Even this article IMO subtly demonstrates the mindset that leads nontechnical founders to not think they need a technical cofounder, by phrasing the search for one as “recruiting” as if they were a subordinate or code monkey. It should be a partner relationship, not a subordinate relationship.
This mindset that technical cofounders are essentially “coders” (a term I hate) is very prevalent among inexperienced nontechnical founders. I know I’m preaching to the choir here but a lot of technical people have deep industry/business/product knowledge and have social skills. It is very frustrating when some Ivy League 25 year old PM/management consultant tries to pitch you on their vision while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of.
>> It is very frustrating when some Ivy League 25 year old PM/management consultant tries to pitch you on their vision while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of.
I get calls weekly from people seeking technical co-founders. The biggest thing most CTO candidates dont realize is the power they have -- unless the "business co-founder" is actually bringing something to the table.
I'd LOVE to work with a "Business co-founder" who actually brings Purchase Orders, Funding, Transact-able Relationships, prior wins (esp publicly verifiable wins). That would be a dream.
It makes no sense to work with a "Business co-founder" who wants ME to put in hundreds of hours of technical work -- upfront -- often for equity "e.g., free" -- and retains the right to take all the upside and has none of the downside. Why would I need a "Business Co-Founder" at all in that case, I might as well be the only founder and recruit later.
I see tons of friends burnt by these types of "deals." The biggest red-flag is when the "Business co-founder" still has a job and no real skin in the game.
I have substantially less exposure to this space than you seem to, but even when trying to start projects with friends, this holds true. So often, I get pitched by pals who think the idea is what they've done, and at that point, it's up to me to "code up." What I would love to hear is, "I've been talking with these three businesses already, and they seem interested." or even, "I'm really worried about the sales and marketing side of things, so that's the problem I'm going to focus on."
Nobody's ever come even close to that. It takes zero coding to have those things already started, and yet nobody even goes down that path before looking for a "code monkey."
This is very common issue with software engineering in general but I'd say particularly with game development, the answer I've found to be the best is what converted me when I was getting started with game dev ("I have a great idea, I just need a team to build it"):
Why do you think we got learnt game dev/programming ourselves? Probably because we too had an idea we wanted to make a reality, so why would we put that on hold to make someone else's idea without some other incentive?
>> Nobody's ever come even close to that. It takes zero coding to have those things already started, and yet nobody even goes down that path before looking for a "code monkey."
In a sense you are lucky in a situation like this -- that have self-selected themselves out w/o any effort from you. Technologists dont need anyone with that little motivation sharing equity. Better to know that at the start.
How do you even find these people? I somehow managed to surround myself with highly technical individuals who are only interested climbing a corporate ladder, not any kind of serious entrepreneurship.
"Business co-founders" are usually finding me (not the other way around.) They are approaching me on linked in cold, or on linked in referred thru someone, or at Meetups (pre-pandemic) or thru community organizations.
The worst example of this is the "founding engineer" role. I get a lot of these offers, and it just feels like a scam every single time. Founders often sell that as some incredible opportunity, zero-to-one, full codebase ownership, huge scope, no eng team, etc, etc. All of that for an amazing 1% equity.
So yeah, the expectation is that I will build the whole project, drive product decisions, help hiring the rest of the eng staff, spend the next 1-2 years basically working on this project 24/7. They keep 99% and I get 1%. Great, thanks.
It's the same with YC: at the end of the day even the founders will end up owning only a small fraction of the company. The difference is that the VCs dilute you over time, not up front, to get the maximum amount of work out of you.
to be fair, if they took investment, it's rarely 99%, cuz investors took a chunk, and a pool of stock gets set aside for future employees, etc. But if the there isn't even any funding yet then 1% is just stupidity.
I get those too. Even if the founders gave away 10-20% to investors, actually building the project under the "management" of inexperienced founders and getting 1% doesn't seem like a fair deal. At this early stage when there is not even a product, hiring a founding engineer is a cheap way to sidestep the need for a technical co-founder who would be entitled for a much larger share of the company. The responsibilities are vast, I can't see that being worth 80-99x less than the contribution the founders make.
Many feel entitled to captain a ship - they are often just useless.
Definitely not always, but more often than it should be. I had this experience once - a family of people that already had money that were obsessed with "running their own business" off the backs of others. They didn't even contribute the money they had. All exploitation. Fortunately I shut it down and walked away with code. It was useless code, but at least I was also able to waste their time on top of my own.
My default mode as a technical person now is to vet the person actually has something they can bring. If they do less than bring us customers before we have a finished product, they've failed. I expect them to make connections and sell what we don't even have. That way I know we can both make something from nothing - the key ingredient to liftoff.
> and retains the right to take all the upside and has none of the downside
When you are paid in equity, the non-technical cofounder doesn't have all of the upside. But I completely agree that both parties need to bring something to the table at the beginning. It can't be "you build something and then after you've done that I'll go sell it". Both founders need to be putting in sweat equity simultaneously, to align incentives.
I think we are in agreement. To elaborate more -- you are right, "the non-technical cofounder doesn't have all of the upside" -- I mean "they have all upside" meaning, they can only go up -- they have contributed nothing so everything for them is upside.
Yeah, I think the difference is between "they have all the upside" and "they have only upside". You shouldn't agree to either of those situations — they should be putting in sweat equity alongside you. But there's a big difference between them, since all founders end up with some upside — if you don't, then you're employee #1 (and even then, you're probably still getting a couple percent).
I think they believe in the "Build it and they will come" and then they just coordinate and tell you what to do afterwards, rather than making hundreds of cold calls (i.e. grinding).
I've similarly had so many technical friends burnt by this.
My new suggestion for "business co-founders" pitching ideas to technical friends where "business co-founders" propose techies do all the upfront work is --
If you have no Purchase Orders, no Funding, no Transact-able Relationships, no prior wins (esp publicly verifiable wins) -- then you put in money. Find some reasonable rate you pay for the upfront technical work. This "balances out" the skin in the game. If they have no money, i'd half-seriously suggest they go borrow money to pay the technical co-founder.
They need some risk, some skin in the game to make this an equal effort.
I get a lot of inbound in this form and after the first disaster I'm much more aware of what a nontechnical founder needs to be doing. I think part of the problem is that they imagine themselves as having CEO responsibilities at the start (e.g. setting vision, hiring, etc.). But that's not what a nontechnical founder does on day 1. On day 1 they are the sales rep, QA, point-of-contact, and customer interviewer. They are every entry level position at the same time, because that's what the company needs.
The big smell here is offering not-equal equity to technical cofounders who join early (first year). YC's proposed solution for later joining cofounders is just to give them equal equity but start their vest later, which I find very incentive aligning. The usual explanation is that they've done all the "market research + product/idea development" already, which is useless.
> while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of.
I considered it a bit, and you know what, I'd wager that four-fifths of tech business dynamics flow from this statement. Technical expertise is the money printer onto which all manners of value extraction anchor themselves, like barnacles. If not at the creation, then, for a time, it is good. And then it happens anyway 5-10 years down the line.
That said, there are different failure modes for purely technical people not understanding business. But the market doesn't seem to reward them the same way. Root cause is outside the scope of this comment...
> That said, there are different failure modes for purely technical people not understanding business.
A common one, I think, is technical people thinking management or business expertise is easy (or even beneath them) because they're so smart in other areas--and any problems they might have can surely be solved with the same tools they use to solve engineering problems, right? Which is kind of the flip side of the attitude of the kind of nontechnical founders we're talking about.
Another thing I'm facing myself (as a technical person) is when I've successfully dipped a toe into a management role, I was lucky enough that the people I was leading were all also technical people whose personalities were mostly in line with mine. But I've had to remind myself that if I put myself in a leadership position again, it won't always be that simple...
Yes, this. I've been in many startups but only once as a founder. I was the technical one, the only one with deep expertise in the core business area of the startup.
Well, my title was founder. All the other founders were on the board, I was not. All the other founders controlled budget, I did not. So really, despite the words on the offer letter I was just an employee. The founder title granted me the right to work 90 hour weeks with no help and no support and no budget to hire help.
At least didn't waste too many years on that one.
Learn from me. Spend some of your money up front and hire a lawyer with tons of experience in startups to guide you through contract negotiations and if the company balks at your (lawyer-assisted) terms that's your giant red flag to run very far away.
>> Well, my title was founder. All the other founders were on the board, I was not. All the other founders controlled budget, I did not. So really, despite the words on the offer letter I was just an employee. The founder title granted me the right to work 90 hour weeks with no help and no support and no budget to hire help.
>> At least didn't waste too many years on that one.
Firstly, i'm sorry to hear about your situation. I'm curious why you didnt negotiate harder some time into this. It seems to be you held all the cards.
I'm fascinated by the number of "business co-founders" who think they can cut a 25k check to some random person on eLance/Upwork and replace technical co-founders.
My recommendation would be to say -- sure, try that. Lets talk in 6mo if you still need me, but i'll set the terms at that point. 6mo is about when most non-technical people realize they have no code in source control and some random person overseas now owns their company effectively.
I've dealt with someone like that once but if they are any good they will never sit around and wait for 6 months. That person hustled very hard, cycled through several upwork teams and CTOs. through ruthless arm twisting kept all the code and underpaid everybody, finally settled on a CTO with 0 self-esteem and slave terms, and ended up building a rather successful company by now.
> given enough money on the table and the opportunity.
In my personal experience it was never even that much money. Some people just really want to feel like they've pulled a fast one, even if all they really end up doing is wasting everyone's time. As a nerd who is generally not motivated by Machiavellian shenanigans, I have a hard time seeing these kinds of predators coming.
Yep. I used to be more charitable, but I've taken to being very short with founder wannabes who act like this. Bluntly, if they refuse to look past their preconceptions to see who they're actually talking to, why should I?
This is made easier knowing founders with those sorts of blinders are likely going to fail anyway, so you don't want to be in the blast radius when it happens.
Technical expertise is very rarely where the core value of a product comes from. If you're really pushing some boundary and just have a better technology product, like original Google or ChatGPT, then sure, tech is your special sauce.
For 99% of software businesses, the tech can cause the business to fail but its almost never what makes the business succeed. Things like customer development and sales are actually far more important.
Its hard to build a well-architected web app that scales, but theres many people who can do a reasonable job at it. But translating that to business value is much harder.
Theres many people can build a React project in a week, fewer who know how to turn that React project into money. That should be self-evident on a site full of people who know how to make a React app, but begrudglingly work for others because they dont know how to turn a React app into money.
The thing about "the business guys" is most of them are actually pretty bad at the business side. And a lot of developers are actually better at the business side, because they have more relevant experience.
The "business guys" get their MBA and learn about merges and acquisitions for billion dollar business and do case studies about how GM optimizes their supply chain, information that's useful in some contexts but mostly entirely useless when it comes to getting your first 100 paying customers for your SaaS.
The developer is actually more likely to have the relevant business skills since they're more likely to have put some sort of SaaS on the internet and tried to get users for it, even if they failed.
I was on YC cofounder matchmaking for a while and was inundated with "business guys" who were just bad at the business side. It didn't bug me that they were non-technical, but their non-technical nature led to some bad business planning. For example, one guy who worked in VC wanted to make a GMail / Superhuman competitor oriented towards VCs. I suggested we start with a Chrome extension for Gmail, he insisted we build an entirely new email stack from scratch for the MVP.
Making a realistic plan is part of making a business plan and his lack of technical acumen made him bad at business.
If someone came to me and said, hey I have a super pared down MVP, it's just 4 screens in Figma with a minimal data model, and I have 100 people who I showed the Figma screens to and they signed up to pay $50 a month, can you build it ? I'd be thrilled to pair up with a "business guy" like that but they are far more rare than a good tech co-founder and the business types that get that far tend to offer things like "founding engineer" instead of actual co-founder because they, somewhat fairly, assume that the skills you're bringing to the table aren't actually that difficult to find.
But to recap, my high level point is that the technical expertise is not really the money printer. The money printer is mapping market demand to technical products, which is a business skill. And that business skill is worth a lot more than technical skills. Its just a type of business skill that you find more often in developers than you do in MBA, and so we don't associate it with "business guys". But it's the most fundamental of all skills to make money from software, other than a handful of "exceptions that prove the rule".
"But to recap, my high level point is that the technical expertise is not really the money printer. The money printer is mapping market demand to technical products, which is a business skill. And that business skill is worth a lot more than technical skills. Its just a type of business skill that you find more often in developers than you do in MBA, and so we don't associate it with "business guys". But it's the most fundamental of all skills to make money from software, other than a handful of "exceptions that prove the rule"."
As an ex-shitty business guy, I taught myself how to code thinking that would solve my problems. Nope. Now I'm just a shitty business person and a shitty dev. Forcing myself to do the actual work of talking to customers now.
I'm in a similar boat. I'm not lecturing anyone having learned from success but having learned from failure.
