Start trying to do the technical work yourself. Contract out particular bits if you need to. A poorly coded and shitty prototype that fits what you want is massively better than a polished application that isn't what you want.
I can hear the "But, but, but..." Wait and hear me out.
There is nothing to give you appreciation for what a technical person brings than trying to walk a mile in their shoes. There is nothing more frustrating than a non-technical cofounder who underestimates what technical work requires. And honestly, the stereotype of "non-technical founder needs technical co-founder" is some asshat with no real clue who will make their partner miserable. Besides, there is a huge imbalance of supply and demand.
But potential technical co-founders are much more receptive to, "Non-technical founder needs technical founder to help turn crappy prototype into product. The idea is good, but I know how much I need your help."
Why are technical people more receptive to that?
- The fact that there is a prototype makes it much more likely that the idea isn't just vague handwaving.
- The non-technical co-founder is willing to put elbow grease in.
- The non-technical co-founder's humility is going to limit unreasonable demands.
So willingness to begin the work yourself makes you MORE attractive.
This is great advice, and I'd generalize it the other way too. Ideally you want both founders to be willing to do whatever the highest value work is regardless of how closely it matches their skills. We often put technical skills on a pedestal because there's a high bar just to get started, but often times building the next feature is not the most important thing you can do. Most people rationalize doing what they feel competent at, versus sober thinking about what is really needed and figuring out a way to do it well enough to get to the next stage. Eventually you can and should hire people do these things, but in the earliest stage having one or two brains fully dedicated to figuring out the repeatable business loop end-to-end gives you dramatically more agility and opportunity for insight than limiting yourself to well-defined roles and expertise.
I was told that the crux of being a founder is to be prepared to do everything yourself at least somewhat, and delegate because you don't have time to do everything rather than because you can't.
> "Non-technical founder needs technical founder to help turn crappy prototype into product. The idea is good, but I know how much I need your help."
Not all technical co-founders want to hear that. I see tons of inquiries that say something like "turn prototype into product", and that activates a lot of likely-seeming guesses about their product thinking, tech debt burden, and how they see the technical co-founder or first hire... and none of them are positives.
I want a non-technical co-founder to have skill and appreciation for: domain, product, business, and fund-raising. That's a ton of work and skills to develop, I know I don't understand all of it, and probably there are entire abilities some individuals have that I don't even know exist. And they should know that I'll bring a comparable pile of abilities and appreciation of difficulty, including some things overlapping with theirs, some things they don't understand, and some things they don't even know are things.
(I'm sure there are technical co-founders who see the role differently, and maybe more like a junior programmer hired to grind code and knock off sprint tasks, but that's not the holistic technical co-founder role that I see.)
Indeed. I understand how difficult it would be for a non-technical person to achieve that, but it could pay-off. I once worked with a sales guy, who owned a consulting business and planned to launch a SaaS. He coded a first version himself, using PHP, and began offering it free of charge as part of the courses he sold. His code was a complete mess, but the software he built significantly improved his chances to attract a technical person and establish a successful partnership, for both sides.
As an engineer and ex startup founder, I recommend only partnering with someone technical and being very careful when doing so. Have a very high bar for who you choose to work with.
YC largely only invests in companies with technical founders. The biggest red flag is a non technical founder hiring you as an employee rather than a founder (when nothing has been built or launched yet) or asking for an unequal equity split with zero lines of code written. Such people proposing these unfair arrangements are not trustworthy.
Remember, it is easier for a technical founder to learn business skills than a non technical founder to learn coding.
For a pure tech company this might be good advice, but lots of startups require domain expertise from very early on even if that means partnering with a nontechnical founder. E.g., my background is in insurance, I've seen lots of insurtech startups founded by engineers without insurance backgrounds, and in my experience they don't tend to be successful.
In an ideal world you'd want every founder to have background in the relevant industry and strong business sense and the ability to build the product, but being strict about all of those criteria would result in a lot of false negatives.
as an engineer who actually launched a YC company, I can say that this is not true and prevents engineers from being good cofounders. The fact is, unless you are the 0.1% of engineers who can create truly novel products, our skills are largely commoditized. I was doing well as an engineer at google, but the product I was building could be replicated by engineers out of India / China etc. Having a co-founder who could actually build relationships, have good product vision, and most importantly SELL were crucial. Don't have the hubris that OP mentioned above - it's a surefire way to fail.
