Some early comments criticizing some kind of caricature of a know nothing business guy spewing marketing buzzwords.
OK. I don't deny these people exists, and admittedly, I have a B2B point of view.
But early, cold B2B sales is hell and i have deep admiration for anyone doing it well.
By far the biggest risk of early stage startups is to build something great, that nobody wants. And in my experience the risk of that increases by a good amount with 2 technical founders.
I say this as a technical person as well (as i guess 99.999% of people here are)
Early B2B sales are definitely hell. I have seen many B2B startup failures up close, and many of them fail because they run out of usable leads, because they just can't convert them. The problem is that figuring out who is going to be a good salesman for your very small startup is far harder than finding early developers. Someone that has done a lot of business sales for a more successful company is using a different skillset, because they have a good brand behind them. Same when you hire from big consultancy: Executives aren't afraid that they are taking a gamble with McKinsey.
I've seen way too many cases where technical cofounders just believe that someone that can use the right buzzwords is as good as any other, and then end up with a defunct sales pipeline. Or you can end up with someone that is great at selling their skills and charisma to technical founders, or even VCs but what you need to convince said people is different than convincing, say, retail executives. The same guy that might be great at raising your seed round, or your series A, might not really be successful at convincing early customers, or knowing what you have to change in your product to be better for said sales. This can fail later too: I have seen companies with a series B, 20+ people in product design and sales, that might not get sales to their name in two years, and then there are major layoffs that don't cut a single salesman, because said sales team's top skill was selling their competence to the executive team.
So it's not that it's easy to be good at sales or product in an early startup, but that interviewing for that is really hard, and that by the time you know whether someone is good or not, your startup is probably in trouble. If this wasn't the case, we'd see far more success in B2B than we see.
> Some early comments criticizing some kind of caricature of a know nothing business guy spewing marketing buzzwords.
If these people are also your customers, it's actually extremely valuable to have someone who speaks that language on your sales team.
Obviously they need to have more than just the ability to speak the buzzwords. You need to ensure they're aligned with your goals and not simply trying to talk their way into extracting as much money from your company as possible.
But if you're selling to the B2B buzzword companies, you're going to struggle without someone who can speak the B2B buzzword language.
Agree with your sentiment here - not every non-technical founder is out to get you with MBA jargon. My co-founder is non-technical, but he's a subject matter expert (he's a physician).
I know several non-technical founders of multi-hundred-million / billion dollar startups. Common thread is that these people are really knowledgeable about a particular industry or subject (ie. sewer inspection, restaurant bulk food ordering, mortgage underwriting). The combo of someone who intimately understands the pain points of an industry partnered with a technical founder is a good one.
One takeaway I found from my experience, using a combination of linkedin and ycombinator co-founder match is just how many non-technical think you are going to be an employee. One meeting was basically 10 minutes of me pitching my idea, then 20 minutes of them asking if I was interested in contract work on an idea that was a year in with no progress. One guy was even like, "look, i need a coder, I can pay you x", not a great way to end a co-founder date.
This is why I limited the meetings to 30min and made sure to ask explicitly about what they are looking for.
If they phrase it as "early employee" or "head of eng" or anything other than cofounder, you're looking at a relationship where you are paid for your time, not respected as a cofounder
As a guess, women are uncomfortable with cofounder dating because too many of them have been burned by men trying to turn it into actual dating.
I don't know how to solve such problems but I feel like that is a big hitch for women in business: How to keep it all business and not have it turn into some issue because some guy thinks you are hot.
I'm friends with four female founders who would absolutely laugh at this stereotypical response. Women are fully capable of having strong backbones, high confidence, and efficient bullshit filters. Founding a company takes grit, from ANY gender, and I'm envious of the grit that founders I know bring.
> 89% Male (Clearly a problem!)
That's not a problem. That's a massive opportunity. For women, and for people to step up.
Are they currently here on HN, which was around 98 percent male when I originally joined more than twelve years ago? Perhaps they would be so kind as to participate in this discussion, speak for themselves and clue me as to how to get shit done as a woman in a man's world.
I disagree and am not up for trying to engage in a meaty way at this time, but I always appreciate a good faith effort to bat about ideas concerning why there is a gender gap. Understanding why it exists is a first step in trying to move those numbers.
That's incredible dismissive towards women generally. I've worked with many, many women who are strong and capable enough not to let hypotheticals about male behavior derail their trajectory.
Sure, but managing that risk is still solely on the woman's side, so it's understandable that a cold message would intrinsically have lower value than it might to a man.