I just spent an entire year spent building software products and they almost all failed. I wrote a long retro (too long, not edited, more for myself than for others, but if curious: https://www.billprin.com/notes/one-year-retro ) and the #1 cause of failure I wrote down was not doing enough talking to customers and customer development.
The one project I have that has a tiny bit of recurring revenue was not originally a project I had set out to build. I cold-DMed some people in a Facebook group and pitched a different project, and one guy told me he didn't like what I built but might pay if I built something different in the same space. And that was the only product I have thats worked. Goes to show the obvious - talk to users!
I see a lot of indie hackers talk about "audience building", and my initial read of that the purpose was that if you get a ton of followers on Twitter, then when you launch a product, you have a bunch of people ready to sign up. Increasingly, I'm thinking the much bigger value of audience building is that it's easier to get people to tell you what to build in the first place.
So yeah, customer development is not some magical thing that requires you to be a "business guy" or anything else, but it's hard, it's important, and sounds like we both need to do more of it :)
> Nope. Now I'm just a shitty business person and a shitty dev. Forcing myself to do the actual work of talking to customers now.
This level of humility will take you far. You will get better at talking to customers over time, keep grinding, keep practicing, it gets easier. And one day the switch will happen, they will look up to you as the knowledgeable consultant instead of looking down on you as the 'shitty business guy' with nothing of value to offer.
> This level of humility will take you far. You will get better at talking to customers over time, keep grinding, keep practicing, it gets easier.
Thanks! I launched my first large-scale cold outreach campaign this morning after learning about it this week and building up leads. Tomorrow, I will try out cold calling.
>> For 99% of software businesses, the tech can cause the business to fail but its almost never what makes the business succeed. Things like customer development and sales are actually far more important.
I STRONGLY disgree with your take as a universal take. At the pre-Seed stage, the technology is the only thing. Without that, you dont have a technical business. You just have a pitch deck.
Of course, once you prove out the idea and reach product market fit, that enables you to either have cashflow or raise funding -- so technology becomes less critical because you can use the $ to hire technologists.
If "mapping market demand to technical products" was really the money printer, every management consultant would be running a unicorn. Every MBB consultant would have a side startup. You actually need the technical product, or some MVP of it, to map a market demand to it, to do demos, to raise funding. If you dont, you just have a pitch deck. Sure, if you can raise on a pitch deck, that is winning, but how many can?
A pitch deck is something you make for investors. I'm not talking about investors, I'm talking about customers.
Lots of management consultants can make a pitch deck. Very few can actually find people willing to pay for an MVP of a software product.
That was pretty much the point of my post. Most "business" guys are bad at the business side. Making pitch decks and raising funds is not the business side - except in some people's little side-circus. Understanding what customers want and figuring out what's the minimal version that people will pay for is.
You show me a management consultant that actually has 50 people willing to pay for an MVP, and that person can easily have a side startup. In fact, please put me in touch. Very, very few of them can actually do that. And even if they don't have a developer, I imagine an investor would be pretty impressed by that too.
Again, I'm speaking in generalities. If your technology is "turn common trash into gasoline" or "teleports people across contintents safely", then yeah, you don't need many business skills. But if your technology is "a scalable web app", or "I forked stable diffusion and did something cute with it", then the business skills are more critical than the tech skills.
It somewhat depends on the product, but in the beginning, I think the tech only matters inasmuch as it allows you to iterate quickly and build a product people love. It can be a spaghetti code tire fire underneath.
What really matters is market insight to understand what people want, design ability to give it to them, and sales/marketing to get traction. You do need a good engineer to pull this off, but they need to prioritize iteration speed, not engineering quality.
> The money printer is mapping market demand to technical products, which is a business skill. And that business skill is worth a lot more than technical skills. Its just a type of business skill that you find more often in developers than you do in MBA, and so we don't associate it with "business guys".
I think you're underplaying the ability to map requirements to a feasible and sufficient technical product. Being the person who is also mapping the market demand to the technical product makes this process significantly more efficient.
I also think there's a lot of overlap with Software Engineering (with a capital 'E') in these skills - a lot of this is about figuring out what to build and making sure you've built it. I believe that's why they're more often found in developers than business types.
I want to say (as GP) good points. Thank you for disagreeing. When I think of the business, my worldview underweights the cases (the 99%?) where technology is only an enabler to the business case - I guess because I don't think it's as interesting as the pushing of boundaries.
The other parts of the business are labor as well. Products don't magically go to market. Business models don't magically create and evolve themselves.
>> The other parts of the business are labor as well. Products don't magically go to market. Business models don't magically create and evolve themselves.
You are right, but it is about which labor comes first. The first labor is taking 100% of the risk without others taking any risk. Others have all upside and no downside. They have a free-option for the upside as the technologist does all the upfront work.
The idea that everything that comes after initial unpaid technical work to get to where you can bring on investment is "all upside and no downside" is so divorced from the reality of anything I've ever seen in any company that I'm having trouble processing it.
It is a surprisingly common reality for numerous technologists.
That doesnt mean that there arent good situations. I would LOVE to work with business co-founders with these backgrounds
- They already have 10 customers in mind, have done mockups, have done validation with customers, and you can verifiably know that the customers are interested in the technology at a particular price point before you build
- They have a friend/colleague at a key major customer who is willing to be the first customer before the technology is even built, and this can be verified
- They can bring in purchase orders before the technology is built out
- They can bring in conditional purchase orders contingent on some technical milestone
- They can bring in VC to pay technical co-founder for upfront work
- They can get front-row seat with some key industry group or policy-maker with influence
- They have prior verifiable successes (e.g., Steve Jobs, Elon as extreme examples)
All the above are worth gold. What isnt worth gold is someone who wants to sit back and chill while a technologist codes away for six months.
> There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness. They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them. But for a startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will have to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing. [2]
> One is a combination of shyness and laziness. They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them.
I think this is more complicated: the problem is not going out and talking to a bunch of strangers (which I would do if necessary, and I do claim that my tolerance of rejection is sufficiently high).
The problem rather is (this is something that a friend, who works as a business consultant, explained to me): to make a successful sale, you need a salesperson "who thinks like the customer". Lots of programmers simply think very differently from how the typical programmers, and thus are bad salespersons concerning these customers.
He really said that I have an insanely good intuition for what kind of software product would insanely help some specific industry, but also honestly told me that I (and honestly also he) would likely not be capable of selling such a product (if it existed) to a customer in this industry, simply because I think too differently from the decision makers in this industry.
Heading over to MIT to “find a coder” is something you’ll hear from HBS aspiring founders.
I also deeply agree with the other part - there’s a class of technical leaders who have that depth and choose to work with technology as the primary day to day. But, they also don’t have HBS MBAs often.
Good VCs look for these founders I think, but otherwise the cultural treatment of that type can aspire one to get a MBA just to fix or re-align the perception.
Dalton says basically the same thing in the video. Lightly edited excerpt from the YouTube transcript (starting around 11:28):
What often happens - again, to go deep on this - is that the way they'll pitch the person is that they'll pitch them their idea, like, "I'm an idea guy, I've got a great idea, do you want to be my worker bee to go do all my ideas?" And of course the person that's the best person you've ever worked with does not want to sit in a cage and do all of the work that you give them. And instead I'm like, well have you asked them if they have startup ideas? And then you sell yourself, where you can come together, come up with the idea together, as co-owners, and it's shocking how often that appears to have never occurred to someone. Like they think the idea of finding a tech co-founder is to find someone who will basically submit to their whims and be, like, their assistant, and that's not the move.
They types still didn't learn that google, microsoft and every single disruptor out there has been founded and brought to riches by technical people. Business minded folks survive for a while, make a few millions, but never reach the levels of these companies. Quite the contrary - companies of this level plunge once business folks dominate. But that's good. Once google's dead others will take its place, and will be likely founded by technical people.
Over the years, when I meet a non-technical founder looking for a technical founder, I ask them if they're ok owning as little of the startup that they offer to the technical person, until they can deliver sales.
Technical people, in large do deliver a product and something that works. It might not be what the market wants, or the right thing, but speed of iteration, is again technical, and something the technical founder uniquely must bring.
There is a video from YC that says they can see it from a mile away when the non-technical founders have taken advantage of the technical person, founder or not, by not giving them equity equal to the difference they make.
This is an interesting idea — variable vesting based on milestones. It would be a great way to reduce risk, though of course there are issues that could arise that would make this complicated. For example, if the technical person vests based on hitting certain product-related goals, does he get penalized if part of the dev team gets hired by another company, which makes it harder for him to hit the milestones? Or for the non-technical cofounder, if the economy goes into a tailspin, and it's much harder to make sales than the cofounders anticipated, should he not vest, even if he's doing everything he can?
But overall, I think this is a really intriguing idea. Points could be assigned for what each founder is bringing to the table (concrete idea, market research, cash), and they would get some vested stock for that. Then the rest of the founder's shares could be put into a pool and vested to particular founders that hit their milestones. You wouldn't want to make it too adversarial, but it's possible the benefits of incentive alignment would overcome the downsides of the zero-sum game thinking that the system could engender.
Oh sure, but if the reason the employees were poached was because the non-technical founder refused to pay the dev employees more, then whose fault is it?
This is pretty well said. I tend to agree and as a founder of multiple companies, as a well an engineering-background co-founder myself, I have definitely had interactions with "non-technical" founders looking for people (like me) and totally got the vibe of the needing a "technical co-founder" because they just need some "coder" as if that's the missing key to success (or whatever).
That said, there are plenty of very smart, driven, people who are not software engineers who don't think of a technical co-founder that way. So it'd be wrong to paint with a super wide brush on this.
>> That said, there are plenty of very smart, driven, people who are not software engineers who don't think of a technical co-founder that way. So it'd be wrong to paint with a super wide brush on this.
Agree, I think business co-founders can add tremendous value. But that value needs to be shown -- upfront. Otherwise, why would any technologist sink hundreds of hours on a mere promise? Business co-founders should have already drawn out solutions, spoken to customers, perhaps gotten conditional sales POs from friends/contacts, raised funding, set up VC meetings, etc.
But a Business co-founder who hasnt done any of these, and just wants the upside after a bunch of technical work is done, isnt the type of Business co-founder you want.
It's really weird given how many tech founders have shown the value of tech talent by creating billion dollar companies. Why can't they see it?
Then again look in a mirror and techos tend to believe business people are total trash. Yes, many executives and salespeople are useless manglement and pointy-haired-bosses (just like there are useless engineers). But don't miss the valuable management gems. Techos: don't make the same mistakes as described about the non-techs in the vid by ignoring a 10x engineer. There are 10x non-techs too.
That’s because the people with money are not the people who actually do the things.
The people with money are the Ivy League 25-year-old PM management consultants.
Since everyone seems to prefer more money over more freedom, us nerds keep agreeing to or putting ourselves in positions where we are depending on non technical people for money.
I hate doing money stuff, I like building stuff
There are people who don’t like building stuff but like doing money stuff.
Which one do you think is going to get more money?
Which one has the power over the other one?
It’s totally inverted and changing this is going to take a century or more to fix
What term do you prefer over “coder”? I’ve had this issue with pretty much any term for what I essentially do. I don’t like “developer”, “programmer”, “techie”, “IT… guy”? (The last two being particularly bad)
Even “engineer” is a bit strange to me and I feel it doesn’t really fit, so I actually never knew what to call myself.
May I ask what a non-technical founder should look for in a technical co-founder?
I have two customers for slightly different businesses. The deals are made, I am building MVP's myself and JVing with established tech companies to get products to market.
I have a supply chain with a 30% cost advantage with customers.
and
I have a hardware software system that significantly improves hire businesses that has customers and development partnerships with research organisations and funding applications in progress.
Both have customers and large B2B growth potential.
I am building the MVP's myself while selling and JVing as necessary but would happily partner equally with a technical expert in Microsoft365 and PostgreSQL and PostGIS.
I'm an expert in business design and love technology without being talented or experienced building it. Someone with a business mind and opinions plus the technical skills to build an MVP and hire a technology team would be perfect. I can license my way to market but it will a clunkier more painful start. If I could work with someone who has deep experience with making microsoft365 work smoothly, for small volumes of data and a small number of users initially, then they would add value to both businesses instantly.
My question is should I grind through this myself with JV's where needed using architects on contract for the tricky bits and build the technical knowledge to be a really good technical work partner enabling recruitment of a better technical co-founder or should I recruit the best technical-cofounder I can and get on with growing the businesses.
I would happily take a smaller salary from cashflow than a technical co-founder initially, recognising their market value remuneration as soon as the business is able - likely early year 2. I would even consider technical guidance/mentoring for some equity if someone was interested.
And I know you are supposed to focus on one thing at a time but the software for the two business systems is similar, and I have systems and people to drive the sales and management for both so will offering a technical-co founder 2 bites at 2 potential rapid growth businesses make them think they were increasing or reducing their odds of success?
What questions would I ask to make sure the partnership will be enjoyable for the technical co-founder?
Are there any books/experts on keeping technical co-founders happy?