This also jives with my experience as a technical founder.
I have built systems from the ground up used by big corps. I've worked for a YC startup. I've built systems from the ground up at other VC-backed startups. I've built my own systems from the ground up. I'm building two right now (https://turas.app is one).
Except for the rare cases where you have something that's an instant hit, doing anything that's B2B SaaS is incredibly difficult without warm intros. Even getting calls to talk to potential customers in some spaces is difficult without the right network or know how to get connected to that network.
Having done this a few times now, it is more clear to me what I want from a non-technical co-founder:
- Be a domain subject matter expert. Most interesting problems require understanding some process or flow of information, documents, money, etc.
- Already identified and quantified the price for removing some friction or cost from that process/flow.
- Have high level industry connections (C-level, VPs, IT decision makers). If you're building B2B SaaS, being connected to the people that will actually make the decisions will make your life a lot easier.
- OR have proven track record of marketing. Consumer and e-commerce are really, really hard spaces. You really need to know what you're doing with marketing and social media. Managing those is a full-time job and as a founding/sole engineer, it's a poor use of time.
- Already have letter of intent to buy or other commitment to pay for a product that solves some problem if B2B. One startup I joined, the co-founder had sold the product as a set of requirements. The enterprise customer was so excited for the solution, they paid for a pilot based solely on the requirements.
None of these things require technical background or hamfisting a no-code solution.
Did your company work out? I understand and agree that a million engineers could build a product. But, many good engineers could also go work at Google et al. As a nascent company without a product, you have very little leverage. As an engineer, why would I want to build this thing for you so that you can go enrich yourself? If your product honestly could be built by people in China / India, then absolutely do that. Don't even bother with a technical co-founder, why would you?
obviously, the split should be 50 / 50. I'm trying counteract this narrative on hacker news that if you're technical, you're the star of the show. The fact is both the technical and non-technical founders are equally important. Don't have the hubris that you can do it all, unless you are truly exceptional.
Oh, I see. Totally agree. Knowing what users actually need and knowing how to sell it to them is the most valuable thing in an early stage company. Way more valuable than engineering talent.
I do agree with you. I wouldn't recommend engineers without product vision to start a company either.
Starting a successful company is hard. It's not just about coding things. That said, you can find technical founders who are good at both product and coding.
I would even argue that 0.1% engineering skills aren't needed, although engineers in this top echelon are more likely to have the general fluid intelligence needed to succeed.
The Steve Jobs archetype is an anomaly in a world where success itself is already one. Ultimately, there is no hubris, the real barometer is market success. Build something people want (and as a corollary / table stakes, have the skills needed to do so).
> Having a co-founder who could actually build relationships, have good product vision, and most importantly SELL were crucial.
I agree with you. I made my attempt at founding a company without a co-founder possessing such "soft skills", and I believe failed primarily because of that.
However, I still see a risk for technical co-founders there: the ability to establish connections, sell and leverage a valuable network has to be made clear before a partnership can be established.
I shut down my company a few months before the peak of the startup frenzy in my country. Suddenly, lots of people wanted to leave their jobs, found a startup and "build a platform".
They were extremely passionate and optimistic about their ideas -- often something along the lines of "It's like <popular product> but focused on <nonsensical niche>"; ideas apparently inspired by some "how to build your startup" content farm article or social media influencers' BS.
But they brought essentially nothing to the table. No money, no useful expertise, no network they could leverage. Heck, some were not even willing to leave their jobs and dedicate themselves exclusively to the new company. They just had a ton of naive optimism and overconfidence.
And I've met a handful of young fellows swallowing the bait, lured by the dream of owning their very own company, picking their preferred tech-stack and doing things The Right Way.
I think many of these people are behaving in good faith. They just have no idea exactly how useless they are when it comes to building something from nothing.
When you only have "an" idea it is not much. Once you start building it you find out that there is a whole continuum of things it could do, and then how to take advantage of the synergies you find.
Once you build something then it is easier to build something else, but you don't really know that until you build that first thing. A single idea is not very valuable, the implementation is because it typically it has to consists of many ideas.
