meetings
and others that you as a technical leader/founder do not need to be in, just
as a business focused co-founder doesn't need to be in the technical detail
meetings where you are working through implementation details of a defined
feature (as an example).

To answer your question, there is a difference between co-founders holding you
accountable and them "managing" you. Co-founders should hold each other
accountable, but to daily manage you is not common, with some exceptions. That
said, if you are the kind of person that needs daily oversight to stay on
track it happens and I've seen it a few times, some people know themselves and
ask a co-founder/friend for it. Also, if you are not really a co-founder but
just an early employee with some stock/options then you are just an employee
and will have more management. Each co-founder should also have a defined role
(in addition to the 10 others they wear early on), so one will be CEO, and one
might be CTO etc. With those roles that means people will have specific duties
too fulfill and so there is an acceptance to those roles and responsibilities
when you are growing a company.

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TechBro8615
Don't let a non-technical founder take advantage of you. A good litmus test is
if the non-technical founder has anything to do on a daily basis. If it seems
like there's nothing for them to do, because "it's too early," or "the product
isn't ready yet," they're probably taking advantage of you. At that point,
unless they've got money to offer (and preferably pay you), there is little
reason for them to have the same level of equity as you, and you should ask
yourself what you're getting from the relationship.