> May I ask what a non-technical founder should look for in a technical co-founder?
Breadth of expertise, ability to learn quickly, open minded when it comes to technology. Loves to work with clients and solve their problems more than they love the tech.
The B2B and PostGIS part caught my eye. I'm technical, but leading both the business and the technical sides of my spatial analytics company. I would be happy to share at least some of my technical knowledge. From infrastructure, DevOps, through database and data layer, and all the way to the frontend - I've been doing this for years and there could be a thing or two that may be useful to you.
On the other hand, I can always do better when it comes to B2B sales, so I am looking to learn too. Maybe we can have a chat sometimes.
Not to mention that you take approximately the same risk minus a couple of hundred K in total comp per year but - tadaaaa - in return you get 0.0025% stock that will vest over the next five years.
It would be nice(-er) if people said: "Look, my parents know people, my classmates and their parents know people, and while we unfortunately can't let you past the bike room, we'd like to work with you".
Show me a meritocracy and I'll show you the winners corrupting it for their friends and kids.
> This mindset that technical cofounders are essentially “coders” (a term I hate) is very prevalent among inexperienced nontechnical founders. I know I’m preaching to the choir here but a lot of technical people have deep industry/business/product knowledge and have social skills. It is very frustrating when some Ivy League 25 year old PM/management consultant tries to pitch you on their vision while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of.
This is nicely worded, but I would like to expand on it. This is coming from someone who is a businessperson who programs — I’ve been programming since I was 10, but I’ve never had the job of a programmer.
tl;dr - I think that both programmers and business people can be delusional about their value add, but folks who can do both are easier to work with, and folks who can do both have more opportunities than just hyper-growth startups.
In generalities, there are four groups of folks on the tech-business continuum.
1. Pure tech folks with little or no business acumen. Some of these folks think “sales” or “marketing” are fighting words. I find many of these folks very difficult to do business with. To be charitable to the “Ivy League” folks you refer to, they have probably met enough of these pure tech folks (some of whom are actually idiot savants) such that they erroneously over-generalize to think that all tech folks are like these pure tech folks.
2. Tech folks with business acumen. The business side usually comes from experience. I think pg advocates for tech folks who do start ups to develop into this. Overall much easier to do business with, but sometimes they make product-oriented decisions that miss the forest for the trees. The best tech businesses come from this group, but they get outclassed on the business side unless they embrace the business side aggressively (Zuck and Gates being prime examples). I think the “Ivy League” folks lose a lot of business due to lack of respect for this group.
3. Business folks with tech acumen (this is me). Great at taking over tech business that are poorly run and optimizing them either as a c-suite executive or as a buyer (this is what I do). While I don’t refer to programmers as “coders”, and I don’t treat programmers as idiot-savants, I know how to find and pay programmers to solve my business problems. Interestingly, I run into some programmers who are doing commodity work who want a percentage of the business. My offer is always the same — zero. I’m not building a startup or complex software. Their skills are largely fungible to me, since most of the value is in finding the solution rather than the nuts and bolts of development. The exception is for folks in group 2 who want to move to group 3, but at that point they become a businessperson rather than a programmer.
4. Business folks with no tech acumen. These are the “Ivy League” folks (and a lot of VCs, tbh). These are the “idea people”, the people who are clueless about tech and tech development, often the people who are also bad at business, but they happen to have access to money and/or critical buyers. Fwiw, many of these folks treat other business people even worse than programmers — they just treat most people like idiots, sans the savant. I sometimes have a hard time doing business with these folks, because they frequently don’t know the value (or lack thereof) of their business, and/or they are only looking for suckers to do business with. Many/most of these folks are all style and no substance. If they had some substance, they would be in group 3 (or try to be).
Obviously these are people on a continuum that are separated into somewhat arbitrary groups. That said, these archetypes exist.
How do these archetypes matter for tech businesses?
If you’re in group 1, you’re at the mercy of whatever business person you can work with. You hope that you end up more like Woz than most of the pure tech folks who get restructured out as the business grows. I strongly recommend that the pure tech folks focus on getting paid primarily in cash rather than equity, since any non-benevolent business person will structure out the tech person’s equity as soon as possible.
If you are in group 2, you are in a strong position to develop a successful startup or successful tech business. Just realize that you are a cog in the VC machine, and they only value you for your potential to hit home runs. You can make more reliable money (think 8 or 9 figures) in a “lifestyle business”, but it is not likely you will become a billionaire… unless you shift to group 3.
If you are in group 3, you need to realize that most of your value will be by doing very boring shit. Billionaire status is possible, but it will be a boring trip, and you are not likely to appear in any sexy tech write ups unless you engage in aggressive self-promotion in these areas (some should, most probably shouldn’t). The biggest mistake I see group 3 folks make is to think that they are in group 2, especially if/when they try to develop a consumer-oriented product without getting a group 2 cofounder.
Group 4… well, group 4 is what they are. There is some jiujitsu by which their egos and ignorance can be used for greater good. If you engage with these folks, I would only do so with that type of interaction in mind. If you engage with them on their terms, you will almost certainly lose.
Why did I write all of this? To clarify options for various level of tech people.
The HN/Ycombinator narrative to push for technical co-founders is very valid for start ups (the pg kind that are built to grow fast), but there many other ways to make money as a tech person or a tech-oriented business person than start ups (especially now in the 20s compared to the 90s or 00s), and some/many of these are more reliable ways to get to a “fuck you money” level. I don’t think a lot of highly skilled tech folks realize this.
Could you name some (not commonly known ways to get fuck you money)? As a young tech guy doing stuff in startup spaces, I'm genuinely interested.
Of course, "no silver bullet", especially to make big money, but I'm curious, from the perspective of someone who'd place around 1.3 on the spectrum you described.
> Could you name some (not commonly known ways to get fuck you money)?
To clarify, I put “fuck you money” at about $10m-$20m. This amount enables a relatively comfortable life in perpetuity without touching the principal.
The ways are all commonly known, but they aren’t commonly followed.
tl;dr — it’s boring.
As a tech person:
1. Learn sales.
2. Learn business operations.
3. Solve business problems, possibly using tech.
A great way to scale into this is starting an agency. The agency can do programming, web development, ad tech… anything that direction.
It’s cash as you go, you get to learn while getting paid, you get a front row seat to business problems, and you can make useful contacts.
Once you have enough cash / cash flow, you can buy or joint venture with companies that have good product-market fit but weak operations, and you provide the part that they are weak at.
These businesses are everywhere at price points in the $10k to ~$500m range (at around $500m, the big boys start getting interested).
Many of the operational failures are in sales/marketing (all aspects thereof like pricing, channels, etc.), organization structure (too many bodies), misaligned incentives, etc.
Some of the easiest changes I’ve personally made is pricing changes. Specifically, changing a large irregular one-off payment to a much lower recurring payment (one that is preferred by the customers), and adding three-tier pricing with appropriate value add at each level. Imho, these decisions were not made by the original owners because either they were afraid of change or they didn’t talk to and listen to their customers (or both).
> The easiest way to get fuck you money is to reduce your consumption.
If you work at a very high paying job in finance or at a place like Google or FB, I might agree with this. Some people in those groups make a lot and spend a lot (sometimes more than they make).
For people with more modest salaries, I think that this is tragically wrong for fuck you money, but probably right for relatively modest “nest egg” money.
There is a limit to how much a person can gain by cutting, but that same person is essentially uncapped in earning potential.
The easiest way to get fuck you money is to start a business that solves business problems. Knowing sales, business operations, and tech is a relatively easy way to access this market. Not easy overall, but relatively easy compared to other options that lead to fuck you money.
Personally, I quit my job at a time I had $300/mo in income from my startup and lived in an old suv. Yes there is a bottom limit but it’s much lower than you might think. A big limitation many people have is their family, since if they aren’t onboard (mine was) then it cannot work out. But in that case it’s no longer fuck you money, since you’re trying to earn enough to maintain your family relationships first, an honorable decision to be sure.
Do you work in private equity or something where you buy out businesses and run them?
I'm technically a type 3, but an idiot one that wasted a lot of time chasing sexy ideas with no connection real-world problems. Trying to get better now.
I have some cash cows. I buy tech businesses and streamline the business side.
> but an idiot one that wasted a lot of time chasing sexy ideas with no connection real-world problems
I hope you aren’t beating yourself up for this — that’s the kool-aid that is being served, and your path is very common.
The cool thing is that you probably developed some useful knowledge and skills along the way.
For full disclosure, I “wasted” a lot of time in my former career as a research professor. I’m glad I did it. It helped me grow as a person. It gave me opportunities to learn important things that I did not know. It was where I needed to be for that part of my life.
That said, although it’s time I won’t get back, I’m very happy about the path I’m on, and I’m not sure a younger me could have navigated this path as successfully.
> How did you get the initial capital to buy businesses, just from your savings as a research professor?
Much like Andrew Wilkinson, I started an agency. Agencies are great cash cows.
In retrospect, I could have just started with savings (I had enough). It probably would have added stress I wasn’t looking for.
That said, the agency was and is still great cash flow. It’s also a useful business space for learning how to build a business that (mostly) runs itself.
Successful tech agencies that have been started by people I know:
- programming
- digital marketing
- social media
- web development
- SEO
- data science
- AI (this is emerging)
The agency is a business that goes to other businesses and offers to solve one or more of their business problems for a fee. Sometimes these fees are one-time payments, sometimes they are recurring, sometimes both. I recommend having recurring payments being baked into your agency model.
It’s a relatively easy way to get “ramen profitable” (or more!) along with some money to invest.
would you consider a small saas product in this realm? that is, is there a clear distinction for what could be considered an agency vs a saas product? or is the line blurred in some contexts?
Yeah. If you have a SaaS that has product-market fit, you are way ahead of the game.
Cash cows don’t have to be agencies, but agencies are easier to spin up than a SaaS.
In terms of nomenclature in general, productized consulting is a thing. Whether you can spin a healthy amount of recurring revenue from it depends on the SaaS product.
Great question, and I thought about mentioning Sam specifically.
First, these nice little boxes I made are somewhat arbitrary and imperfect. That said, they have a use.
Sam is currently a 3 imho, but he has enough tech chops to be able to work with 2s effectively. I think any sufficiently large tech company, especially if the tech is complex and/or consumer-oriented, needs at least one 2 and one 3. OAI is a great example of this.
I’m pretty sure Sam can’t do any of the AI work on his own, but he knows enough (or learned enough) to be able to empathize with the AI leads, clear roadblocks for them, and otherwise support their work in an effective manner.
How would you go about moving from Group 1 to Group 2? As a mostly technical person, I'm not allergic to the business side of things, but I kind of don't even know where to begin. I understand the product side of things reasonably well, but things like LLCs, accounting, finding lawyers, figuring out how to hire marketing people etc. are pretty opaque to me
> As a mostly technical person, I'm not allergic to the business side of things, but I kind of don't even know where to begin.
I’m kind of biased. I think b2b sales experience selling anything is a great way to learn core business skills — things like finding the true business problem (it’s rarely what your customers say), navigating the gatekeepers and decision makers, negotiations, etc.
As I have said elsewhere, starting a small agency is a good way to start. If you know some 1s, figure out ways to do sales and business operations for them. Many 1s are terrible at sales and hate the scut work of business operations. Just make sure to charge enough so that you can pay them well and pay yourself enough to be worth your time. The key is learning how to add value above and beyond supplying access tech talent.
Note that this is not easy. There is a lot of suck in sales (and agency management), and there is a reasons sales people make a lot of money. But if you can’t do this, you probably shouldn’t start your own business. Running a business is a lot of dealing with day-to-day suck and embracing it.
> LLCs
This is a one-day or less research project.
> accounting
Word of mouth in your area. Possibly online if you’re in the US. Also possible in a day (or maybe 8 hours across a few days).
> finding lawyers
Same as accountants. The good ones will jump out at you by the way their clients talk about them with effusive praise and specific examples.
> figuring out how to hire marketing people
Ahh… now this is a tough one.
The short answer is that you have to be the 3 in marketing — that is, you need to know enough to hire and work with specialists who aren’t willing or able to do the business or tech work on their own, and you need to know enough not to be bamboozled by the charlatans (and there are a lot of charlatans in marketing/sales).
At early stages of a business, you should probably do it yourself, and you have to be good enough to do that. A 70% effort is usually enough to get a solid business revamp off the ground. This is all learnable.
Once you hit growth and revenue, you can hire an agency. The best agencies will not try to milk you, since they have enough business. Pro tip — don’t be an agency’s smallest client.
If you are savvy, you will ask around for folks who have had good marketing people, and you will get to know these folks. Tap them and/or their network when you need people.
A lot could be written about this, but I will just say that learning marketing has a huge roi, and having access to a good network of marketers also has a huge roi. Communities like the Dynamite Circle or Hampton are low key ways to help develop these networks.
This is what I constantly tell my students: The hard part about doing a tech product for the most part isn't the what beginners think makes tech hard — the hard part is wrangling systemic complexity in a good, sustainable and reliable way.