You’re absolutely right. If I can develop it as an engineer, I can also sell it alone. I don’t need a dead weight called “business guy”. Of course exemptions exist, I know wealth people with rolodex full of very useful contacts. I might team up.
Only once I got to the end of the piece did I realize a big problem with it...
> When people share equity in a business, it’s like getting married [...]. Date first. See if there are a couple of projects you can work on before jumping in. Offer to pay them something for these, even if it isn’t full market rate.
I think this is getting the dynamic wrong, or at least suboptimal. IMHO, you both should be going into it as equal partners, not one paying the other.
> But if this is someone you just met, you should stay in control with more than 50% of the shares.
Both cofounders should get sufficiently comfortable before committing, and ideally both should see it as equal risk and contributions. Or don't pretend it's a partnership.
> It’s a bit like the product and company is a racecar. The technical founder builds the car, but the CEO drives it. Both are important, but you can often find other car builders once the car is running (to mangle my metaphor a bit).
Or, a whole lot of people can think they could drive a racecar, but a relative few can build a racecar, and the latter is harder to fake. (Sure you want to use the racecar metaphor here?)
Before that bit, I was thinking maybe I was picking up on small oopses in the writing, and the writer actually did intend an equal partnership. But this really does sound like the writer is speaking to someone who thinks of the company as only theirs, and the technical cofounder is an underling and a necessary evil. And further, the technical cofounder is someone who could be discarded once they've served their funding bootstrapping purpose.
Rather than feeding the ego of a solo founder who wants to play the big chief, I hope this implies forming a cofounder team with equal equity.
Nontechnical founders can't be "idea guys", robotic people managers, or too precious to whatever needs doing. They have to be hustlers first, connected, and making fat stacks with potential customers, partners, and the media. And then, with the other founders, responsible for everything that needs doing and prioritizing in the midst of ambiguity. Always be "parkouring" up the market from one meeting or customer to the next while building product just in time.
Technical cofounders need social skills, resourcefulness, and a hint of business acumen. It's never enough to only be technical. UX, design, FE, BE, ops, budgeting, audit/regulations/compliance/security, disaster recovery/business continuity, technical mentoring, and long-term roadmapping are all important areas to address. Initially, there will be a great deal of dev pain due to a lack of common platform services and tooling. It's important that a technical leader be able to eventually scale up a team that can establish (build or buy) standard practices and tools, divide responsibilities, and delegate.
When in doubt, work with someone you already know and trust because too many people don't or can't act cool when real money appears. There's no magic formula, but there are other cool kids with that twinkle in their eye out there. Honesty and obsessive workaholism seem to help.
" most of the folks I’ve talked to really don’t need a CTO. They need a founding engineer. "
and then author continued this in his other post
" That person is really a founding engineer. Such a person is a special breed. Like an engineer on a larger team, the founding engineer needs to be able to execute and build product, quickly. They need to be aware of technical debt and when assuming it makes sense. They need to write code that works, is testable and performant. They need to evaluate whether to build or buy or download from Github. They’ll be performing devops tasks as well, such as monitoring the application, troubleshooting performance issues, and making sure deployments and rollbacks happen cleanly.
In addition to all of that, the founding engineer must communicate with non technical folks, both within the organization (including the CEO) and outside of the company. The founding engineer may or may not be doing tier 1 customer support, but will be doing tier 2 support. They also have to be willing and able to drive decisions, especially around technical issues. They need to be able to understand and give feedback on the business strategy at some level, as that will determine technical decisions. The founding engineer also needs to able and willing to take market feedback. This may be filtered through others, and any response should be discussed with the other founders, but market feedback and quick iteration is a strength of a startup. The founding engineer may be doing some product management as well, depending on the other team members’ strengths. They’ll be the de-facto UX designer. They also will be interacting with vendors and contractors. They may review budgets and will hire technical team members. It’s possible they’ll interact with investors if funding is sought.
For all the additional responsibilities, the founding engineer should be compensated, well, like a founder. With not much money and gobs of equity. (Not much money is obviously relative, and depends on market value.) "
I can't imagine what sucker would do all the tasks of CTO + multiple engineers for no pay and 0.1% to 2% equity and title deflation and no board seat.