Yeah, but imagine if you had that fear – or really, just the annoying worry – going into every potential cofounder. It would be exhausting, and I imagine that's why fewer women opt for the process at all.
I spoke with a very adept founder this last fall, who was looking for a technical cofounder to evaluate and build out the platform for the company. It was a compelling idea with clear need, B2B, well-wireframed, well thought out, and she (the founder) brought a litany of information about funding already in the works, contacts, market fit, and to-market strategy. I was thoroughly impressed, and I was on board.
Unfortunately, we did not proceed. See, I have a family to provide for. I'm in my 40s. I'm not looking for or to build the next unicorn. What I'm looking for is the opportunity to build a consistent, stable, and yes evolving product that produces reliable baseline revenue, targeting reasonable growth. The founder wanted to work immediately towards unicorn status, with cofounders taking in a salary that was approximately half of what my current income stream provided. She is in her early 30s without dependents. For her, this is a reasonable risk that provides a good lifestyle. For me, that was an unthinkable risk to the detriment of my family, including young children in day care. She also wanted to build out a small engineering team paying roughly 60% of market rate - in this hiring environment. What that would mean was a team of inexperience or heading offshore, both of which were non-starters for me.
All in all, I think she got some really bad advice from her SV peers. Her idea could have easily generated 100k MRR with a moderate amount of effort. I couldn't even put a number on the immense value of the data she would have been amassing as a side-effect of her idea. Our personalities were a match, we had the same philosophies and ideology was similar enough as to not provide room for conflict. We both thought the idea had incredible merit.
At the end of the day, it was a generational divide that proved too large to overcome.
I agree with your conclusion and want to expand on a few points.
> early 30s without dependents
Its my observation that co-founders usually fall into this group for better or for worse. A natural consequence of this is that they often have less experience, a smaller network, and an entirely different risk profile that favors, go figure, high risk ventures. I believe this also makes many in this founder demographic easy prey for VCs and others with the ability to doll out predatory contracts - and makes the role largely unappealing.
> a small engineering team paying roughly 60% of market rate
So this has obvious consequences, but you also don't need to bake "good" software this early on. You can launch shit software, as long as its just not-shitty enough to lock-in a few lucrative clients early on. This validates your idea and allows you to hire the "good" engineers to build the """good""" software, or at least more scalable version, going forward. The real hit is on the CTO or VPE or technical lead who has to break their back making the in-experienced team work. That's a lot of stress that more often then not leads to huge amounts of burnout.
> bad advice from her SV peers
Yeah this sucks, everyone has advice to give and almost nobody takes responsibility for its fall-out. But being a SV founder is generally lucrative enough (even if its just in networking) that I have little sympathy for those who fall into the trappings of "greedy" bad SV advice (like underpaying your workers!). That's not just on the people giving advice, that's on the founder too. Distancing yourself from such behavior is a no-brainer.
Sorry that your experience has been influenced by people that are obviously not good at their jobs (both on the founder and VC side). What you describe definitely happens, but is not what the best founders and VCs actually do.
If you're raising money from a good fund today you're definitely not subject to "predatory contracts". People are raising a lot of capital for pretty low dilution, and there's plenty of secondaries availability.
I also don't know what you mean by founders having a smaller network or less experience; if you really spend time with good founders you'll see that a lot of them 1) have expertise in their area of focus 2) are pretty well connected.
I'm worried about too much of this narrative being repeated on here; just like with any other job, some people have only be exposed to bad managers / co-workers. That doesn't mean the whole industry is like that.
> So this has obvious consequences, but you also don't need to bake "good" software this early on. You can launch shit software, as long as its just not-shitty enough to lock-in a few lucrative clients early on.
This is an excellent point that I should have made. Ironically, I've spent much of my career unrolling and re-working/writing code for companies that have done this. The amount of money spent on this after the fact continues to shock me. Personally, I don't think I could lead a team writing "bad" code, knowing it was bad, to race to a KPI or some such. It's just not who I am, and maybe that's a bad limitation for a tech cofounder. I do still think her idea could have been done "the right way" first, given the clients, early adopters, and contacts she already had lined up based on her wireframes.
> You can launch shit software, as long as its just not-shitty enough to lock-in a few lucrative clients early on. This validates your idea and allows you to hire the "good" engineers to build the """good""" software, or at least more scalable version, going forward.
In my decade and a half of software engineering experience, this has happened exactly once - we cobbled together something to validate a concept, then completely fucking scrapped it and built it from scratch.