Many non-tech people e.g. look at programmers and think the hard part is knowing what this garble of weird text means. But this is the easy part. And if you are a person who would think it is hard, you probably don't know about all the demons out there that will come to haunt you if you don't build a foundation that helps you actively keeping them away.
I love the way you put this. It also doubles as a great explanation for why programmers shouldn't be worried that ChatGPT is going to steal their jobs: ChatGPT is good at the garble of weird text, but it's terrible at the "wrangling systemic complexity in a good, sustainable and reliable way" piece.
I think ChatGPT will eventually be good at the garble of weird text. It's immensely helpful already but you really must be checking up on what it is telling you. Plausible but non-existent or incorrectly used APIs are routine still. I definitely bet on it eventually getting there though.
You know what computers couldn’t do 10 years ago? Understand and write coherent code. Why do you feel confident in your opinion that they won’t be able to do that in the next 10 years?
2) a strong history of understanding the limits of functional automation (why are there still project managers? Asana exists!)
3) an understanding that progress will slow in this space considerably once we have made the big wins and the hype cycle dies down. (see also; every tech hype cycle)
I go the exact opposite way on number 3. It seems more likely to me this follows the growth trend of the internet, mobile phones and computer graphics than blockchain and VR. 10 more year of growth like the last would be pretty wild to experience.
"Grog, 10 years ago in 30,000 BC, we didn't even have wheels. We've gone from no wheel, to wheel, in only 10 years. What makes you so sure that self-driving cars aren't just around the corner?"
What we describe as common sense isn't actually common. That is, over-hyped things like microservice architectures saturate the Internet. Since content of the Internet is generally what will become content for LLMs etc it stands to reason they'll be similarly biased towards hype.
Yes, it's certainly possible for content to be curated and models to become biased in other ways but...
If they can "wrangle systemic complexity in a good, sustainable and reliable way" then I think that's AGI. If we hit AGI we'll have plenty of other things to worry about beyond being able to make a living as programmers.
I don’t know, I’ve mostly followed this approach over my 20 year career, but it really depends on your surroundings, and honestly hasn’t led to great success.
E.g. If you’re surrounded by yes men who will code whatever without question, product people greatly prefer that, and you end up sidelined.
There’s also plenty of companies who don’t want engineers getting involved with decisions, and product and UX people work upfront and in isolation until you’re handed tiny Jira tickets with Figma mockups attached. Discussion at that point is considered “disruptive“.
It honestly seems like this has gotten worse in the past 5 to 10 years.
> E.g. If you’re surrounded by yes men who will code whatever without question, product people greatly prefer that, and you end up sidelined.
I'm amazed at how non-obvious this seems to most engineers and how often this angst gets repeated in online tech communities. I mean, when I was in academia there was a tension between publishing impactful results or cozying up with the right professors into the right conferences vs outputting meaningful work (pressures into p-hacking or having big names author suspicious results is par for the course.) In industry it's the tension between product folks and engineers. Have you ever talked to high-level finance folks who deal with the tension of product folks just wanting to do things and finance folks who remind them how money works?
It turns out that the hardest thing about getting things done with people is... dealing with people. I wish there was a way to remove this weird somewhat-ascetic blockage found in tech communities about this. Many of the more physical engineering occupations have to deal with this in the form of contractors and supervisors. Wait until you have to work on a government contract lol.
When I mentor junior engineers with these feelings, I like to use an adage: "Where there are people there are politics." Look at pretty much any prominent FOSS project and you'll see tons of it (by dint of transparency) and those folks generally focus on the project and not a product!
I can see this in academia, because you're working on reputation as much as anything, if not more so, sorta prone to being like this in a way.
Finance however, not once[0] have I either observed nor heard of someone working in finance being overruled by a product person. If finance says no go its no go, simple as that. People tend to listen to the money folks, even at a high-level.
[0]: I work both in fintech and have lots of professional colleagues that work at other financial firms from big banks to all manner of investment firms and much in-between, as well as several generations of family who have all worked in finance on various levels. Honestly, its high level finance people trying to pressure others into getting things done faster when they want something done, not the other way around.
> Finance however, not once[0] have I either observed nor heard of someone working in finance being overruled by a product person. If finance says no go its no go, simple as that. People tend to listen to the money folks, even at a high-level.
Totally, but finance people want to see the company succeed too, and even if finance says it's a no-go, product people will still keep trying to push around them. I just mean that this tension exists between different stakeholders in every organization. If we knew ways out of this, we'd revolutionize government bureaucracies, vastly increase firm efficiencies, sort out FOSS issues, the world would be our oyster! But human coordination problems are really hard. The hardest problems out there really. That's my general point. Too much airtime is given to tech people who seem to not understand this. It's a bit like complaining that when I jump I fall down. I also can't imagine spending 20 years bemoaning this aspect of human nature.
The real human element that I've observed, having been both in management and as an IC, and more broadly from research I've done as a whole, is that ENG is often the profit driver but has the least amount of say in their own workload.
I think this is where the tension comes from in the lasting, I'm still complaining about 20 years later sorta thing. Once you realize the value you are delivering to the company, naturally, you start to want to have some more say over the value chain, I think this is innante to human behavior, but there is alot of gates between ENG and the rest of the org, most of the time, from what I've observed.
Look at, for example, how "Agile" is implemented at a company. It focuses on ENG having to address stakeholders, without really saying that ENG should be its own stakeholder too. With SCRUM and other systems, the emphasis tends to be on outside stakeholders and what they want, rather than bringing ENG to parity with other stakeholders so everyone has more equal input on the work streams - which ultimately, when this is actually done, prevents more problems than it creates, nearly every time - yet you can feel the resistance in most orgs to giving ENG a full table stake
> note, this good engineering advice but bad career advice: "yes" is magic word for more shiney rock and put in charge of large tribe of developer
> sad but true: learn "yes" then learn blame other grugs when fail, ideal career advice
> but grug must to grug be true, and "no" is magic grug word. Hard say at first, especially if you nice grug and don't like disappoint people (many such grugs!) but easier over time even though shiney rock pile not as high as might otherwise be
> is ok: how many shiney rock grug really need anyway?
It has, because embracing agile as it was laid out in 12 principles put too much power in these "technical" people by giving them a stake at the table, to anyone who doesn't work in an ENG first / ENG focused company.
If you look at how "Agile" is implemented in most organizations - even in technology companies! - there's alot of barrier process put up to sideline / minimize engineering input by focusing on stakeholders where stakeholder is defined by everyone telling engineering what to do as opposed to engineering being seen as a valid and reasonable stakeholder too.
I think its because in part there is a linear pipeline that the non technical business side sees as how things go: you plan X, it gets designed by Y, and then "manufactured" by engineers, if you will.
Engineers - good ones, in my estimation - want more stake in each step, both in planning and design, because often its engineers that work on the system the closest (you'd be shocked how many designers don't use their own products on a daily basis, same goes for alot of business oriented folks) and this is not "the way the world works".
So let others add ideas to the backlog and the product owners triage? I would be worried about ideas getting drowned, leading to a disincentive in participation. I would probably add a layer of voting or something to allow good ideas to surface.
I meant that product still writes the high level user stories, but eng figures out the solution along side UX, product, etc. Not handed broken down tasks and mockups first.
Kind of, and it usually works. Even as a founder you can trick yourself into doing things that way. I've found that 20/80, Pareto style, is even better. 20% of the features can achieve 80% of the sales, and you'll be a lot happier if you're not constantly chasing the long tail.
You do 80% of the functionality with 20% of the required code and pretend that this is what the project manager asked for. Likely they'll never notice the missing bits which may have seemed like a good idea at the time .If they insist you do 80% of what remains with another 20% of the code.
But with some luck your project managers' butterfly mind will have flitted on to greener pastures and everybody is happy. No need for Grug to reach for his club (while remaining calm).
80% of the features/details for 20% of the code/complexity. Even minor tweaks can have an outsized effect on the final code. A large part of my job is doing this in such a way that satisfies the stakeholders.
To rephrase your point with tongue-firmly-in-cheek: "many technical people look at products and think the hard part is wrangling systemic complexity in a good, sustainable and reliable way" but in reality, that's not the hard part.
If your product is successful enough that systemic complexity is your chief problem, congratulations, you've made it further than most startups - which die from lack of demand, lack of paying customers, and lack of users giving feedback.
>This is what I constantly tell my students: The hard part about doing a tech >product for the most part isn't the what beginners think makes tech hard — the >hard part is wrangling systemic complexity in a good, sustainable and reliable >way.
I teach the same thing, seemingly every day to my teams. It doesn't work, until it works reliably, within reason.
High-5 from the doers to the teachers! (Both are needed)
For the record, my partner teaches at a major university, just not tech. ;)
The business degree kids with an idea need to realize the tech cofounders can learn and understand business.
Having an idea is like having a thought.
A startup needs product and distribution. If a tech cofounder builds what’s asked of him and the sales cofounder can’t sell, should the ownership revert to the tech cofounder?
I mean, this is largely true in software engineering in general. Programming is easy. Perhaps being an excellent programmer is much harder but for many things being mediocre is good enough.
The hard part is building things sustainably at scale (people wise or performance wise). That's when a combination of knowing how to manage systemic complexity and knowing how to communicate very well (soft skills) really come into play.
IMHO the hard part with a startup is you don't want to build something that works sustainably at scale. You want to build something that could plausibly morph into something that is sustainable at scale.
I've started to look at scaling like you're killing a golden-egg-laying goose but there's a 1 in n chance that it'll pay off for you. n starts higher than you'd hope and rises as you make tradeoffs.
I've been thinking about scaling a bit because I've been digging into a large SaaS product for a client and find I am able to replicate their locally relevant output at a fraction of the cost. Scaling up has allowed this SaaS to serve an entire country but a majority of their user base think in terms of one or two local counties. Consuming their output means subsidizing work they do that's irrelevant to (or might actually compete with) your own interests.
There is a weird local optimisation problem where being an excellent programmer can make one a bad software engineer. (Another: unparalleledly excellent Excel skills making one a worse financier.)
I've seen this so many times in my career. It happens because interviews (especially at the junior level) focus almost exclusively on line-by-line programming acumen. People who excel at those interviews don't always make great software engineers, and sometimes they make terrible ones.
suppose you need to either be in the top percentile of handsome and the top percentile of emotionally aware to get a job as a hollywood actor, but these attributes are uncorrelated in the general population, so 99% of top-percentile-of-handsome people will be top-percentile-of-sensitive and vice versa
then the pool of hollywood actors you observe will contain, out of every 199 people, 99 who are top-percentile-of-handsome but not of sensitivity, 99 who are top-percentile-of-sensitive but not of handsomeness, and 1 who is both
someone observing this result but not understanding the process that led up to it might think that emotional sensitivity makes you ugly or that being handsome makes you emotionally oblivious, even though (by hypothesis) the traits are uncorrelated. in fact, this negative correlation in the selected group can survive even a fair bit of positive correlation between the traits in the general population
similarly, it's easier to get a programming job if you have a history of delivering successful products, or if you have a lot of line-by-line coding acumen
This is what I always say. In college/studying you learn programming, CS, algorithms etc. Once you're a software engineer, you realize that programming, CS, algorithms etc are the easiest part of your job. If the code is too hard for you you're most definitely losing on other things. It sounds very obvious, but think about it, part of being a good software engineer is that programming should be trivial.
depends on what part of "doing a tech product" you're talking about
> the hard part is wrangling systemic complexity in a good, sustainable and reliable way
in an early startup, this thinking is one of the most common ways to failure. people optimise their technology for its scalability, reliability, and "cleanliness", when none of that matters yet. all that matters is finding product market fit
I like Michael's take that the real value in a founder is their ability to recruit the right team. What I don't think was said explicitly here is that typically technical people are progressively marginalized as the business grows. We get some harrowing stories where that doesn't happen, but I don't think that's the standard story. Like they allude to, it's a story of what the people who handle the money and investments value.
Context: Michael is a non-technical founder from Justin.tv and Twitch.
Typically stories I hear where technical people maintained equity it was through a lot of maneuvering. It wasn't given to them by the merits of their accomplishments.
> typically technical people are progressively marginalized as the business grows
I know three YC technical co-founders who were ousted by their CEOs, and a justintv alumn who got nothing from the follow-on exits. When YC says “you need a technical co-founder” they mean it like you need a disposable lawyer. The essay here is about targeting growth and flipping, not high-performance teamwork.
This does seem to be the pattern. I was a technical cofounder in one startup (not YC), even though I do have the chops and experience as a startup CEO. You have to focus so much on the tech and tech hiring early on that you are left out of a lot of the deal making and fund raising. It seems to slide you over into the same bucket as early employees pretty quickly.
Hmmm, an extremely interesting thought! Basically, agentifying might be the next programming.
Do you have a guess how that would play out or how likely that might be? It seems like the main blocker here would be if the agents remain relatively weak in pure reasoning.
