
What To Look For In A Business Co-Founder - jasonlbaptiste
http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/what-to-look-for-in-a-business-co-founder/
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timr
Looking over this list, I think the problem with the "business co-founder" is
clear: there's simply no such thing as "business". There's copy editing, user
support, PR, HR, operations, accounting, legal, etc. And if you're going to
work at a startup, everyone needs to be good at many of these things. Skill --
actual skill -- is at a premium. There's no room for the guy who wants to boss
people around and think big thoughts and call it "business".

Too often, the guys who you run into at meetups and valley social events are
what are best characterized as "useless douchebags"; they have no marketable
skills or experience, but plenty of ideas that they'd like _you_ to work on
(typically for free). But real, valuable, "business" people have hard-won
skills. Real business people are accountants, lawyers, salespeople with
experience and contacts -- people who have something with more value than the
ability to talk a lot and go to parties.

Thus, I don't think it's interesting to debate the question of the business
co-founder, because it's not a useful categorization. If you're starting a
business, you're a business co-founder, by definition. You might focus on
code, but you're going to have to worry about a lot more than that if you want
to succeed. It doesn't matter what you call the person sitting next to you, as
long as they're contributing. And if they're not contributing, you're in
trouble even if they're a hacker.

~~~
wccrawford
I think the other half of that is that people that DO have skills are out
using them. They aren't sitting around hoping to find a startup to co-found.
The ones that end up being a successful co-founder are the ones that have a
sudden lapse in activity for whatever reason, or can be convinced to give up
their current success for a chance at bigger success.

It's no wonder these people are scarce.

~~~
timr
Agreed. Personally, the biggest obstacle to doing my own thing is finding
someone to work with who is hard-working and trustworthy, but who also has a
similar outlook and tolerance for risk. These people are rarer than investors.

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faramarz
Cute! But I disagree and here's why. There is no list of criteria to be a co-
founder. I'm sorry to pick on you Jason, but I'm speaking generally and your
post happens to fall victim. Co-founder, founder, chairman, executive
instigator, this and that; All of them are cute titles to have on your
business card, attending the next non-important hot tech gathering in la-la
land and none of them have anything to do with your business success.

Maybe I've been surrounding myself with too much tech startup news lately, but
It seems to me that because of low barrier to entry in this sector and the
flood of weekend projects mashed up together under the influence of 10 red
bulls, this community is more obsessed with quantifying every action/inaction
of the journey than focusing on the actual journey and the end goal.

My advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is to stop reading about _should_ and
_would_ be lists and just go out there and get it done. You don't need a biz
dev guy, or know what PR even stands for. Your number one priority is the
obsession of getting-things-done.

If you come up with a brilliant new BBQ grille design that sits on top of the
camping fire pit, great, find a local fabricator and get a prototype. Pay for
the CAD design and send it over to China for overnight production of a dozen
samples. No NDA's. NO Investors. No biz devs or marketing guys. By weeks end
if you don't have a solid demo of your grille in hand to walk into wal-mart
for the sales pitch you booked a month before, you have already lost the
battle. Go find a job.

I take issue with reading entrepreneurship advice from a list because it's
meaningless to everyone else but the person who wrote it. The more lists we as
a group come up with, the worst shape we are as entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship is not for everyone and everyone is not made from the same
fabric. So why are we trying to breakdown this pursuit into something
_everyone_ could comprehend, because they can't and won't, and only those who
really do should not even have the time to read lists after lists of pre-
packaged advice, because that means they're not getting-things-done.

My apologies again if this seems like a direct response to the OP, because
it's not.

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zaidf
The #1 problem with most business guys is not that they cannot program but
that they are too damn passive. They accept the rules and the constraints too
damn easily.

My biz dev friend comes from a traditional background. He is great at what he
does. But he will be the first one to acknowledge that his world is very
limited by rules.

A week ago I asked him to find us the best telemarketer in town and to have
him working for us by next Monday(today). I told him to set up 2-3 interviews
in the next 5 days. His response? "That is impossible..".

What part of that is impossible, I asked. So I broke it down for him: there
are 2-3 incredible guys in this town of 60,000 people who we could hire for
this job.

This is exactly what I told him: _"you are THREE fucking phone numbers away
from meeting the right guy"_.

That's it. There is nothing more to it, really.

Then I asked him to call up all his buds from his last job(in telemarketing)
and find out who that top guy is. If they don't know, get at least another ph.
number off their friend and ask them. Keep doing that until you find the
number of one of the top guys.

