
Stop Looking For A Technical Co-founder - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/15/stop-looking-for-a-technical-co-founder/
======
timr
I joined a non-technical co-founder to do a startup (1). Now, I'm as allergic
to the usual MBA-seeking-coder-monkey as any technical guy, but Jamie had a
few qualities that really pulled me in:

* Jamie came well-referred by technical people I trusted. That introduction makes a huge difference (being approached by a random "biz guy" cold is almost always a non-starter for me.)

* She produces -- objectively. Jamie got the initial version of the product built, brings in crazy amounts of press, and has don a ton of work to seed our marketplace. Oh...and she also writes HTML and CSS. I'm amazed by what she's been able to accomplish.

* During the "founder dating" phase, she never made me feel unequal. Too many business people do things (inadvertently or otherwise) that make potential technical co-founders feel like the unwanted, silent partner who is little more than an equity drain on a world-changing business idea. Jamie was looking for a business partner, not a coder.

The bottom line is that finding a technical co-founder is hard, but not
impossible. You have _no idea_ how many smart coders I know who would
theoretically love to do a startup, but "don't have an idea", or are hesitant
to take risks, or have some other form of inertia that's keeping them in a
boring day job. If you bring _demonstrable_ value to the table, have _respect_
for the people you're recruiting, and treat them as _equals_ , you've got a
chance.

[1] I'm putting this down here because I'm honestly not trying to plug
anything, but some of you may be curious: <http://www.vayable.com>

~~~
crdoconnor
Uh, is this a clone of <http://SideTour.com> ?

~~~
timr
Other way around. Vayable was founded in 2010, and has been online since early
2011. We're also bigger and in more places -- hundreds of cities, worldwide.

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robomartin
The problem I have with the "just learn to code" crowd is that there's a huge
gap between being able to write "for" loops and programming.

Take data representation as an example. In school one of my professors used to
harp all the time that data representation is, in his view, the most important
aspect of programming. He'd say something like: "Pick the wrong data
representation representation and you can make a simple project into a
nightmare to write, maintain and extend".

Programming is about having an arsenal of non-language-specific concepts come
to your fingers as you think about the problems you are trying to solve. Data
structures, algorithms, data representation, design patterns, optimization,
tool selection, workflow, etc.

This is particularly true today when a programmer might have to be comfortable
with half a dozen languages in order to create "a simple website" or a mobile
app.

Yes, anyone can learn to code. Programming and building non -trivial products
takes time, experience and lots of hours making lots of mistakes while you
continue learning.

By all means, go and learn. Anyone can do it given time and dedication. I just
don't agree with articles that seem to imply that an art student can go out
and buy one of those "learn in 21 days" books and become a programmer. Not how
it works.

~~~
memset
I disagree with the notion that there is a huge gap.

I originally learned to program via QBasic in 21 days. DOS in 21 days. VB 6 in
21 days. ASP in 21 days. Borland C++ in 21 days. HTML 5 in 21 days. PHP+MySQL
in 21 days.

Because that's what we had! The books came with CDs of code examples and
compilers you could try that worked on windows. And by the end of the book,
you had a working chat program.

Was it great code? Secure? Scalable? Efficient? We'll never know because that
code is long gone. But I wrote quite a few chat servers, hit counters, and
dentists' websites back in my day.

And that is basically what "Learn Python the Hard Way" is. Teaches you the
basics, builds up to some neat little projects, and since most of the software
problems in the world are variants on "how do I loop through a list of blog
entries and display it in a table" then I am not convinced that this is a
complex enough problem that 21-dayers can't come up with a good data
representation.

For the vast majority of us who will never ever face scaling problems, not
understanding the cost of a hash table lookup is perfectly okay for an MVP.

The stuff you learn in school is completely valuable. But sometimes I feel
like the things I learned (caching algorithms, design patterns, etc) put me in
a mode of "spend a lot of time trying to architect" rather than "building
something that works and upload to github."

"Just learn to code" emphasizes the latter, and I think that is a good thing.

~~~
robomartin
I have hired programmers who "learned in 21 days" just to be open minded.
Never again. I am NOT elitist. I am not saying that a CS degree from a top-
level university is necessary. Not at all. I've worked with college dropouts
that can run circles around PhD's. No question about it.

No, what I am saying is that becoming a good programmer requires a lot more
than what is covered in these 21 day books. To be clear, I don't want to pick
on those books, I've used them myself and they are excellent. However, I come
at it with twenty years of having worked on everything from assembler to,
well, all kinds of languages.

It's one thing to be able to to hack at a language. It's quite another to be a
good programmer, regardless of what language you happen to have to use.

It's the difference between Luke flying the Starfighter with instruments and
using the Force. One focuses on the mechanics, the other just flows through
you.

OK, maybe I went too far on that one...

