Seeking Technology Co-Founder (NYC)

50/50

regardless of whether you have previous knowledge or not, if you're willing to program (whether it's front end or back) and you do learn, even if it is on the fly, for this project... then maybe a 50 50 split does make sense...

Thanks :) Didn't mean to sound defensive. I posted expecting responses similar to yours. Initially I was naive but a little networking in the tech community solved that pretty quickly.

Don't take this the wrong way ... but I've had an inside perspective on how investors (who actually write checks, not blog articles about how cool they are) think. You'd be shocked to discover what little value they place on your code. And investors are not even the most important part of starting a business - customers are. They could care even less than investors do. If coding was that all-important, why doesn't every hacker code their way to multi-million dollar success stories? IF ONLY STARTING A BUSINESS was as easy as you say. I've been and am in a similar position, have come across COUNTLESS "hackers" with their own pet project, and coming up now a little over a year after they've all turned me down, amazingly, nobody cares about their excellent code - just like a year ago, and probably a year from now. Yes, product development is important. But alone it gets you nowhere. You need communication skills, ability to motivate during hard times, ability to redirect hostility and stress found at many startups, ability to sense people's needs (for example, most people I've ever met that write more checks than blogs about themselves as investors usually have manic-depressive natures and are looking for the "high" of being involved in something cool/worthwile/humanitarian/state-of-the-art). You need awesome design skills, ability present information in ways that make sense to non-technical users. You need ability to document work processes that keep everybody current and on-track. You need to be able to follow massive amounts of information to figure out who is likely to enter your space and where your space might branch off 6 months / a year etc. You need the ability to quickly figure out countless people and pitch them on their secret desires, not your startup. You need to be able to respond to massive, systematic changes in the market that can render your entire business model useless and be able to quickly figure out a whole new business from scratch that can still be built with dwindling resources. You need to be able to write countless business plans at a moment's notice in case you get interest from who knows where who knows when. You need to be able to figure out how to cheaply or freely market to your customers while overcoming a decade's worth of internet-enabled skepticism. TELL ME, who the hell is doing all of these things and countless more things I forgot to mention while you're busy coding? Or do you plan on doing these things "after you're done" coding? If so, how can you compete with a startup that has people doing all these things WHILE their programmers code?

"Great deal for you." If someone does years of market research, comes up with a clever way to make money and beat potential competitors and figures out a way to get money to finance the project, you think it's a "great deal for them" if they get 50% of a company they start while a hacker hacks, as if though the hacker is doing them a favor? Do you have any idea how many 1-person hacker companies trying to sell their "product" (ie, code) with no users to a larger company I have come across while looking for programmers for my startup effort? As much as you may hate hearing this, remember all those snobby ivy-league MBAs during the dot-com bust that thought they were a gift to the rest of us, you know, the ones hackers hate? You've replaced them. You're the next version of them, and 10 years from now I guarantee you as the dollar falls and your value to the market is reduced exponentially as more and more eastern-european/chinese/indians are graduating with PHDs and work histories for major overseas companies starting from even high school all the way through their grad programs, I guarantee you you will be replaced by another class that will recall, "Remember the days a decade ago when programmers thought they were God's gift to the world just because they could do what a billion foreigners with better educations can do just as well, or better these days?" Hubris cometh before the fall, amigo, and you U.S. based programmi...

>> Having ideas and being a user in your target market doesn't cut the mustard IMO. And an early stage team doesn't need a project manager, or detailed spec sheets, or other "manager-y" stuff.

I predict you'll fail with whatever you try to startup AS LONG AS you have this attitude. A founder who used to be a former user and can point to the flaws in everything on the market and came up with a better solution is an IDEAL person to have start something. Their intuition is based on their experience of what people like them (ie, former customers) will PAY MONEY for. That's a business. Hackers hacking all night is not a business. Sorry to burst your bubble.

You can't be more wrong. You only get PRACTICAL, USEFULL business ideas AS a customer/user. That's why 99.99% of programmers who start businesses flop - they're so wrapped up in some tiny aspect of their warped reality and how their awesome code makes a tiny part of it a bit better in ways nobody understands, that they never stop and think that 99.99% of the general population of who they think will be their customers couldn't care less.

That's if they even bother to think about who their customers will be. Most programmers can't think beyond "users" and I'm sorry, but now that we're entering recession times, you'll learn really quick that users does NOT equal same as paying customer.

The sad truth for you is that most successful companies were started by people without the technical skills but who were users of many things, had a "big picture perspective" and thought to themselves, "You know what sucks about the current state of things, this, this and that - someone should make something different like this and this."

Otherwise, from your model, you just have programmers making something most likely nobody will care about. That's not a company, that's code. If you get some users, that may a service, by which I mean of the charity kind. If they pay you, that's a product, though not necessarily a successful company.

HERE - FORGET MY THESIS - imagine instead this scenario - let's say all the "big idea" people went on some Atlas shrugged type of strike. That leaves you programmers in boston, and those in virginia, in New York, S.V, and about a hundred million others in Russia, Eastern Europe, India, China, Netherlands, Ireland, France ...

If the idea people are that irrelevant to starting great companies, and programmers are that all-important, why don't you guys all get together, form some sort of super development virtual company and spit out 50 million uber-companies all based on your awesome code?

I'll bet 50 idea people in various industries will start successful companies that MAKE MONEY for every 1 programmer with a brilliant algorithm to load YouTube videos 2% faster or whatever passes for a great business idea among hackers these days that manages to fool some desperate, inexperienced VC to put money into their project.

FINAL ANALYSIS: Masons build, but building without a good plan leads to well-executed crap. No inspired architect/designer, no beauty, no inspirational "thing" that PAYING customers can wrap their minds around. I've said it before and I'll say it again: just because you get "users" and maybe bought out by Mega-Corp. doesn't mean you've created a successful company. Get people to pay you money for your thing, that's a business. Otherwise, just a delusion that will never survive the next 4 years of economic slowdown. Can't figure out how to make people hand over their money for your "thing"? That's where you need "business idea" people who've honed their intuition from using everything in the market.

I don't think I said we wouldn't fund a co that did exactly the same thing as a previous one. The real answer is that we rarely (never, so far) get two companies doing exactly the same thing. They may be in the same general business, but they tend to each have their own approach to it, and any good market has room for multiple companies approaching it from different directions.

E.g. Snipshot and Splashup. Both are web-based imaged editors, but the similarity ends there. Snipshot is an easy editor for end users. Splashup is Photoshop.