All this took place Sunday evening. He got in touch with the #1 performer at
our campus phonathon through a friend and we had lunch Monday afternoon. Less
than 24 hours from the time we hatched the plan, we found our guy.

Now I am not a sales guy or a business guy. But programming makes you see BS.
A business guy, by default, is full of self-sabotaging BS and limiting
beliefs. Ones that are go-getters and refuse to accept the default rules can
really add value to your team.

~~~
fabiandesimone
You say you found him. Is he working with you now?

~~~
zaidf
Yes, today's his first day. It's just a PT position, not FT.

------
il
Great article, I'm happy to see that I have experience succeeding at many of
these attributes, and am studying many others. I'm eagerly looking forward to
the second half.

Aside from these, I can't emphasize enough how important it is for the
business guy to have some technical knowledge/ability, at least enough to be
able to make reasonable demands of developers and determine project scope,
expense, etc. If they've at least managed a technical team before, they'll
know better than to ask you to build the next Google in a week on shared
hosting.

I was doing consulting recently for a B2C Web 2.0 tech startup where both
cofounders were great at fundraising, talking to customers, etc but were
completely nontechnical. Even making a small change to their site, like adding
analytics code or uploading a new landing page involved an email to their
outsourced dev team in India and 24 hours of waiting. Needless to say, the job
was a nightmare.

~~~
sabj
Wow! That sounds crazy indeed. My feeling is that if you are reasonably smart,
there is nothing to stop you from learning those kinds of skills. Plus, in
that kind of situation, it's very important to make sure that you don't get
ripped off, etc. Have to be able to understand what's going on.

Honestly, making / maintaining / designing web sites is fairly easy,
especially if you have something in place and are looking only for incremental
change. While I don't expect everyone to be able to write beautiful CSS in
their sleep, if you have a web startup you should be able to know what's going
on there. I can handle all kinds of front-end / design problems, just never
cared to develop the technical chops for serious back-end wizardry. Looks like
I am having to try to pick up more of that these days.

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sabj
I think I am good at all of these things! (And, beyond just 'thinking' them,
have had the opportunity to prove myself before). While I know a lot of flaky
aspiring business-types, I still get bummed when I see articles written like
those that cropped up tonight, writing off the idea of ever partnering with
someone who isn't going to necessarily spend 90% of their time writing code. I
think that it's great to emphasize engineering / technical talent, but not
fair to just write off everyone else as a waste of time.

I'm fluent in the languages that developers speak and can serve as a liaison
to the rest of the universe; I think that I have a way to be really helpful
and at the same time help shape product visions. Plus I know enough code to
make trouble for myself.

If / when I have something I want to pursue, I am trying to make sure I won't
be beholden to all of these finicky technical types who seem to enjoy so much
scowling at the idea of anyone business-focused. I don't see things as so
black and white, and while I understand that some will say it is easy enough
for a hacker-type to learn the ropes of what other business things they might
need to do, that doesn't mean that having someone less technical is all doom
and gloom! At least, it hasn't been from my experience so far.

Hopefully I'll have a chance to prove this perspective soon :)

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todayiamme
For some funny reason this list is kinda secondary to me. Of course, it's
critical that my co-founder is talented and brilliant. I wouldn't be
approaching her/him if they weren't, but isn't trust far more important?

I've been led to believe that personality, drive and determination are far
more accurate metrics of measuring whether you should work with someone or
not. Is that wrong?

~~~
michael_dorfman
"Trust" is key.

I speak from (painful, expensive) experience.

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mkramlich
I like how right next to the OA's title was a photo of Steve Jobs. I think
that pretty much answered the question immediately. If you could pick one guy
who would be the epitome of the ideal business co-founder for a tech guy:
Steve Jobs. You can't argue with a successful track record.

~~~
bl4k
the Apple case of having a biz co-founder in Jobs and a tech co-founder in Woz
is often cited, but Jobs is really a tech guy who knows his biz stuff.

He made most of the tech design decisions at Apple and NeXT including ObjC,
Rhapsody, Carbon, Cocoa, Mach, etc. When OS X was in early beta I exchanged
emails with Jobs about some FreeBSD libs and he definitely is a tech guy first
as he knew the ins and outs of everything.

My suggestion would be to just find another tech person who can talk to a room
of people and has some level of confidence. It is far more important to have
two tech hands than one guy fine tuning powerpoint presentations and other
other busting himself coding. You will pick up all that biz stuff easily
anyway, especially with all the other entrepreneurs out there to help you.