I have no clue how it will play out, but Autogen looks like it's going down the right path + has MS behind it.
I am able to get some pretty nice ideas out of LLMs by gaslighting them into larping as tenured professors at <insert good university for subject here>.
I haven't really tested yet if using actual people's names helps or hurts.
Having started a small business I respect greatly the skills of great sales people and fund raisers and people who are great with people. But I don't respect them when they think they can start a business where they don't take what they actually make seriously and think the product will just work its self out if they sell hard enough.
>> History has shown them to be right.
>> There are many terrible products in this world that were successful only because of good sales and marketing. And vice versa.
Just because technologists have been marginalized, abused, and extracted from successfully thru history -- does not mean it should be accepted and it does not mean I want that for myself or my technical friends.
This doesn't track for me. I saw a Tesla dealership and supercharging station in my city before ever seeing an advert for Tesla. That's why Tesla was successful where others weren't.
The fundamental core engineering -- the motors, the inverters, the control systems, battery management in their cars are pretty damn fantastic and they were consistently ahead of most others. And the Model S, while a dubious luxury car in terms of fit and finish, was a piece of amazing engineering when it came out.
The Model 3 and its variants I think are meh from a UX POV (stupid centre iPad distracto-slab etc) and I won't pay for them because of who is behind them... and the lies about full self driving, and the crap support etc... suck.... but I think it's disingenuous to call Tesla product crap.
Most religions spread virally, which means the marketers are the customers, which is usually a testament to the product/service being one that customers value. I say this as an atheist who's not a fan of religion, but people clearly get a lot out of it, or at least believe they do.
Probably neither. People like to belong to a group where they feel they "belong" and that in itself is sufficient explanation for the spread of religions IMO.
Propagation of societal values and/or fear of hell and/or fear of death assuaged by the assurance of an afterlife and/or being able to rationalize away the vagaries of nature as the will of god(s) are just optimizations after the core system was already invented.
There is a place for religion. Something that pushes you to be better than you are. Along with the happiness and fulfillment that comes from that effort. Selflessness, love, compassion, truth.
Plenty of bad religions telling you that you are perfect the way that you are. Just give me money, fame, or influence and I will flatter you and pump your ego.
Another form of this is flattery in exchange for hating something. Many doomsday cults fit this category. All your life problems are because of 'insert target X'. But I, I have the answers you need.
Religion is more attuned with purpose, where your heart is, than the belief in God. Though the two are often paired.
There are plenty of things that deliver the above without the dogmatic slaughter of hundreds of millions of humans throughout history and at this very moment.
There's also plenty of religious people who have never murdered anyone in their lives, and there have been plenty of dogmatic massacres for reasons entirely unrelated to religion. The two issues seem to be quite uncorrelated tbh.
Religion requires belief without evidence. (Or flimsy evidence like ancient testimony.) It's uniquely positioned as a tool to manipulate people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do.
Windows (especially v3.1, Windows 95 and Windows XP) was leaps and bounds better than its contemporaries when it came to normal desktop use. You can have the most technologically advanced OS in the world but if it is too difficult to use for 99% of potential users then it it not a good product. Microsoft was one of the first few companies to really get this right.
Yeah, perhaps I should have said MSDOS. But even still, I think perhaps your rose-colored hindsight is probably miscoloring your memory. The initial releases of Windows was a nightmare, with Bill's mom consoling him after a particularly disasterous demo, and if it wasn't on the back of the brilliant--or lucky--marketing maneuverings that cemented MSDOS as the preeminent PC OS at the time, I firmly believe that Windows would not have become the preeminent desktop OS powerhouse that it is today.
In fact, I think that behind the scenes of the ominous MS investment in Apple (with the whole big-brotheresque Bill Gates appearance) there was an explicit--business, not technical--agreement between Gates and Jobs that Apple would not venture out of their own hardware, specifically to allow Windows to continue its PC dominance.
Meh. Was early Windows (and/or MSDOS) perfect? Obviously not. Was it better than its competitors? Yes. Absolutely. Compared to what we have today they were all shit tbh and MSDOS was better than most.
Don't get me wrong, the marketing game of early MS was absolutely phenomenal. I just want to say that they succeeded to the degree they did because BOTH marketing AND the tech were good.
In am not in Sales but I imagine good at Sales overlaps alot with good at product design/ownership. They are talking to the customer alot. Both the ones who
buy a competing product and also buy the one being sold. They probably have done
some account management so they know the concerns with onboarding and getting value from the product.
Corollary: you do not need a non-technical co-founder.
My advice to engineers is that it's nearly always easier to learn business/sales than to learn to like a co-founder, especially the type generally drawn to being a "business" founder.
It is good to have a co-founder in general though, get one of those if you can. Just don't worry about finding complementary skills, bias entirely towards someone you can work with.
Second this. I worked in Sales Engineering for 5 years, ended that career selling a $25MM solution to the CEO of a fortune 100. There is no secret sauce, and it is all learnable. The key skills are interpersonal. I know its hard to do as an engineer, but most of (enterprise) sales is shutting the F up, listening, carefully listening, earning trust, and learning to navigate stakeholders and what their potential incentives are to help you.
I think sometimes the salary market would disagree with that.
At many companies a sales engineer can make more money than a developer.
Personally I think it’s too nuanced a question to answer generally. Depending on who it is and the context “the right” person in either role can make all the difference.
To put some context here, SEs often make so much because of commissions, not due to some crazy salary.
Commission based sales seem like a good thing -- it is pay to perform. "Business co-founders" are not the same thing as SEs, because "Business co-founders" are often paid upfront (via equity) for the future promise of performing. That is not a setup with good alignment of interests.
Engineers do very well in Leadership/Management/Marketing/Sales/etc. which i consider ancillary domains in the Tech. Industry.
The reason is that Engineering is primarily quantitative and hence Engineers are taught to breakdown their Problems into smaller pieces and solve them one-by-one by using constraining/limiting abstractions so that each piece can be solved and then integrated into a whole.
In Non-Engineering fields this problem-solving approach is never taught and enforced. Most parameters are nebulous/qualitative/interlinked and more heuristics/opinion based with the result that they never learn to break a problem into manageable pieces and solve them one by one.
I would say the reason is actually that teaching engineering requires first teaching a good deal of math and software development, which most marketers don't have (though well-educated ones may have some). Teaching marketing doesn't have as many dependencies that are rare in the general population.
Absolutely true. Of course, a non-technical cofounder probably knows more than just marketing. He may add a lot of value in terms of fundraising, product management, and other areas. Teaching all of these things to an engineer wouldn't be trivial.
Nonetheless, I think most business functions are more societally established, and for that reason they can be more easily outsourced.
You can find a "pre-packaged" MBA, attorney, etc. because society is very good at churning out those roles. Just go the most recently graduated Wharton batch and hire the top grad for $300k, and you have someone who can do your legal, fundraising, operations, etc.
It's much harder to find someone with unique technical insight and the ability to deliver, which is the true value of a good "engineer".
This is like saying you can go hire the top graduate of your local bootcamp and they can be a decent tech lead. Experience matters for legal and business roles just as much for engineering, much as we devs like to pretend otherwise.
Sounds like a chicken-and-egg problem: how do you get the $300k to pay this Wharton grad? (And BTW, trusting a Wharton grad with legal work is a very bad idea — bschool teaches networking, not legal skills. Even a law school graduate would not be prepared to be the lawyer at a startup — 2+ years of relevant legal experience would be required.)
This sounds like a typical engineer's summary. It is a dismissal - just like the video talks about tech being dismissed.
Recruiting a co-founder is not "just sales". The video is taking about an archetypical salesperson who still can't buy a tech guy (maybe their sales skills are not so good).
> My advice to engineers is that it's nearly always easier to learn business/sales
Technical people mispredict the value of a business co-founder in a similar way to how this video talks about tech co-founders being misvalued. Cue jokes about sales-droids. But there is a mirror between businessy people undervaluing tech and tech undervaluing business.
A key point of the video is recruiting (albeit a form of sales): it is hard to sell "adventure" and belief.
We see this every time an engineer tries to shift to a managerial rôle and fails. In theory business skills can be learnt, in practice it is hard and perhaps easier to co-found with someone with the skills already. There are risks, but if you can't judge ability and integrity then you're already hosed.
The best example I can think of who cogently explains how they learnt is Jim Keller - talking about how he changed AMD.
I generally agree but if you're developing a product for a niche industry and that non-technical co-founder has a shit ton of insight and connections, it will 1000% open doors. Then again, perhaps you can partner with those folks in other ways vs giving away 50% equity.
By that logic the person with that domain knowledge can partner with technical folks for less than 50% equity. Which is what normally happens in my experience
I'm currently the technical guy and would love to learn how to also be the business guy - what do I need to do to develop those skills?
Getting your hands dirty is the best way to learn anyhting, so with technical topics, especially programming, I would just dive into projects and start coding, building things, and that's how I learned. In terms of business skills, what projects can I realistically undertake on my own that would help me develop those skills? Should I start a low-stakes business selling soap on Etsy or something? Is that adequate? Completely different ballgame from the corporate startup world - but would any of the skills from such a humble venture transfer to the larger stakes ones?
How might a technical guy become the business guy?
You become a business guy the same way you became a technical guy!
Don't waste time selling soap though (unless you really love soap) - my best advice is to try to sell something you've made. It could be your time (as a consultant), or it could be a product.
I would suggest waiting to develop these skills until you know what product you want to bring to market as an entrepreneur. No sense in learning B2C growth hacking when you end up in enterprise sales (or vice-versa).
Let's just say - there are some critical things you have to be good enough at and those correlate with commonly observed corporate structures. Some degree of Sales, Marketing, Legal, Security, R & D, and Finance competencies need to exist across the founders. Sometimes one person can do it, but they also need to know how and when to bring in experts if they are lucky enough to need to scale up.
On a very basic level, not having a cofounder in any capacity can create a structural bottleneck when two important things have to happen at the same time. A trusted second party provides resiliency.
This is more likely to be true where you are selling to other technical people. But it becomes much less likely to be true when you are selling B2C, or to non-technical businesspeople. And of course, the ability of a technical person to learn sales varies quite a bit. Some technical folks pick it up easily, but others do not (or find important non-technical bits like fundraising and sales to be very distasteful/annoying).
And of course the reverse is true. Some "business people" can pick up a huge amount about UX, client priorities, process automation and what is and isn't technically possible and make useful product management contributions even if they never touch the codebase, and some simply aren't interested in that level of implementation detail even if they're really good at selling the big picture and someone really needs to get a handle on that side of the business.
Disagree, and I say this as a technical founder with no cofounder. Once things start to take off, a majority of the things you deal with are non-technical. There’s so much that goes into building a company, and you really need someone who understands how businesses work and can run G2M.
Sure, you can hire for it… but you’ll almost never find someone as invested in it as the founder, and it’s just as important as the product.
I'm the technical co-founder and my co-founder non-technical; he's brought in so many soft skills around process, finance, sales, recruiting, etc.. that I would have (and would still) struggle at to replace.
He's also a domain expert in our field so for me it was definitely the right choice to make.
he doesn't sound nontechnical if he's a domain expert in your field, but presumably he would be even better if he also had whatever technical skills you're saying he lacks, not worse
what i was saying wasn't either of those, but it's closer to the former: some technical people have a proper superset of the skills of some nontechnical people, because that's kind of the definition of “technical people”
while it is true that nobody is both as good at soccer as lionel messi and as good at programming as jeff dean, you can definitely be good enough at everything to start a company. and lots of people are bad at everything. everyone starts out bad at everything
being bad at programming or biology or whatever the relevant technical field is doesn't make someone good at management or bizdev
so don't look for nontechnical cofounders
just look for cofounders who don't have to be technical
Agreed, I think it depends on the technical complexity of the product & model.
Declaring it an absolute requirement feels a bit like an exclusive club without real merit or consideration. I say this as a former exec at a YC company founded by a pair of eng degrees that couldn't build a thing (not even a prototype).
I have made this mistake exactly twice in my career and the simplest advice I have... I won't categorically say that you should never accept "a lower salary right now but when we bring in investment/sales we'll bump it" because, well, sometimes there are companies/projects/founders that you meet and truly believe in and want to be a part of their team. But... the absolutely critical piece of it is to get in writing:
- what the triggering events are (investment, revenue thresholds, etc), and make sure to include "hiring other team members for similar roles at higher salaries" as one of the triggers
- what the salary bump will be
- whether or not there will be retroactive compensation included
The first time around I ended up leaving the role before any of the usual triggers would have been activated. Management was toxic, salaries sucked, morale was in the shitter anyway. The second time around I discovered after tendering my resignation that someone who reported to me was making $40k/yr more than I was. It would have been an amicable parting (I was moving on to something that was much better aligned with my interests) but it got pretty sour when I found that out. I got asked a couple times to come back to consult on a few projects and the rate I quoted them (and they begrudgingly accepted) was steep.
