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A web start-up needs a 'tech' co-founder because...?

2 points by richtofen ↗ HN
Right. It is pretty difficult to run a web startup alone. Especially in the early days of excitement and terror. You need shoulders on your side to bear part of the pain. And the thrill. But do your founders need to be hackers, or even 'tech'? Especially if your product is not new technology per-se, but solves users' problems using a combinatoric of available technology. Does the skill to write this product necessarily need to be with a founder? Gut and heart say that your CTO needs to be a founder. The mind does not find impeccable logic for it.

4 comments

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exline
No. There are lots of startups with non technical founders who can bring in (or outsource) the technical development. There is a larger risk in the quality of the code when you do this. If there is no tech founder, then most of the time you will have a harder time judging the developers you will be using (hiring/outsourcing to.) It also means that you will have to pay for the development vs a co-founder putting in sweat equity to get the product done.

Based on your brief description, it sounds like there will not be a lot of heavy lifting to get the application up and running. From personal experience, getting the MVP version of the app done is really the easy part. It doesn't always feel like it, but in the overall picture it is easier to do development than it is to sell the app once finished. The sales/marketing after the fact is where the real work starts. Many hackers have trouble moving from development to marketing.

richtofen
@exline: Appreciate your response. Am replying a little late, but was deep in the jungles of India [seriously] for the past few days. Quality of Code:I have found the best guys possible, within my means. I will trust them. Nothing further is possible. Development vs Sales/Marketing: Thanks for flagging this up. Being an architect, project manager and designer, I hear you on the create vs evangelize challenge. We are on to it. Lots of user-feedback and testing based on UI's and interaction demo's [knocking stuff together as flash presentations and pptx files (it is low, I know)], some cryptic splash pages, a few fire-hose twitter accounts that are trying to create some buzz [but only bot-followers till date, etc. And friends. Lots of priceless friends and well-wishers. Within all this, a tech co-founder would have been ideal, but the heroes currently writing the code have their own startup dreams to chase, kids to send to school, and mortgages to pay. Nothing is perfect, I guess.
hga
A lot of it is risk management as well as budget control. Without a 'tech' co-founder you don't know if you're getting taken to the cleaners or if your "not new technology per-se" technology as "bolted together" for your particular needs is going to do the job.

If you're not technical, how can you even know how hard or tricky the needed work is?

richtofen
@hga: Appreciate your response. Replying late, as I was away from all possible lines of communication.

Taken to cleaners risk, technology sufficiency: I would choose to have faith, I guess. As both individual and startup, this is not the first time I would be taking decisions based on incomplete knowledge/information, and it certainly would not be the last.

Technical knowledge: A saving grace is that I am technical after all. Just a different discipline - that of putting spaces and buildings together. The hypothesis is that the principles of problem-solving are universally same - just that language, grammar, syntax and rhetoric are different. If I have managed to produce cinema and theatre using my training as an architect and designer - I am hoping I can pull it off for a consumer internet application as well.

Having said all that, a tech co-founder would be ideal - except that I do not have a shared non-work history with any - and this level of chemistry is essential for the travails of co-founding. It feels somewhat lame to go 'date' a potential co-founder, just for the sake of having a tech co-founder.