Ask HN: How to be found as a technology co-founder?
There are tons of articles on the internet about how to find a technology co-founder. I believe, there is another problem that also exists. If you have strong technology skills, but no business connections or experience, it's virtually impossible to be found as a technology co-founder, even if you've got a desire and ambitions.
Can anyone suggest an approach, what should one do in such situation?
Perhaps there is some matching service (read specialty social network), which helps to address this issue.
63 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadAs an example, my co-founder is technical, but he's the CEO and is primarily focused on sales & managing our investors. I've written every line of code of our platform since day 0. We've had tons of situations over the last 18 months, since we started this company in earnest, where we've fought and disagreed in significant ways. However, the reps we've built up in communicating with one another have allowed us to move past these issues, without sacrificing the necessary dialogue, but also not harboring resentment or frustration with one another. Starting a company is so frustrating and difficult, I have a hard time imagining a scenario where I could have done it without deeply trusting my co-founder.
All that being said, everyone is unique. You may find you're more than happy to be a technical co-founder with a stranger. But, my primary recommendation would be to find someone in your circle that you trust that you'd want to work with every day for the next decade (which probably isn't too many people).
Wish you all the best!
Whether it's wise to pair with such people is another topic.
http://www.davidralbrecht.com/notes/2018/06/primus-inter-par...
This is interesting proposal but I think the ambiguity, fast changing environment, need for making regular 'leaps of faith' in startup environment is very different than the traditional centuries old business practices of accounting, architectural firm, where 'primus inter pares' is working well.
The time-tested rule of common interests and alcohol (in this case: conferences and meetups!) applies here as well.
This path would take you a good few years before you get to cofound your own startup with partners, but it's probably one of the best paths.
You can found a 1 man SaaS app... burn is halfed, and your code per day rate is about the same as a pair with a business guy.
If you find business lacking down the road, you are in a position of power to pull someone in.
Along the way for sales you'll have to learn how to put yourself out there, which can be challenging (it was for me). But its like speaking in front of people. If you do it enough times you learn to get by.
If your a founder, regardless of whether you the "tech person" or not, you'll probably have to learn all of this anyway.
Id second the "dont do it alone" part if its a full-time startup. Its tough going and having someone to share the burden in incredibly helpful.
Lots of business people don't really know what they are doing, either, and more experienced people are often willing to help!
A good advertising or marketing guy will help you go from 100 users to 1000 users, but you shouldn't need them in most cases to get a few users and start the path. Adwords isn't rocket science.
Now obviously there are exceptions, say if you are trying to create a 2 sided marketplace it's not so easy to just slow roll your product... but I think that is a fairly low % of total products.
You can have mentors and friends to help with BS calling if you are willing to listen. But ultimately they will not always be right, so you risk not following a valid idea far enough.
Disclaimer: I found my co-founder from the EF program and completed the program.
Non technical co founders, when working properly, have an enormous amount of work to do, often much harder than a technical person, even though it may never involve anything more complex than excel or a web browser.
You need to find someone who you can work with, work through problems with and trust. No small task! I suspect most people find each other by pure luck.
More broadly: Plenty of non-technical founders out there - I think the important thing to determine is what areas are weakest for you? Example: for me, my weakness is coding, then finance. I can do those things myself but I'm slow. Ergo I work best with hardcore engineers, I don't mind if they are a bit slow on the "soft" side of things.
Source: am a sales guy with a technical background, so the "people" side is something i have a lot of exposure to
As a founder, you don't to be found. You need to find people and solve problems.
Be a sole-founder. Learn whatever "business" skills on demand. If you can learn programing, what else you can't learn?
It's more possible than ever for a sole technical person to build meaningful business from ground up.
Think in a different way: what if a "business" person can't find a technical cofounder? Can the business person pick up programming skills as fast as a technical person picks up "business" skills?
What kind of "business" skills do you need? Talking? Writing English? Marketing? Sales? It's 2018. There are tons of resources online that you can use to learn these things.
Go to www.indiehackers.com to learn some inspiring stories. Be confident.
In a time sensitive manner, people skills, learning people skills is one of the hardest things to learn.
I wouldn't use the word most, more like many.
But regardless, you make it sound like there is something wrong with such people for feeling insecure when in fact people exhibit insecurity in a wide variety of contexts (job interviews, heights, closed spaces, etc).
Pre-existing connections in the entrenched industry you're trying to break into? A rolodex of "people who went on to be potential channel partners" you met while doing your Harvard MBA?
Unfortunately, networking means talking to a lot of people not like you, and giving a lot of yourself freely, which to a maker feels like both exploitation and a water of time.
Gotta kiss 99 frogs, and suddenly, frog number 18 called a friend and said friend turns into frog 100 that's actually a match.
This is fundamentally alien to makers, and wish I had been able to learn this in my 20s or 30s, but I honestly don't know how I could have been receptive at the time. (Now I'm receptive, just not very good at it.)