Fair point. The risks are huge. Makes sense if you've got 30% of the cap table. The risk is worth it. Esp if you are founder and on the board directing the company and fending off risks.
Not sure it makes sense if you've got 0.5% equity.
Definitely does not make sense if you are being given X,000 shares and have no access to the cap table.
Any engineer who thinks they can value a fraction with a numerator and no denominator is fooling themselves.
Startup employees -- if you were given 50,000 shares but told you arent allowed to see the cap table, please UPVOTE/DOWNVOTE accordingly if you think the pay-cut to market was worth the money you got at the IPO.
I am developer who spend 2 decades developing things. First decade it was hardware and now I moved to software. I can always guess which idea from “idea person” will work and which is not technically feasible. In my limited experience the “idea persons” are not really listening why stuff does not work. Sometimes simple laws of physics are ignored.
>> If the founders you need cost you 75% of your equity and you make a unicorn.... Were they worth it? Who cares. You got your fuck you money.
How many times does it end at the technologist owning 25%? I've seen tons of friends swindled and ending up with nothing and successive rounds of business hires walk away with the value.
The inverse side of this is, that depending on the business, you may need another type of co-founder as well. Two technical co-founders aren't the right fit for every business.
When I met my current cofounder he was paying $5,000/month to a dev agency in Eastern Europe that was ripping him off with slow progress, inflated hours, and very poor quality code. Their developer was brand new to the tech stack and made many glaring mistakes. As a non-technical founder he had no way to judge the quality of their work, he was completely at their mercy and they took advantage of him.
I do not know how non-technical cofounders expect to avoid this type of situation.
The skill here though is the general skill of hiring people
to do a job you can’t do yourself. This is a very useful life skill. Have you ever hired an electrician or builder? It is like that.
So if you hire a company to build something think of a way to keep them in check. You could hire an independent person to review their work (like hiring a seperate project manager and architect to work with the builder)
Or you learn the trade a bit and ask lots of hard questions. That fly by night outfit would crumble on asking basic questions because they are not cut out for it. Their happy paths is suckers. As a coder I got sucked into cheap labour coders and never again. Too much skummy stuff going on.
For sure. I'm a non-technical startup CEO but did two years of CS in college. Also, my product is on the simple side, from a technical perspective. These two facts have definitely helped as I've overseen dev work and brainstormed new product ideas. If you've never done any coding, it's hard to know what is relatively easy versus relatively hard. I'm still not perfect, but at least I don't make the completely uninformed mistakes that I would make if I'd not done a little 'hello world'-ing of my own.
I'd like add to this conversation this two other important facts:
1) you (or your partner) do need domain experience and expertise. If you want open a bakery, or even try to automate a bakery, you really need at least some commercial baking experience. I see so many folks pitching a product in an area where they have zero experience.
2) you (or your partner) do need some organizational and/or business management experience. Business-whether it is software, hardware, or selling bakegoods-is about working with people and working with money. Learn about it and do some of it before starting uour own company.
>> 1) you (or your partner) do need domain experience and expertise. If you want open a bakery, or even try to automate a bakery, you really need at least some commercial baking experience. I see so many folks pitching a product in an area where they have zero experience.
I'd love to deep-dive into your example. Lets say this is the case.
Suppose you are the technical co-founder coding for 80hrs/wk. Does the baker also work 80hrs/wk? Can you just hire a baker as a consultant for 5hrs/month? Is that worth giving away 50% of the quity? Are they just providing some domain expertise you can buy a la carte, or are they bring in sales and critical relationships? Are they just another baker, or President of the National Baker's Association who will get you front-row exposure to thousands of bakers?
I agree with the discussion that this isnt typical for programmers (employees) but I think for founders it is very different. A successful founder has to put in so much. Even when you arent working, you are often working -- that might mean lunch with a potential investor gatekeeper or a soft pitch to a prior colleague who might refer you to a client. Or working the room at a conference. Or speaking to a lawyer on the phone even when you're at the playground with your children...because otherwise you might lose some critical client sale in the redlining process.
I dont think I've ever worked as much as when I was a founder. There is also the sheer leverage you have over the business and outcome. Every hour invested can mean so much.
The inverse is also true. As a technical founder, and maybe even an introvert like me, you should definitely look for a non-technical co-founder who can help you with networking, etc... I found my dream co-founder through YC Co-founder match and what can I say, it's going great. We're focusing on enterprise GraphQL/API solutions (https://wundergraph.com) and I benefit from the networking and communication abilities of Stefan, while I answer all technical questions. Tldr, I highly recommend to team up with people who complement your skills.
I think this trope of 'technical people = awkward introvertive nerd' is becoming less and less true. The normies have learned our craft, and they're not necessarily worse at it.
Honest question: Why can't this person be employee #(single digit), SVP of sales or something, hired during product development? Why the need to elevate to co-founder? Does an introverted technical founder really need an extraverted non-tech networking expert from day one?
When you build a startup, you have to go through so much crap, a lot of people wouldn't do that for money. But there's another aspect. Early on in the startup life, sales is not just about selling but "exploring". You have to learn about the market, what people want, what your ICP is, how to target them, etc... Does an employee care enough? Do you really want to put this responsibility into someone else's hands? I'd say no.
You hit the nail on the head with complimentary piece - and extending that to personality as well.
You need a mix of technical skills (engineering, product, marketing, etc) but also personalities (which manifest in different behaviors which are all useful & compliment each other - eg bias for action and hitting targets vs careful analysis).
I'm very strong in logical analysis and strategic thinking. My problem though is that I have a natural tendency to not talk to people. Ask me a question and I'm happy to answer, but I don't like to initiate conversations. Stefan is the opposite. Everybody loves him. He can talk to everyone and he's very creative in finding leads and building connections with other companies. But he's a really bad developer. Together, we're a really strong team. I'd say without him, I would still not have a strong network.
This is generally true. I had a technical cofounder for the first 4 years or so, but once our tools were built it was less clear what his ongoing role would be.
This is because at that point, our focus turned to licensing our (patented) technology to businesses. We still have B2C customers who use the tools that he originally built (and which have been updated by contractors after he left), but now the vast majority of our revenue comes from our B2B licensing.
We are pretty unique in this regard, since most startups aren't able to generate much revenue from licensing in this way. Specifically, when we work with our licensees, we provide a JS library that they plug into their own platform. We don't need engineers to do integration work, or provide support.
My technical cofounder provided a lot of value in getting us to where we are, for sure. But needing a technical cofounder to launch doesn't necessarily mean you need one all the way along.
The clients don't want us mucking around in their code, which is why they have their devs do the work. There are some cases where having a dev on our end could help unblock their devs, but these are pretty rare cases. In general, it's very easy for folks to use our tech, and I'm able (thanks to a couple years of CS back in the day) to help out with the vast majority of questions that come up.
In terms of changes, there aren't any material changes. We've had licensees up and running for 7 years without changing any code.
Usually a company with software need to develop new features, reengineering to reduce infrastructure costs and improving performance bottlenecks, maintenance, etc. Do not you have that in your company? And if you do, who is leading those initiatives?
We are not innovating on the core product, which has remained static for many years. Instead, we are pushing adoption through our licensing partnerships. We now have over 250k students using our reading tech through education platforms that we work with. Building more of these partnerships, based on the data we have gathered from our existing partners, is the focus.
Sounds like at that point you're not really a tech company. Your tech might as well be some off-the-shelf stuff as far as you're concerned, if you're not actually working on it any more.
Interesting perspective! So if Dolby had stopped making new versions of its technology and just licensed what it had until people stopped buying it, then it wouldn't have been a tech company? What kind of company would it have been?
A sound company, or whatever the technology in question does? If you're in a position where it's viable to not be making new versions of your tech then presumably that means you're in a field that's at least somewhat mature as its own thing. I think there's a temptation to equate "on computers" with "tech" whereas for a lot of fields doing it on computers is pretty much commodified now.
In our case, we're growing via adoption of our first generation core product. I could definitely make a second version, but it wouldn't help overcome the primary challenge we face with adoption, which is that the technology looks unconventional, and isn't well-enough known yet. Making a more complicated version wouldn't help with this, and might not even improve the efficacy. It would also require internationalization, whereas our current version is language agnostic.
So it's not that we won't ever create a newer version, just that it's not the primary focus.
I mean not all businesses need to thrive. If the thing generates significant profits for a while then the founder can retire and either sell it or just let it die. If it's not a publicly-traded company there's no fiduciary duty to do anything more than that.
If we were riding on momentum I would expect our revenue to be stable/shrinking, not growing (as it is). I agree that in the long term this is true, but when you start as a tiny speck, you can grow for a long time as awareness spreads. For example, we started our in education and are now getting interest from news/media organizations. This is without changing the core functionality at all.
>> My technical cofounder provided a lot of value in getting us to where we are, for sure. But needing a technical cofounder to launch doesn't necessarily mean you need one all the way along.
This is a good point, but it should be clear that you would not have gotten to this point w/o the technical co-founder.
The problem is that once you get to this point, less than honest non-technical people seek to marginalize and eventually consume the equity/payout of the technical co-founder that often took the original risk.
It is critical that technical co-founders maintain equity and FIGHT hard for what they have earned and enabled, do a fair extent of the value they added.
What so the person who "provided a lot of value in getting us to where we are" got ditched in the end? Is that your story? Use people and then chuck them to the curb once everything u need has been extracted?
Absolutely not — he vested founder's shares just like me. And then I continued to work with no salary and no additional vesting for years after that. Also, I was working full-time while he was working nights/weekends.
I assumed he got some $$$ - but did he want to be removed or did you tell him he was no longer needed? Was he just as sure that he was no longer needed as u were?
>> What so the person who "provided a lot of value in getting us to where we are" got ditched in the end? Is that your story? Use people and then chuck them to the curb once everything u need has been extracted?
Technologists beware -- some business co-founders will treat you honestly and you'll be paid fairly. And some will not. You need to read this comment and realize that both outcomes are possibles, especially once lawyers, VCs, and other business people get into the mix.
> especially once lawyers, VCs, and other business people get into the mix.
This is unfortunately true, since the VCs are only interested in the forward-looking value of the enterprise. They would prefer to dilute other shareholders (including founders — and especially former founders) to maximize future fundraising. And lawyers, of course, are happy to tell the VCs how to do this, regardless of what protections were put in place initially.
Maybe. Those posts offer preposterously low equity, so I wonder whom it is supposed to attract. Suckers?
Y Combinator sincerely wants people to succeed, I don’t think it’s reactionary or myopic like that.
That said, to fill whatever hundreds of spots nowadays, they’ve exhausted Math 55, it graduates all of 12 people every year.
They’re dipping into a far greater supply of nepo babies than ever before. Those jagoffs can’t do anything - not programming, let alone sales - so whom is this advice really for? Those companies will “succeed” anyway, I mean they won’t fail. You can make a ton of money as a technical cofounder, but for the minimally intellectually stimulating problems of some moron's meaningless app, for that moron to get all the glory? Just to polish life off by marrying your subordinate and sending the kids to Day School? And shoveling all that money right back into meaningless angel investments?
This is a stylized comment of course, but it's just to say, yeah, you need a technical co-founder, really easy for Y Combinator to say. I too would like extremely talented people to give everything and take nothing.
Do you mean the “founding engineer” jobs? It can be misleading, but those are not founder roles. They are regular employee roles where the “founding” part of the title is just an honorary indication that the person joined the company early.
YC won’t count someone as a founder unless they have at least 10% equity in the company. Founding engineers are typically getting 2% or less (from what I understand).
Founding Engineer = Engineer making under-market salary for tiny sliver of equity who can be laid off anytime because the company is fledgling, works 70hrs a week, puts in major % of work a founder would contribute, but has little upside.
To be honest, for someone who cant land market salaries (e.g. non typical background), who finds a good team, this might be a good opportunity.
I'm a technical founder working in a deep-tech startup.
If I am completely honest, I think the recommendation of having a technical cofounder while useful for startups in the past might not be as useful for the startups of the future.
Why? I strongly believe AI will cause a paradigm shift, and I'll adventure stating that AI will make non-technical people be able to do more and more with less. Which will make the requirements for differentiation in the tech side even harder to accomplish (very few people reaching the god-tech realms), but at the same time it would make the bases reachable for almost anyone. Basically, a more polarized order where less people will have access to "technical founders" that can differentiate themselves enough outside of the AI realms.
In my experience, usually the problem with a non-technical person isn't that they can't implement their ideas. It's that even if they could, their ideas are unworkable for a hundred reasons that they can't begin to understand. So why would the outcome be any different with AI? Even if the AI is a super-intelligent system designer and tells them all the flaws with their thinking, they'll tell the AI to shut up and get to work just as they'd do with a software engineer.
I actually think that for the foreseeable future, the opposite is more likely. A technical person will be required to get good technical results out of AI, whereas a lot of the key growth-related grunt-work that a good non-technical founder takes on will become easier and easier for a skilled engineer to automate.