Essentially the author wants to find a moron who doesn't realize how bad the deal is.
The problem is that the people who make poor decisions like this for themselves, also make such decisions for the company.
There's definitely appeal to it. I took this role at a startup with 2% equity and a not terrible but lower-than-market-grade salary. It was a great way to get acquainted with the CTO role but did not buy infinite loyalty to the company, I left a couple of weeks ago. I learned a lot and can now confidently call myself a CTO. It was like a paid real-world MBA.
I agree that you should not be trying to find an engineer to take on a huge amount of risk co-founding a business and offer them a measly 0.1 to 2% stake in the company.
It seems to me like the author is arguing that the you don't need a CTO, you need a technical co-founder, AKA a founding engineer, and that they should be given double-digit equity. Am I reading this wrong?
Just to add, you have to like them. Same as marriage. Genuinely like them for the person they are and like spending way too much time with them. It can't be transactional.
This is why SF is a hard place to find a cofounder. There's so many networking events, meetups, matching programs, accelerators. But everyone knows in SF, relationships are transactional. A lot of this manifests as 2 people just parroting language that they read online at each other or doing stupid cofounder matching quizzes. As if that helps you figure out if you have a meaningful connection with that person.
Jobs aren't personal but starting businesses are. Do it with someone that is a good friend.
This also implies that you can't force a business partnership which I think is completely incompatible with how SF works.
Source - I live in the suburbs of SF to avoid actual SF.
Right and who do you tell about your idea, they might steal it. So do you agree to non-disclosure-statements with any potential partners? You can't just "try it" like you can with a sex-partner :-)
IMHO, the main value a tech cofounder should bring to an existing idea is the expertise to avoid tech as much as possible. Most ideas are not doing anything revolutionary technically and you can go very far just by cobbling together stuff from off the shelf tools. You need a strong technical vision to avoid the temptation of overbuilding and focus on just enough tech to support your current phase of validation and that’s a unique and valuable skill.
If you have a company that primarily relies on some novel technical accomplishment to be viable, it should be something founded by a technical co-founder IMHO.
My usual thing is to say that early on, there's only the technical person and the money person. There is no ideas person. If you aren't one of the first two (i.e. access to savings, investment, sales channels, etc.), then you don't have a role. Too many wantrepreneurs just want to basque in the glory of their own ideas while someone else builds them.
> So, you’re a non-technical founder. [...] Push forward on your own. You can get a long way with no-code tools and manual processes. This is a grind, but a tech founder will be impressed by this effort if you get results.
Impressed or cautious. It's probably OK, so long as the non-technical solo founder doesn't says the words "our MVP" nor "our stack".
This also applies if you used a gig worker for any early demos or experiments. It's in the past, this is your prospective spouse you're talking with now, and the main reason to discuss history of one-night stands is to make sure you aren't starting the relationship with 'tech debt' that doesn't go away with penicillin.
I've been working with my cofounder for 10+ years and my advice is to just focus on being exceptional at whatever you do. If you have a track record of achieving results, you'll attract similar people. Some of them will be technical.
Over time you'll become friends with the ones that are entrepreneurial. Rushing the process is ratcheting up the risk 10X.
Going to throw cold water on all the advice here. I am serial startup CTO with a variety of outcomes. I never made a billion but I had enough successful exits and careful investments that after 20 years I am comfortable (still hoping for the lottery outcome though).
I was very naive for a long time about the realities of the world, as I currently see them. There is a wealthy and connected class that exists in the world. There is not some secret cabal that controls who’s in and who’s out, but rather relationships and reputation and references. Having a good family is a very strong signal - a parent who runs a company, a parent who’s a billionaire, a background that can give you legitimacy. As a “new man” you can become part of this class through guile and wit and success, but you are operating on hard mode.
A lot of people in the money class by birth (which are most of them) are not inherently successful. But their connections open so many doors.