~~~
kranner
Unfortunately Jobs is just the guy to have an engineer prepare replies on his
behalf and pass them off without attribution, too.

~~~
dennisgorelik
How do you know that?

~~~
kranner
I said 'just the guy to [do it]', not 'I know for sure that that's what he
did'.

He is known for obsessing about his public persona, meticulously preparing his
speeches to appear off-the-cuff (to the point that it has become an inverted
joke), and 'posing' in every way imaginable (when he needed to).

See <http://mixergy.com/steve-jobs-investment/>

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jiganti
What's the best way, as a future business-cofounder, to be reasonably well-
versed in the technical side of things?

Would I approach it as if I wanted to eventually code, but stop once I view my
understanding as adequate for it's purposes? Or is there a different approach
specific to my having little interest in actually coding myself?

~~~
jason_tko
Well, the best way is learning to code.

However this is extremely time intensive, and can defocus you from your
primary skills and abilities which would be most beneficial to the company
anyway.

The second best way is to project manage some software projects. This will
give you several sobering doses of reality, and will provide you with very
useful reference experiences and skills in relation to software.

So, put together a spec for something you need done. Write it down in plenty
of detail.

Then try to find someone to do it for you for a fixed price.

(Advanced Level : Find someone to do it for you at an hourly rate.)

Ask them to keep you up to date on their progress, and to keep you abreast of
the challenges and problems they face.

Offer yourself as a sounding board to talk out problems, and challenges. The
more you listen to people talk about software, the more you'll start to get an
intuitive understanding of whats going on, and how developers approach
development.

After a few hours, the first thing you'll notice, is the need to make
everything as simple, and distilled as possible.

That whizbang spec you put together that will revolutionize life on planet
Earth? As you have written it, it will take 40,000 man years and will require
a budget of the GDP of a European nation.

Get used to cutting things down into bite sized chunks, and cutting those
chunks into bite sized chunks.

After about 5 or 6 software projects, you will have a decent understanding of
the complexities and difficulties in software development.

Ideally, most of those projects will be complete failures.

Then you will have an advanced understanding of the complexities and
difficulties in software development.

After completing these tasks, you will never again utter the phrase : "But
it's just a simple requirement. Just do it, it should only take an hour or
two."

You should also be filled with respect and admiration for people who can turn
ideas and solutions into workable and clean software.

You are now ready to not make your technical co-founder go completely insane.

Good luck !

~~~
DTrejo
Also, make sure to read tons about how programmers feel about business guys /
managers, and figure out how not to be like those people. There's tons of
advice out there, and there may even be some good advice in the most offensive
rants. Read those rants, feel the pain of those programmers, and see the
opportunity to improve yourself so you don't inflict similar pain.

Some possibly helpful resources which you may have already seen:

[http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-
Teams-S...](http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-
Second/dp/0932633439)

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/> (right sidebar has a ton of articles)

[http://www.amazon.com/Facts-Fallacies-Software-
Engineering-R...](http://www.amazon.com/Facts-Fallacies-Software-Engineering-
Robert/dp/0321117425)

~~~
patrickk
Also, read Peopleware. It's an excellent book for anyone who has to manage
technical teams.

[http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-
Teams-S...](http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-
Second/dp/0932633439/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281947572&sr=8-1-spell)

Joel Spolsky mentions that every manager at Microsoft has to read it (I could
be wrong on that, but a lot do read it apparently).

------
emanuer
Huh? Money, no mention of the ability do manage money? I mean, it is obviously
simple to calculate the cash-flow. I am talking about making the decision:
"Yes lets focus on this aspect of our business, because we can expect the
highest returns for our time and resources invested." I understand that
especially at an early point it is all just guesses, but some guesses are more
probable than others.

Some examples are: income, fixed and variable costs, margins, taxes, cash flow
projections and all that other money related stuff.

I suppose this might be negligible for every startup that gets more funding
than they could possibly spend in the foreseeable future. Rather this is
essential for every bootstrapped startup.

Btw, I am the Business Co-Founder and I just went through the list. I gave
myself 7 out of 12 points. (The fact that I have an MBA helped me only with
the 4th point)

If the points in the list are equally weighted, the conclusion for me would
be; I suck. But at least this list gives me an indication for where I have to
improve.

At last I want to mention, I found it to be a great post and want to thank you
very much for your free advice, it is highly appreciated.