Interesting. If I put it in other words, the argumentation is that AI will just propel the already existing qualities of the people. And because people are different (and the distribution of intellectual qualities remains constant as we grow), the AI will not make any difference on that point.
I'd agree on that.
However, let's imagine the scenario of two people have the similar qualities, with one main difference between them: one have worked longer on those than the other (but their "base" is the same). Do you think AI will propel them at the same speed? (or said in other way: where will be the biggest delta on speed between their pre-AI and post-AI versions?)
I think the key factor is how difficult it is to specify what you want in detail, since this is still going to be necessary with AI. If you can't clearly express what the AI should do, you won't get good results.
I'd say it would be much easier for a technical founder to write a detailed spec for the work that a typical non-technical founder does than the reverse.
Having used LLMs to solve tech problems, I would not trust the current state, or even GPT5, to reliably solve anything other than the most trivial of trivialities.
Is the idea that in 2025, AWS will have an AI console where a non-technical founder types in what they want their site to do, and the LLM takes care of the rest? Register domains, build out the database/backend/auth/frontend, etc.?
I really can't see it happening in 2025, or 2035, without some pretty big leaps forward, the kinds of leaps that may never be possible.
"Is the idea that in 2025, AWS will have an AI console where a non-technical founder types in what they want their site to do, and the LLM takes care of the rest? Register domains, build out the database/backend/auth/frontend, etc.?"
Even when this AI exists, the non-technical founder will ask it for the wrong things.
LOL? Why do we even need the business co-founder? Let the LLM create the idea also and keep 100% percent of the equity for the FAANGs that created the LLM
IMO the problem is defining oneself as non-technical. Anyone can learn any topic if willing and with necessary resources. Some people make it part of their identity that they wont learn certain skills.
Tech is nowadays like literacy. Imagine a person saying I am not literate, instead of trying to learn to read and write, at least to a degree.
I think it is a status problem. Some people think of management as higher status than operational roles, and they do not want to be seen doing the low-status tasks. While it can pay well, tech seems for the general population as respectable as a mechanic or a chef, but not as a lawyer or a doctor (generalizing too much to try to get the point accross)
On another note, sql was supposedly intended to be used by "business people" but developers are instead the ones using it. In general, a business type wants to loosely specify the needs and get some body worry about the details.
I am talking here about the typical archetypes. Of course the best business people are not afraid of digging into details and learning, but for the average ones I found some generalizations apply.
AI usage is trending up. I don't see any signs of deceleration in our company.
Right now is mostly trivial, but as AI is able to get more context on the space, it will go up.
I foresee AIs learning from the code of your repo, your language, your dependencies... and most importantly, your competitors (if they have open-source code of course).
The more context, the better it will get, the faster you will iterate and the bigger you may get.
This is dated. There's no rules to founding your own company.
As a non-technical founder I can
A) Get a technical cofounder which takes me weeks to find, dilutes my ownership, and with whom I have no recourse if their work is sub-par (or we end up just not liking/trusting/vibing with each other)
or
B) Build an MVP with any number of offshoring partners in a matter of weeks and for far cheaper (money, time, opportunity cost). If I don't like the work, we can modify the contract, or I can quickly pivot to another team.
This is also true for technical founders as well, to be clear. You can probably do a lot of the business stuff by outsourcing. You can worry about gelling a team once you've got to 1.
Heh, good luck. As a tech cofounder, I attempted to do just this and I have extensive development and management experience. It was a nightmare, EVERY SINGLE offshoring company tried to play us as a group that didn't know their stuff, and when put to the iron they couldn't produce anything that would stand up--technically--against a mild sneeze.
If I hadn't been there, my other founders would have gotten up to their eyeballs in offshore dev debt and would have a giant hairball that even the most experienced tech people would be unable or unwilling to make additional progress against once the offshore team stops delivering.
So, good luck trying to lead an offshore team that's only interested in absorbing as much money from you as possible before moving onto the next sucker. If you don't think a tech cofounder is worth their ask, then you deserve to get exactly what you pay for.
Sorry you've had those experiences, but mine have been consistently profitable and pleasant. I think a big part of that was that I asked around before I selected an offshore partner, instead of just choosing the cheapest or the first.
I'm not the GP, but I know many of the tricks to watch out for:
- Offshore partner delivers software, but you dont have any code. Successive rounds of updates become more expensive. You cant walk away because you have none of the code. (Business co-founder has no idea and goes to new partner with binaries expecting updates to be delivered, then gets told they need to start from scratch)
- Offshore partner delivers software and code, but not the code corresponding to the software. You try to switch partners, but realize you start from zero, because you dont have the code
- Offshore partner delivers software and correct code, but only for the app/UI. Only they retain code for the backend.
- Offshre partner delivers code for UI and backend, but not the right code, UI is secretly pointing to a different backend with different code
- Offshore partner delivers correct code all around, but only they have the build scripts, dependencies, and cloud images required to run it.
- Offshore partner delivers everything, but only they have the data required to start up the system. New partner spends as much time figuring things out and eventually wants to re-code the whole system.
For each of the above, business co-founder goes thru the rounds two or three times. Each time, they spend 20 or 30k and each time they walk away with binaries they cant do much with. Eventually they give up, or find a technical co-founder.
whoa. these are obvious in retrospect (they're the same ftbfs and saas tricks debian spends most of its time fighting) but i wouldn't have thought to expect them in this context. thank you
to get from zero to one, which i think is what you're referring to with your 'once you've got to 1' line at the end, you need to first find a market that's at zero; a product/service that doesn't exist. but that isn't enough; then you have to take it to one, a product that does exist. there are three piles here:
1. product categories that are technically feasible and profitable and where products already exist;
2. product categories that are technically feasible and profitable and where no products already exist;
3. product categories that are not technically feasible, so no products already exist.
anyone can tell the difference between pile 1 and piles 2 and 3. but you need a technical cofounder to be able to distinguish between pile 2, which is very small, and pile 3, which is enormous. and that's not something you do once; it's an ongoing process that happens at many levels of detail in your product, and even at the largest scale it's a gradual process of reduction of uncertainty, because you don't really know that something is technically possible until it's been done
then, you need to actually build the first product in that category, which involves identifying, prioritizing, and mitigating the risks that could destroy it. probably in banking a lot of this is things like regulators, market moves, and bank runs, but in companies built on software, a lot of those risks are software risks, and you need technical acumen to do this
as a nontechnical cofounder, what value are you bringing to the table? your family's money? invest in a vc fund, or start one, though without technical cofounders you'll waste all your money on companies in pile 3. your business knowledge? that's worthwhile in some cases. your leadership and management skills? likewise. but you're going to have to offer convincing evidence of something like this to be a good option for anyone to invest their money in
> you need a technical cofounder to be able to distinguish between pile 2, which is very small, and pile 3, which is enormous
Huh? A technical cofounder doesn't have any sort of monopoly on feasibility, and there's dozens of ways to understand opportunity space, PMF, and all the many other key considerations early-on.
As a nontechnical cofounder, what I bring to the table is enough wisdom and experience to get to a stage where I do need a CTO and technical team.
> technical cofounder doesn't have any sort of monopoly on feasibility,
it's hard to tell what you're trying to say here, but people with the technical understanding of a field do in fact have a 'monopoly' on understanding what is and isn't technically feasible in that field, to the extent that anyone understands it at all
for some products they also have a 'monopoly' on understanding what products there's a market for in the field. if you're developing a new kind of swiss lathe, your customers are going to buy it, or not, in large part based on technical features like mrr, repeatability, and cycle time. if you don't understand the technical field, not only won't you understand what is technically feasible, you won't understand your product's value proposition. this obviously doesn't apply to mass-market products
in a gold rush, though, selling shovels to gold miners is more reliably profitable than mining gold
Nothing you just described requires an entanglement with full-time technical cofounder. I could get a ROM estimate on, say, your lathe from a product design/engineering firm for a few thousand bucks, use that as PRD + go/no-go, then take it to prototype/evt/dvt/pvt with any number of experienced partners on contract.
Don't know why we're having this argument. Outsourcing is a very common thing.
Honestly as a technical guy: You come off as greedy.
As a technical founder, I face the EXACT same risks. What if the business guy can't drum up money? What if he can't sell the damn pen.
Most companies fail, the strongest firms will have strong business and technical people.
If you want to stand on one leg. Go for it. You'll piss your money away overseas. When you need someone to help you get across that line... there is nobody at your side.
Founding a successful company is hard. You will face days where you don't have the answer. Things will happen that are outside your experience... and yes, you can buy, buy, buy your way there... but remember, you are buying mercs. I've been a merc. Win or lose... I get paid, so, yes sir. How high sir?
Rework is just more money.
... You sure you want to be on the other side of the table from someone like me, without someone like me at your side?
Because all those off-shore firms... are more merc than I am.
I just mitigate as much risk as I can, as early as I can, and it's worked so far. Tech is littered with hundreds of companies that died because of personality conflicts - which can be readily mitigated with an MSA and SOW.
As I note in my original comment, my approach can absolutely be utilized by technical founders.
No contract can save you from what you don't know, and don't understand.
Different points of view, if they can stay respectful. Can be a great strength.
I see the world in terms of risk. If X will help me derisk something. Even if it isn't totally EV+ it can be a good play, because risk of ruin is real. Especially with large amounts of money, and small numbers of trials.
25% less to have a 10% better chance at making 75m vs 100m? Probably worth it a that level. Because 75m or 100m is life changing money for 99.99% of people at least. The amount won't matter as much as your chance of getting to it.
For many (most?) startups, for many (most?) MVPs, in many (most?) domains -- yes, with a million caveats -- the "non-technical cofounder" can likely figure it out what's needed to hack together a simple product, get a handful of real users using it, and then go from there.
In my case, all I had done was make HTML/CSS websites with a bit of PHP. But I didn't let "I need a technical cofounder" and "I'm just the business guy" stop me from figuring out how to build v0.1 myself and get it out. I had never touched a server before. I had never built a web app with a MVC stack before. I had zero experience with command-line prior. I didn't have any formal technical training. But I just started coding and built it myself, and from there was able to attract a great technical cofounder and early team. And 10 years later, we sold it for $100M.
I'm not saying this to brag. I'm proud that "I figured it out" with duct tape but I realize that I had the good luck that it all worked out.
But I worry that other guys like I was are sitting there thinking 'Shit, everyone says I need a technical cofounder'. Well, maybe not. Go try to build it yourself. Especially in the age of co-pilot and decades of StackOverflow - for most apps, you can figure it out.
No one take this the wrong way. I'm just trying to potentially inspire some bright person out there to try it themselves, and building the first simple version yourself might be the missing step in attracting a REAL technical person or at least validate your hypothesis.
Can I offer intravenous DMT, ketamine or at least psilocybin (in various frameworks) for a technical co-founder, especially in such fields as bio/neurotech, AIxchemistryxhardware, as this may necessitate from the methodology of quantum mechanics?
How about a non idiot business and accounting savvy co founder with a great vision and a solid product idea with a firm understanding why previous attempts failed, but also with the maturity to admit when they were wrong about their calls? Loool
As someone who would be interested in being a technical co-founder (complete with my own seed money), I wonder if when they say technical co-founder, they mean programmer who can build a MVP or someone who can build a technical team and help solve technical problems.
those companies will happily outsource the development of their core competitive advantages to another company who does appreciate its value; they will then sell it to their competitors
I think the amount of technical expertise needed varies by field. I work in a small biotech startup. In this space, you aren't going to get anywhere without deep technical knowledge.
The original title on this (which was there when I started this post) was infuriating - but it is still bad.
Is it speaking to the 'true' co-founder who is above the technical one? Maybe the other co-founder who is an 'idea innovator' could up-skill a little and stop pretending that you can build a business by putting on a power suit and making presentations with upturned hands and studied pauses?
That's explainable, Dunning-Kruger effect. Whole custom development industry is based on it. Otherwise it will never exist as there are whole agencies with 20-30 year history that never seen a tiny bit of what they produced working in production: everything is a throwaway paid for by these would-be founders.
It's like clouds: AWS exists because enough stupid people don't understand available hosting options and can't make simple cost calculations.
This will never change simply because no one makes money if it does. If those people started looking for a tech-cofounder, then two options:
- they never find one, thus give up on the idea, the money they spend/waste on it will never be spent, thus GDP from this final consumption (which nearly all of custom development is: final consumption, a hobby), will not be created.
- they find someone who will pretend or will falsely believe to be technical. essentially same guy as the original one. and he will waste some time and money with freelancers, become convinced they are all fraud (because this is what happens when you ask for idiotic stuff to be built on impossible budgets - everyone except scammers, decline), then hire some agencies, and waste some money on them, aaaaand it's gone!
How do you explain to people who are not capable of starting a business, that they shouldn't start one?
Bigger question: WHY would you do it? Why not just benefit from them?
I love getting approached by friends and family and having to do my best to gently let them down on their “million dollar ideas” they “need my help building”.