I honestly don't know if it'll ever happen to me in my lifetime, and I wouldn't bet on it. Supporting the "shit software" for the lifetime of the business isn't something I'd want to do.
I've seen just as many examples of well-written software failing to meet the needs of the business as I have of "shit software" that couldn't be cleaned up. This is doubly true in growth startups, where your programmer headcount grows fast enough that by year three you're producing more software in a quarter (or month) than you did in your first year.
Why does your having different priorities mean that she got bad advice? It sounds like you're at different life stages and have different risk tolerances. That's natural and doesn't make either person wrong.
I'm very opposed to the idea that founders need to eat ramen for 4+ years when raising venture money, and I think VCs are slowly warming up to that fact.
But, yes, you will take much less salary than at a normal engineering gig.
I think 100-150k is relatively palatable. 150-200 is possible. Above 200 almost unheard of at pre-seed / seed stage.
The irony is to hire your first engineer, you'll almost certainly need to shell out 200k+.
I also have a wife and 2 kids, so I am looking for a cofounder that can respect this and give the salary needed to live a decent life.
VCs tend to believe that market validation can be done with engineers at any level of competence so why not go cheap? Then once you have that market validation you can always decide to hire competent people to clean up the mess. That way they get to take more shots, and solve the hiring problem as well because it is far easier to hire kids than it is to hire seasoned pros who might have a bunch of demands.
And the best bit: non-technical co-founders usually seem to believe that they should end up with 98% or so of the equity, because after all, you're a mere technician.
Non-technical cofounders looking to take advantage of others are over-represented in this pool because they never get selected.
They continue going on meeting after meeting, looking for a mark. Meanwhile, the genuinely good non-technical (or technical, for that matter) co-founders are quickly selected out of the pool.
It's the same reason that you're far more likely to encounter someone who can't FizzBuzz during interviews than you are as a coworker: The developers who can't do the job are doing 10-50X more interviews than the developers who are good at their job, so you're going to see far more unemployable devs than employable devs with a random sampling of interviews even though most devs are employable.
This is a common misconception. If someone says they want to bring you in as a cofounder, they almost always will think of you as a significant equity partner.
That's only usual if the product is weak, your rep is high or if you have a relationship.
To be an equal you need equal equity but it is not that simple. Two friends holding 66% can dilute you, move your work into another company assgin a low value and cut you out. The many ways to get screwed is extremely high.
I got an offer from a startup as the first dev hire (CTO/Directorish) and got an absolutely laughable equity percentage. It was insultingly low. Promptly passed and thankfully broke into FAANG where I'm going to be making probably more than even if that startup had been successful with the equity split they were going to give me.
Some shiftier startups have started to use the term "founding engineer" in their recruitment materials. I doesn't mean "cofounder" at all. Rather, it's a new, confusing term for "1st engineering hire" where you get hardly any equity and still most of the responsibility and workload associated with a cofounder role.
This is almost always true. Even companies that think they are being fair seem to offer laughably lower amount of equity to technical co founders. Even more true if the technical co founder hasnt worked in a start up or been a co founder before.
There’s always so much disdain for non-technical co-founders in these discussions, but I think that’s too facile a conclusion.
While it’s true technical people have a higher floor and can’t get by on bullshit, many strong technical people are terrible founders for a variety of reasons.
However building a successful startup requires a certain kind of hustle and resourcefulness that is not limited to technical folks. We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water due to all the “idea guy” wannabes flooding the space. Someone who can sell, someone who can hustle, someone with strong charisma and story-telling skills—these are incredibly valuable traits that can form an amazing complement to a technical founder that wants to focus on building.
> 95% of people I talked to were non-technical. Many were actively searching for a technical co-founder or early engineer. I’m convinced that me being technical is the single biggest contributor to the high response rate.
That would be the most painful part of all this for me. If I were forming a startup, I don't think I would consider pairing with someone non-technical. My personal idea of hell is having a bunch of marketing people spew buzzwords while I write and debug all the code.
There are certainly advantages to both routes. I think there are a lot of business skills that are just as important, possibly even more important than the technical skills.
fwiw, my original plan was to be a solo founder. I ended up killing that idea a few months in because I missed some of the key red flags a business focused person likely would have caught.
> I ended up killing that idea a few months in because I missed some of the key red flags a business focused person likely would have caught.
Could you give a few examples of such flags? I'm pretty curious as someone hoping to be a technical solo-founder myself. Do you think that some management training would have caught some/most of these?