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kurtvarner
> _Be conservative with your equity. One of the easiest ways to scare off a
> technical co-founder is to offer 50% of your company in an initial email or
> meeting. Freelancers in particular take this as a sign of your trying to get
> free labor. 50% of nothing is still nothing._

I completely disagree with this. You want to find a _co-founder_ , not an
employee. In the early stage your technical co-founder will be doing 90% of
the actually work. To offer them a small equity stake because it's your _idea_
is an absolute joke.

~~~
IsaacL
I would say the advice should be: don't offer equity too soon. I've met some
random "business guys" at conferences who offer me an equity stake in their
startup within moments of meeting me. That smacks of desperation and turns me
off. It's like dating, the legit business guys who've interested me have got
to know me first before discussing startup ideas.

In particular, offering equity as part of a freelance arrangement is just dumb
all round. It's a lose-lose situation.

A freelancer wants cash, not lottery tickets in your non-existent startup. And
giving away a chunk of your company to someone who's only going to be around
for a few months hurts you too. I know there's one UK startup that was founded
that way (built by a web agency that got a chunk of equity) and it caused no
end of problems. Either get a co-founder who's in for the long haul and reward
them with equity, or get a freelancer and reward them with cash.

------
acchow
He links to another article which states clearly what he was trying to say:
Don't _look_ for a technical cofounder; _earn_ one.

[http://www.humbledmba.com/please-please-please-stop-
asking-h...](http://www.humbledmba.com/please-please-please-stop-asking-how-
to-find)

------
crewtide
Great article. I learned to code in my 30s, and about six months later the
full meaning of it dawned on me: I could make any of my crazy ideas happen
myself! No need to find someone else, no need to wait, I could just do it. It
was awesome.

~~~
rollypolly
The problem with working on your own is getting things done in a reasonable
time frame.

Sometimes opportunities are fleeting and you need a team of people to succeed
while the getting is still good.

~~~
jreeve
I agree.

A secondary problem with going it alone for coding your MVP is that you don't
amass skills at the same rate as someone who is working full time as a
programmer.

You can learn quite a bit more material if you are under the gun to get
changes made for clients who are paying you, and this can be multiplied when
you are working with other people who know more about solving programming
problems.

For what it's worth, I aspire to be the "technical founder" for a couple of
startup ideas that I work on, but I quit doing other things with my one-man-
shop media business.

My strategy (as someone who programmed in HS/College and quit for a decade,
and who is now moving from being a wordpress hack to owning a more diverse set
of programming tools to solve the problems I am give) has been to find work as
a freelancer for a progressively higher-level agencies.

Even though ultimately my goal is to have the tech chops to realize my vision
(and working for other people is a sideline to that), it doesn't hurt that
I've been making a really good living programming for other people while
learning how to do a diverse set of technical tasks.

This plan, of course, has taken me two years so far, and I have budgeted
another two years for the same path.

If your time frame is short for a real product, indeed: "you need a team of
people to succeed while the getting is still good".

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bignoggins
Not sure if I'm the only one out there like this, but I'm actually a technical
guy who wants to be a non-technical cofounder. I'm a decent programmer but I
find myself much more drawn to the business and product side of things and
would be more than happy to have someone else who is a much stronger
programmer than me handle the bulk of the technical work.

~~~
peacemaker
You're never the only one. If you have the programming skills but the interest
in learning the business side you should use that to your advantage. I think
more technical people could do with understanding the business side and vice
versa.

