

Ask HN: How good do I need to be to be a technical cofounder? - randall

I've always described myself as a product guy... in that I've got enough skill to whip together products but I've always been reticent to describe myself as a technical cofounder since I don't dream in algorithms.<p>I'm wondering how you view technical cofounders. Is it the passion for CS that defines a technical cofounder? Or just someone who has the ability to hack stuff together, and later manage a technical team?
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toast76
To be a great founder, you just need to be good at one thing: building stuff
that people will love and buy. The rest you can either learn along they way,
or hire someone to do for you.

Dreaming of algorithms doesn't make you understand customers, help you get
funding, or help you build a great team. If you love your customers, and build
something they will fall in love with, the rest will follow.

~~~
code
That doesn't address his question. It addresses what every "founder" should
have, not what determines a technical cofounder...

OP, I think as long as you can build what you're trying to build and it's
solid without serious issues, you're good enough. Most founders will end up
hiring more technical people on to help with complex algorithms and such down
the road. Not every technical founder have say, a PhD in Machine Learning for
example, to build a complex semantic search engine (random example). As long
as you're confident in your code to an extent to get the company up and
running and be able to lead a technical team, you're probably good enough to
call yourself a technical cofounder.