As a solo technical founder my idea of hell is kissing frogs, doing all the follow ups, figuring out taxes, doing demos, managing freelancers and debugging code. But 100%, no boards, no arguments is nice. But just last year I've messed up so many things a "real" CEO would have managed...
Yup, but make sure they can sell the product, not sell you.
Also, never give up control of the finances - abdicating that responsibility means you will probably get screwed. You need to be technical about ensuring your efforts are not stolen.
I suppose it depends on the kind of product your building. My non-technical cofounder (medical field) does so much that I wouldn't enjoy, like trying to secure contracts with health care companies, funding, working through all the nuts and bolts of setting up being a provider, finding patients, etc.
Comparatively, I feel like the tech part is the easier part. I know (generally) what we have to build, and I'm confident I can build it and build up a team as we scale.
I guess it would depend on what it is, but I would think anything I would be interested in would need more than one technical person from the beginning…everything I’ve ever started has.
Someone has to do it. Usually you pair with someone who is stronger in areas you are weaker. In your case you are going to have to do it now.. is that what you really want?
I went through an active search two years ago, and what I learned is that cofounder fit is super hard to find, and probably impossible to timebox. But I thought that similar to how zettelkasten allows your ideas to grow into essays, I could grow the size and strength of my network until it becomes extremely obvious that someone is a great fit.
Furthermore, the best fit might be someone who is not on the cofounder market, that way I might be able to recruit them first.
Interesting approach by OP. As a technical founder I am similarly taking the approach of meeting as many people as I can and sharing, building in public, being helpful, but not with the frame of cofounder dating. If we really vibe with someone, then we can take it further. Meanwhile I make progress on my idea that I find meaningful.
The vast majority of the engineer/non-engineer speed dates that I remember from the
Cambridge University entrepreneurship scene were basically versions of this.
The other type was "A: Hi, nice to meet you! I have a great idea for a startup. Would
you like to join me in implementing my idea?" "B: No! Because I have a better idea for a startup.
Would you like to forget about your idea and instead join me in implementing my idea?"
"A: No thanks, I still like my idea."
Why not whittle down 50% of the meetings? Sure you probably can’t guess who to cut out but you could have done 10 meetings, figure out what works for you and cut out the rest accordingly? Good idea still, I’m interested in doing something similar. Do you recommend any methods?
Yeah - I considered this. There were probably 10% of people I could tell that wouldn't lead anywhere.
Some of it was trying to not allow my own biases to cloud things. Some of it was hoping to offer a hand up to others who may not get as much attention. Some of it was wanting to just run an experiment and see what happened.
I think the best method is finding a good community to start from. As I alluded to, YC matching has not done this for me.
The other thing is to pay attention to why you didn't like a given cofounder/idea. I identified a handful of industries that just were not for me (hadn't realized this consciously previously)
> I think the best method is finding a good community to start from. As I alluded to, YC matching has not done this for me.
My glean from the article was that Cambrian has a group for this, but they seem to be focused on fintech -- do you know if there's a similar high-quality community for biotech?
Looking at your calendar, you had no time for bathroom breaks, lunch, time to reflect & recharge, etc. I would expect by the end of the day you were pretty tired. While you probably got the structure of the meeting pretty down pat by the end, don't you think your ability to evaluate may have been affected by the number of meetings you were taking?
Someone with Pre-Sales experience in the B2B world might be a decent filter. In my experience, they are often the ones working with both the business buyer and the IT department to build a business case. They are usually comfortable switching contexts between the product's technology and the customer's problem.
Man, you need to know how to talk :) . Another person with exactly same starting point - well, except Director, as one wouldn't get it in the first place - wouldn't be nearly as successful, in fact the picture could be almost exactly opposite.
I'm not right now in a position to join an early stage startup, or even have my own idea about one -- but I'm very interested to hear about people's ideas or just see what topics are being discussed to know what's out there.
What places / sites / channels of info are good to visit or tune into to get in touch with the startup world? Or just to find out what's new and interesting? I would have no idea how to even get 3 co-founder contacts from the article's description.
I don't have a lot of personal contacts to do this (I suppose this is similar to someone who doesn't live in the Bay Area but wants to work there some day), so would be glad to hear any advice!
The catalyst for me was joining a couple of communities. The best for me was Cambrian (https://www.cambrianhq.com/) because I am generally interested in fintech.