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eps
That's an opinion of some random "CS senior" that somehow made its way on TC.
It's basically HN version of "Top 10" lists on digg - a pseudo-informative
speculation on a popular subject. _Speculation_. It might be a good
conversation starter, but it's hardly insightful on its own.

~~~
AlexeyMK
Hey, that hurts! :D.

Agreed, a lot of the material has been covered before. A lot of the value in
the piece is structure rather than particularly original insight (though I'd
love it if the Peanuts/Monkeys meme caught on). I did my best to link to as
many of the better pieces on the subject; I hope some find it useful.

------
ChrisNorstrom
I try to put myself in the shoes of the technical co-founder. Imagine how
annoying it must be to meet all these people who want you to build their site,
without paying you a lot of money, and while keeping most of their equity.
First, what are the technical co-founders getting out of it if the risk fails?
Next, how exactly are you, the non-technical entrepreneur, going to pull your
weight? The scary thing about startup weekends are how many idea people walk
around looking for others to build their product. I'm a designer and even I
got stalked.

So I've decided to try and hack together whatever I can, just to show my
potential future technical co-founder that I'm willing to do the dirty work
and pull my weight. Do whatever you can, use wordpress temporarily, get
started by outsourcing the work, set up a landing page with email signups.
Show your co-founder that you've taken significant steps, minimize their risk,
prove your product or service has traction, and already start heading towards
some kind of success. Make it so that your co-founder doesn't have to build
everything from scratch.

A product/service is what makes a company. Asking a programmer to make your
product is basically asking them to build the foundation of your company for
you. And no one is going to do that.

------
birken
I really dislike articles like this, which state unproven thoughts as facts
and useful advice.

1) Learning to code isn't hard? It is. But let's say you did learn some basic
stuff and put up an MVP which is gaining traffic. You now need to hire more
engineers. How are you going to vet them? When you hire them are you going to
manage them or are they going to manage you? Are they just going to take over
the product? How do you know if they are doing a good job or not?

2) Hire an external team. Good luck! You have all the same problems as above
but now you are probably paying a lot more cash and less equity for the work.

3) Simplify your MVP. Wait, but I already did simplify it, and now I need to
grow it! An MVP does not a company make, and once you _do_ make an MVP all
your problems don't naturally go away.

4) No settling for a mediocre team. I spend a lot of time interviewing people
for engineering positions, I have a very strong technical background, and I
can assure it is extremely difficult. Great people and mediocre people don't
walk around with signs around their neck. They all blend together and it is
your job to identify them, and it isn't easy at all.

As somebody mentioned in a comment post, I think this similar article which is
linked to is significantly better:

[http://www.humbledmba.com/please-please-please-stop-
asking-h...](http://www.humbledmba.com/please-please-please-stop-asking-how-
to-find)

This response for how to find a technical co-founder is just perfect:

> I can't help you with that, but all the good entrepreneurs seem to figure it
> out. Hopefully you will too.

I also think it applies for a technical person finding regular co-founders as
well.

You need to have skills that another person thinks would compliment them, and
then convince them of that. I think the distinction between "technical" and
"non-technical" already is bucketed too much, since being able to write code
is just a skill on a talent spectrum just like anything else. You don't need
one person who is amazing at writing code and one person who doesn't know
anything. Two people who each know a little bit might work. One person who
knows a little might work. There are no preset rules, because every company
and idea is different. You gotta figure it out.

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rwhitman
I like to think about this "find a technical cofounder" stuff by imagining
myself, a highly technical person who's entire work experience being on the
computer - dropping everything to start a bakery.

Would my expectation be that I could find a great baker to work with me for
free or half-salary? Or that I could learn to bake well enough to keep up with
the competition out the gate? No - chances are I'd either have to shell out
good money to hire a skilled baker who actually knew what they were doing (and
probably fail a lot regardless based on my total lack of knowledge in selling
bread) and/or spend a few years producing deformed loaves of bread by myself
before this plan would work.

So for the non-technical founder to start a technology company without the
money to hire experienced technologists I think its completely unreasonable to
expect anything less

~~~
NonTechGuy
Yes, but if you started a bakery to sell a new item that no one else was
making and were first to market with it you might find early success. This in
turn would allow you to make a subpar marble rye because people are coming to
your bakery for your unique new pastry not the bread.

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brianlynn11
My accelerated method is to do both at the same time: outsource and learn to
code. My very first project ever which was a relatively simple PHP site that I
outsourced. I learned HTML, CSS and JS as a freelancer in the mean time. Once
I got the code base I learned how the front-end works with the server quickly.
Doing so I was able to build new features whenever I wanted at a reasonable
pace after like 3-4 months.

That's just the tip-of the iceberg though. There're so many programming
discipline that newbies need to learn if they're serious about building a
great product and being a project manager.

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alain94040
I don't quite agree with the options listed in the article. I still believe
finding a great technical co-founder is the right answer. _How_ you find one
is what should be discussed. But maybe I'm biased, since I run a meetup whose
goal is to help find co-founders. I believe that if you are passionate and a
"doer", technical people will want to follow you.

~~~
WalterSear
In my experience, "Doers" are by-and-large (and often by definition) other
technical people.

~~~
NonTechGuy
I second that and I'm not a technical guy

~~~
WalterSear
Neither was I. Come on in, the water's great :)

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stygianguest
"Most quality software engineers today have offers of amazing work
environments and 6-figure salaries from the likes of Google and Facebook."

Most? Really?

The thing that really gets me is the implied equivalence of salary and
ability, surely a belief shared by all those floating on the startup bubble,
but pushed sustematically by techcrunch et al. as subtly as the propaganda of
fox news.

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Nate75Sanders
_In the fall of 2004, Rose withdrew $1,000 — nearly one-tenth of his life
savings — and paid a freelance coder $12 an hour to mock up a Web page. He got
a deal on server space over the Web for $99 a month._

$99/month? Shouldn't that be $99/year?

~~~
gwillis13
My brain stated the same thing. Someone is not going about money management
properly, if $99/month is true for only a $1000 investment plus freelance
budget.

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spitfire
Stop telling us what to do.