It’s not that they are all bad ideas. I just stopped putting any value at all in “ideas” a while ago. Ideas are a dime a dozen, even trillion dollar ideas. (Here’s an idea, lets invent teleportation, it took me ~3 seconds to come up with a trillion dollar idea!)
I think there are three things that matter so much more than the idea. Team, execution, and traction.
You need the right team, and putting together the right team is the most difficult thing to do, because a good startup team needs to be able to cover the largest amount of surface area in terms of “stuff we can do ourselves”. There’s a lot of different “departments” in a company, and at the early stage it’s the founders covering all of them. If you want me to play Frontend Dev, DBA, Product Manager, Architect, Backend Dev, Tech support, and Tech recruiter I’m ok with that so long as you can play Accountant, Fundraiser, Spokesperson, Secretary, Lawyer, and customer support.
You also need execution. I won’t say the execution has to be great across the board, but ideally it’ll be great in a few core areas key to your idea (I.e. your special sauce), while being “good enough” across all the “departments” you juggle to convince people you know what your doing. This is where I think lots of people fail. People have this false notion that they can do the things they are most comfortable/good at and somebody else will soon come along to handle the other stuff. (Well we can just hire somebody for that they say — with what money I ask?) Execution means understanding that no job is below you because at the end of the day it is solely on you if it gets done or not and oftentimes there is nobody else to do it. The monthly update emails don’t get sent unless you send em. The employees don’t get paid unless you pay em. (They tend to get bitchy about that if you forget to do it on time too.) The product doesn’t get built unless you build it, and the customers don’t get acquired unless you acquire them.
That brings me to the last thing, which is traction. If I had a dollar for every-time someone has tried to get me to go in on building their “New take on social media, it’ll be the next big thing!” I’d probably be able to self-fund my next venture by now. If you have “the best thing ever” but nobody’s using it, it isn’t “the best thing ever”. It’s kind of like Schrödinger's cat. Your product is both the best thing ever, and a piece of garbage until somebody opens the box and uses it, upon which you find out which it is. You don’t need traction at first but eventually you need traction or your venture will become a exercise in masochism as you slowly slide towards bankruptcy trying to get enough traction to save you the company from entering a death spiral.
A tale as old as time. Gotta love the classic spin on the same trope of “the C suite drives the sales tho” to justify their insane salaries and bonuses. like they’d have anything to sell in the first place.
I’m not diminishing the effort and skill necessary to be a good salesperson. I am, however, commenting on how often that turns into engineers being kept “in the back” when the paperwork starts.
That may be more of a personality conflict. There's no more important choice than who you co-found with, and both parties should have high regard for each other's value to the business.
Of course that’s how it _should_ be. After working at enough startups in very early and/or founder roles, I can tell you it’s more common than not to get treated like a second class citizen when the “business” dinners come.
It's interesting, how all this stuff is written for the biz-bros, too -- try doing a google search on how to find a non-technical cofounder. Like, say you're an eng, with a technical idea you think would make the foundation of a good startup, and you're looking for someone to "found" the PM/marketing/bizdev side of things. From what I can see, the content/advice doesn't exist, even via YCombinator.
why would you want a nontechnical cofounder to do the pm/marketing/bizdev side of things? a nontechnical person might be able to do those things, but technical ignorance or incompetence are not necessary for them, and aren't even assets; they're just less serious drawbacks there than elsewhere
you might genuinely need some nontechnical people in your startup, but if you have some money you can always pay people to come be part of a focus group or user test when that's necessary
to correct your error: nontechnical skills like marketing, grit, forgiveness, and negotiation are far more critical to business success than any technical skill
you are the third person here to incorrectly attribute to me an undervaluing of non-tech skills, but that's on you three, not me; you're just pattern-matching what i said to some kind of stereotype and guessing what kinds of opinions i might hold on questions i haven't talked about. it's as if i had advocated abortion rights and you attacked me for advocating gun control
but i'm not in favor of gun control, and i value non-tech skills very highly. you guessed wrong, and you should be ashamed of yourself for falling into fox-news-style stereotype-based reasoning instead of thinking about what i actually said
the particular communication skill i need in this case is the skill to avoid communicating with people who will ignore what i actually said and substitute something they would prefer to argue with
Wow - that's an irrelevant tangent. HN guidelines are to avoid flamebait and politics.
> why would you want a nontechnical cofounder to do the pm/marketing/bizdev side of things?
This is what my comment relates to. It seems to me that you are dismissing the potential value of a non-tech co-founder. A co-founder is not telling the dev what to do. Partners whos skills complement each other. I helped co-found a successful business with 4 founders: 1 sales, 1 BA, and 2 dev - although we were all tech types with far wider skills than the stereotypes of the labels I used suggest.
To be clear: some people don't need a non-tech co-founder, but I have seen devs try to start businesses where I felt the devs would have done better partnering up with non-dev co-founders. Also if one can't sell a business to a high-value co-founder, then my guess is one likely lacks the skills to be successful.
> case is the skill to avoid communicating with people who will ignore what i actually said and substitute something they would prefer to argue with
I am replying because I felt you ignored what I said, and you substituted something you preferred to argue with.
I'm not trying to change your mind - I'm just trying to explain how your comments come across to me - it is about me not you. I'm not trolling to make you angry - HN is not for that and why waste your time or mine. All good.
you guessed how highly i valued non-technical skills, based on literally zero information. i explained how highly i actually value non-technical skills, which is utterly contrary to your guess. you maintain you 'made no error', which i suppose means that you believe your initial baseless guess was correct, and i'm either mistaken or lying about my own beliefs
and somehow you think i'm the condescending and rude one?
my initial comment didn't even say how highly i value technical skills; it only said that the sign of the value i assign to technical skills is positive rather than negative—in the context of looking for a cofounder (as opposed to certain other contexts, such as finding user testing subjects, where the sign might be negative)
i explained that, by answering my comment in the way you did, you are engaging in the same kind of flamebait and politics that kills rational discussion around topics like abortion rights and gun control. (please stop doing that and respond to what i actually wrote.)
in response, you're implicitly claiming that i'm the one who's bringing in the flamebait and politics?
i don't know what you expect to achieve with this kind of darvo bullshit
no reasonable person could claim that when i say 'nontechnical skills like marketing, grit, forgiveness, and negotiation are far more critical to business success than any technical skill' i am 'dismissing the potential value of a non-tech co-founder'
but you did make that claim
what i'm dismissing, as i've explained at exhaustive and exhausting length, is the idea that they're valuable because of their lack of technical skills, rather than despite it (and because of their other skills, which, as i explained repeatedly, are even more crucial to business success)
yes. why would you want the three people doing those three specialized full-time roles to be nontechnical?
it seems to me that, given a nontechnical person who's good at one or more of those roles, they'd obviously be even better at it if they also understood the technology. ignorance and incompetence are weaknesses, not strengths
as for having some money, the context of this discussion is startups with angel or vc funding, which is plenty for focus groups and some user tests
Because good luck finding those three roles where they’re from a technical background?
I’ve worked with a grand total of one PM who was from a technical background. He was actually a great engineer but he was absolutely the exception to the rule.
Sure, if you can flesh your team out with entirely technical people filling those roles, great for you, but that’s like asking why you wouldn’t only hire 10x engineers. Well of course if you could find and hire only 10x engineers you would, but it doesn’t work like that. Especially considering those are all industry positions that are typically taken by people who never went into technical roles.
right, so people who are looking for a cofounder to fill those roles aren't looking for a nontechnical cofounder; they're looking for a cofounder. they may have to accept a nontechnical cofounder, but that's not what they're looking for. that's why there's no advice to be found on finding a nontechnical cofounder
i feel that my first comment in this thread already explained this with perfect clarity and you've just been trolling
Might I suggest not being "just a programmer" then?
In a startup it's extremely important for founders to wear many hats and share many burdens.
If you're the person that just goes off into a cave and emerges with beautiful code 6 weeks later and then expects everything to be great - you're wrong. There's a massive amount of foundational work to do to support a startup that technical people don't even think about.
As someone who's rarely been "just a programmer" or "just a designer," that hasn't stopped me from being viewed as such by managers if it's convenient for them to mentally classify me as such.
If that's happening then you're not really a cofounder - you're acting like an employee.
If you're a cofounder you do not have a manager...
Starting a company requires a diverse set of skills, almost none of which are technical. A technical person can excel at those tasks, but they have to have the desire to figure out what needs to be done before asking what needs to be done.
The point is you can act like whatever you want, and so can everybody else, and often that means they'll be idiots, often in consequential ways. That's life.
The point is if you act like an employee, you will be treated as an employee.
Starting a company is not easy. If you stand around and only do tech, then you're not a founder, you are an employee. If you have to ask "what needs to be done next?" you are not a founder, you are an employee.
If you call someone your manager, then you are an employee.
Can’t be bothered to watch the whole video at work so I apologize if this is in TFV.
If you can’t find one technically minded person who believes enough in your vision to drop everything and help you make it, that is not a good sign for your vision.
The video goes into why that's the wrong mindset. If you're looking for people who "believe in your vision", there's a good chance you're looking for an employee, not a cofounder. Strong candidates have their own vision, and strong teams build something out of everyone's vision.
It can still be the case that one person has an awesome idea that everybody else in the company signs off on. But chances are, everybody on the team is going to have to make some room for other people's ideas and takes on things.
That's why the willingness of a software developer to drop everything to work with you might not necessarily signal anything wrong with your vision.
If you can't find a single software developer who believes in your plan for better APIs or project management tools or consumer internet apps, it's a pretty good heuristic that your vision or ability to sell it sucks, or that you add less value than the dozen other people that talked to them about chatbots for X this week. Any prospective technical co-founder has a huge amount of insight into those markets. On the other hand, unwillingness of software developers to believe that the dullest sounding CRUD app going will be very exciting to grey suited men controlling a little known niche (probably precisely because hardly anyone's writing software for it) doesn't actually mean there isn't a market there.
Your product could be boring and useless except to a niche audience, but still a great business opportunity. In that case, people will only work on it for the money, and that is fine. Some ideas are simply harder to sell to potential employees:
“We’re making the world a better place through paxos algorithms for consensus protocols.”
“We’re making the world a better place though software defined data centers for cloud computing.”
“We’re making the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between end points.”
“We’re making the world a better place through scalable, fault tolerant distributed databases with acid transactions.”
Yeah, I think the big difference is that devs might actually [be the only people to] think those sound like interesting problems to work on, whereas making the world a better place through [equivalent jargon in niche logistics/tax/pensions etc] only excites a small number of people who aren't devs, especially if it's not that much of a technical challenge and the hypothetical moat is just sales and business logic. Which leaves money, and unless the founder with the business model hires rather than looking for tech cofounders, it's really only a possibility of future money for working unpaid on something they don't understand on offer...
I don't think it's about the audience, but the company type. If someone is starting (random example) a food company based on their superior hot-sauce recipe and existing retail relationships, they probably don't need a technical co-founder. If someone is starting a company that "uses AI" to craft and target hot sauce recommendations, but doens't really know what that means and assumes they can get a shop to code them an app, that's going to be a problem. I think the latter case is what this is usually about. Many (most) business owners don't have technical co-founders and are fine, not so in tech.
In your first hot-sauce recipe example, that person IS the technical founder. Just technical in the field relevant to the business, which happens to not be tech.
The scenario in tech is more often comparable to some dude saying "I want to make a business selling the greatest hot sauce ever" and then having to go looking for someone who actually knows anything about hot sauce.
I think the idea that the person with the specialised knowledge of how to make hot sauce is the technical founder is an interesting point, but I think in YC/HN contexts it's usually considered to mean "engineer"; even in cases like accounting software where the founder who doesn't write software's specialised knowledge of the field is at least as critical as their partner's ability to convert that to code, the latter founder is the only "technical" one. Although tbh I don't think accountants or lawyers get offended by the insinuation they're the "non-technical founder".
This is going to age as well as supermarket cheddar. In a year the
explosion of nocode and AI driven tools will allow lots of non-technical founders to build great startups. Especially the X for Y ones. No you can’t build a Google, Instagram or Dropbox that way but you can build
a business to the point where you can hire a CTO. You can get started without a tech cofounder for many things. All the Uber for X type stuff like Airbnb or that YC one with cleaners for hire a while back are examples.
> In a year the explosion of nocode and AI driven tools will allow lots of non-technical founders to build great startups.
Corollary: In two years of time, the inflation of No/Low Code + AI startups will lead to massive competition, and only those who has an actual technical cofounder will survive.
For tech companies yes. A lot of startups aren’t really tech companies but “we use tech” companies. Those will buy off the shelf solutions from the tech startups
or from big tech.
This mindset that technical cofounders are essentially “coders” (a term I hate) is very prevalent among inexperienced nontechnical founders. I know I’m preaching to the choir here but a lot of technical people have deep industry/business/product knowledge and have social skills. It is very frustrating when some Ivy League 25 year old PM/management consultant tries to pitch you on their vision while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of.