I remember being turned off by OnDeck because they wanted a hefty "registration fee" and basically took anyone. This seems to be gone now (another bubble indicator? ;)?
How does one even get into the cofounder speed-dating circuit? My background is software engineer, SE manager, occasionally playing PM/TPM at a big company. I want to build something cool. Ideas are cheap, need someone who understands execution.
By using the two “dating sites” he mentions: Cambrian & YC Startup School.
I’ve used the latter and can confirm there’s more than enough candidates for high quality, if you’re willing to search, read bios, and do (email) outreach.
Technical directors are merely tolerating all the “ideas guys” with no skills and no capital.
We should cut them out and relegate these marketers to a contract role, and exclusively pursue business models where customers don’t derive confidence from a CEO sales guy. Mainly because they waste our time, they can’t even judge the character of people in their network assuming they even have a network, and take way too much equity in a conversation that would be better off avoided.
(repeating my earlier sentiment) This is a poor assessment.
Business want someone that understand their needs and can communicate in their terms - not 'someone that can code'.
Having lived on 'both sides of the fence' it took me several years to develop the perspective, maturity and skills necessary to be able to communicate 'with confidence' to customers, and it's not some kind of bluster.
While the bar is certainly lower for someone to 'just have an idea' and so there's a lot of chaff and noise ... for most startups that don't require exceptional technical chops (say for example, not a new kind of DB), a 'good CEO' is worth far more than any technical contributor, at least nominally.
Technical contribution in more clearly defined areas is more or less just skilled labour.
The big advantage of being technical at an early stage is that that labour can come very cheaply with long hours etc. and the material reality of a startup is that there is 'a lot of work, and it's mostly technical'. Also - it needs to churn quickly, which is difficult to do for regular staff engineers at an established company.
The best thing any young technical person could hope for is a competent, trustworthy, conscientious, somewhat business savvy CEO who can communicate, as a partner.
Edit: The #1 issue I see among youngish new companies making pitches, is that they are building something that nobody wants. They have no specific insight into some kind of market need, and don't have the ability to communicate with material confidence around specific issues. Sadly by the time someone has been working in industry long enough to do this (and this is a minority, not everyone develops insight), their opportunity cost is usually pretty high and they're less interested in 'startups'.
For example, in a recent discussion with a major retail exec., listening to his woes, a 1/2 dozen solid concepts came out of a 1hr. discussion, but they're opportunities that could only be addressed by someone with that insight, and would be hugely benefited by someone like him doing the selling.
I notice I did write my opinion in a very echo-chambery way.
Sure, emotional intelligence and charisma and communication skills are important in this proposed technocracy, I’m just saying that the non-technical people with no capital should no longer be able to grift their way into double digit share ownership. We can go vertically integrated and switch the distribution of ownership, much more heavily than it already is.
Sorry, but this still sounds pretentious. The set of possible cofounders is a market like any other, and compensation is generally commensurate with value generated. Charisma and EQ are just as important, if not more, than generic technical skills for most businesses. There's obviously going to be exceptions such as when new technology is being created at the foundation of the business, but that is not the majority of startups.
Technical founders who don't have those skills need somebody who can handle it - and it's very valuable.
Charisma and EQ are attributes much like IQ and curiosity - they are nice and important, but not in and of themselves hugely important. However, 'Business Competence' is a material thing that is valuable.
Was it the proposed technocracy part? I'm not sure how people could get that impression. /s
No, but really, I mentioned that technical cofounders should pursue businesses that don't need the other personalities. There are enough of them. So in that subset of businesses, the technical cofounders would have all the equity, and in the remaining businesses their value would be seen as deserving more of the equity than what currently happens. Just requires coordination.
You just have to find technical people that can do both to some level that is good enough to prove your mvp has legs. After you raise money as long as you can stick to all technical people do it…as long as you can.
My father in law (who had a successful exit back in the 90s with an actual silicon business) is a strong advocate of engineer startup CEOs. ~"Non tech people aren't going to learn technology; it's very doable for a tech person to learn necessary sales and finance skills."
Having spent the last N years with sales cofounders, I wish I'd taken that advice on board earlier. (Though, there's certainly value in learning sales from skilled practitioners.)
OK. I don't deny these people exists, and admittedly, I have a B2B point of view.
But early, cold B2B sales is hell and i have deep admiration for anyone doing it well.
By far the biggest risk of early stage startups is to build something great, that nobody wants. And in my experience the risk of that increases by a good amount with 2 technical founders.
I say this as a technical person as well (as i guess 99.999% of people here are)