The entrepreneur I have hitched my horse to, which has assembled a trusted team of executives and VPs, is part of this class in addition to already being worth tens of millions from successful exits. He is hungry beyond all belief and desires to be a billionaire, and he is quite skilled and hard working despite being born into low-tier wealthy family. His ability to get calls with the rich and successful is absurd. He wanted to speak with Mark Cuban and he got him on the phone to pitch him within days - just one example where I am name dropping someone to illustrate the type of things he can do. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of who knows who, who owns this business and who made this thing, he also knows various people in entertainment and the arts and gets them to vouch and rep his various interests. A famous pop musician tweeted one of his ventures as a favor and drove a lot of users. He networks like you won’t believe and owns property in NYC, LA, Miami, and jet sets around the US / Europe / Dubai as needed for business.
I am pretty sure my children will be similar to how he started in terms of connections based upon my help and the school I send them to. However I started very low in society and used technology skills and hard work as the mechanism to elevate myself and hustle to get to the place I am now.
As tech people on HN we value ourselves so much. Yes we have a lot of skills and are necessary and provide value. But guys like my CEO are key to succeeding in business and without him I couldn’t do my job and succeed in the way I want.
Who you know runs the world. As the technical cofounder we are not the deal makers nor the money people, who truly have the value and upper hand. I’m not trying to depress you, nor say you can’t do it without someone like this. But once you start really seeing how the 90% case works - how this company gets follow on money despite inferior product because some VC owes a favor, how this company gets acquired for more than it’s worth because of some friendly connection, why this company gets a seed easily and yours can’t get anything despite traction. It’s just how stuff works.
A lot of honesty here. I can't help but point out the spiritual hole this upbringing can leave on children. Parents who prioritize networking and building relationships with the rich and successful show a poor example to their children that need to learn important lessons like compassion, inherent human value, altruism, generosity, etc. It's like teaching them the opposite of the story of the "Good Samaritan"
I met someone who was as humble as apple pie, training to become a cancer surgeon. Seeing her, you couldn't have guessed that she was descended from some of the erstwhile most powerful nobility in Europe (including relations to a bunch of royalty today). But then again, while she got that far through a lot of merit on her own terms, she was amply supported in many ways by coming from a very wealthy background (eg: no need to work part time to support herself unlike most college kids, visit home very often, etc).
"Think about why you want one." So many requests for technical co-founder seem to boil down to "I had this awesome idea for a fully sick app bro, I just need someone to do some coding and we'll make millions!" Or in other words, "build my dream for free and I'll be your boss and you can keep half the profits maybe". Sounds great.
Frankly I find the "ideas guys" to be insulting, as if they think that having technical ability somehow means you're automatically bereft of imagination, just sitting around waiting for someone "creative" to show up and "let you in on their big idea". Most people with serious technical chops develop them in pursuit of some other goal.
Rant aside, I guess I should flip this into some kind of advice. They need to bring something serious to the table. Like, for example, one or more of:
(a) A top tier domain expert in the domain you're targeting, with deep insight into stellar industry contacts
(b) A business wizard with the ability to raise serious funding on good terms, negotiate contracts and supply agreements, identify optimal pricing structures
(c) A management wizard with the soft skills required to recruit a startup's worth of unique characters and keep them working effectively together
(d) Someone who's loaded and bankrolling the gig, for which you will be paid a competitive wage plus receive substantial equity
I started out imprentation in 2008 as a business co-founder, now i'm the solo founder of fgemm SpA, j published the paper about it n have the provisional patent for the algorithm's implementation on a machine.
Start trying to do the technical work yourself. Contract out particular bits if you need to. A poorly coded and shitty prototype that fits what you want is massively better than a polished application that isn't what you want.
I can hear the "But, but, but..." Wait and hear me out.
There is nothing to give you appreciation for what a technical person brings than trying to walk a mile in their shoes. There is nothing more frustrating than a non-technical cofounder who underestimates what technical work requires. And honestly, the stereotype of "non-technical founder needs technical co-founder" is some asshat with no real clue who will make their partner miserable. Besides, there is a huge imbalance of supply and demand.
But potential technical co-founders are much more receptive to, "Non-technical founder needs technical founder to help turn crappy prototype into product. The idea is good, but I know how much I need your help."
Why are technical people more receptive to that?
- The fact that there is a prototype makes it much more likely that the idea isn't just vague handwaving.
- The non-technical co-founder is willing to put elbow grease in.
- The non-technical co-founder's humility is going to limit unreasonable demands.
So willingness to begin the work yourself makes you MORE attractive.