At the begining, I literally crawled, begged and did anything and everything under the sun to convince technical people to join me. The waterfall looked like this:
- Say I contacted through events/linkedin/accelerators/friend-of-friends/facebook/CS-professors about 100 people (number was definitely larger than this)
- Something like 50 even bothered replying
- Something like 20 bothered having lunch with me
- Something like 10 sat down for a second meeting to look at whatever code I already had
- 5 I had maybe a week of work done together closely, discussed the challenges and arrangements closely etc.
- It didn't work out with 4 of them for various reasons - simply didn't click in some way
- 1 eventually quit their job and saved my ass. We are all full time now though of course.
When I was presenting to technical people, I had a friend doing a PhD in CS who cant quit his PhD but wrote some serious c++ code (as our work dealt with large matrices) while I wrote a web python backend to serve the cpp code. And I had a deep background in industrial engineering and finance. So I think the 50 evaluated our work and bothered replying took a reasonable guess that my chops were "not bad".
Then 6 months later it was intern season and I did the same thing again. Then I did the same thing to get funding. Then to get customers. Getting full time staff that is proverbially "ninjas" is even harder than getting investors or customers. One is committing their lives to you and another is just a procedural budget decision. Then it follows that it should be even harder for someone to co-found something with you.
After a while I started using a CRM and a systematic funneling for everything that has a 80%+ fall off rate. Which is literally everything in a startup, from newsletter opens to fundraising to good interns.
You should do all the things adviced in this thread, then assume that if there is an 80% to 90% fall off, how many of them you should do (more accurately: NEED TO DO) on a per week basis to hit your final target. Because of the last 10% who didn't fall off, you still have to reject the 9% who you can't work with, don't like the business idea personally, don't think it is a viable idea etc. If you use an accelerator's services to shortcut the process above, remember you have to pay them 6% to 8% of your eventual company and its 50-50 whether they can perform the search service well - so its cost is approximately 3% to 4% of equity.
Good luck!
As a builder of a company for more than a decade (a lifestyle, not Start-Up (VC-fuelled)), the hard part about starting up is NOT the tech.
You might be a really good developer, but that definitely does not translate into being a good CTO. Most common problem is being bogged down by technical perfection and rewriting until the company dies. (I have seen that happen at least ten times with companies in my network)
A CTO is a "chief officer", i.e. his/her focus should be on the survival and growth of the company. That means choosing how to act in an environment, where there is always to little money and too little time and past decisions unfortunate to fix-up..
Add to that, that when the company grows, you need to heard cats as a lot of devs are not really good at negotiating technical matters as equals..
I must admit that for me the "no business experience" would be a dealbreaker for a CTO... Balancing the liquidity versus total cost is one of the hardest problems I have ever encountered... (and that is going to be your problem even if you get a big tank of jetfuel (VC-money), the burnrate will probably still kill you if unmanaged).
Add to that, that your business partner is going to be the most influential person in your life (even more than your spouse likely), just getting "matched" is not that easy.
A family member of mine bought 50% of a company (not IT) and the other part stayed there as CTO (he was the sole owner and CEO before). The ended up almost-hating each other but being forced to stay together for most of another decade (due to both having a lot of skin in the game). The day the sold the company was the second last day they ever talked, the day the signed the final corporate report for that year was the last...
Notice neither was a bad person, they we just badly matched (personality wise, skill wise, vision wise...) and entered something they should have stayed out of.. It didn't help that both had invested their whole livelihood in the deal..
So to recap: - to enter a co-owner/founder role, you really need to know the other person, like the other person and trust the other person as much as a family member... Otherwise you are likely doomed or unhappy for a lot of your immediate future
- being a CTO (especially as co-founder) is a vastly different that just being a dev with better salary and the final say.
- experience matters
- so does 10+ years of preparation to your "overnight success".
- business is hard, most fail...
I'm a technical guy, always wanted to start my own company. 6 years ago I finally got my green card and started looking for a "business" co-founder. Months went by, nothing happened. As many commented, it's usually not a good idea to found a company with somebody who you have not known for at least a few years.
Finally I decided to just go for it and learn "sales" myself. After achieving some moderate success these business people started to knock on my door. Finally I brought a "co-founder" for less than 10% equity. It really helped long term to make sure we had a tie-breaker during disagreements.
6 years later it's a 60 person, multi-million-a-year SaaS company.
I think the first step is demystifying it. If you wanted to learn a new programming language, you would just "do it": read books, read about the language, practice writing code, etc.
Compare that to a business, where you have to pay to file paperwork that you may have to hire a lawyer to tell you that you did wrong.
You need to know how to structure an articles of incorporation in a good way for your organization, and you only know you get it wrong when it's too late.
You need to know how to raise funds in a way that own't personally bankrupt you.
You need to know how to read and understand contracts.
You need to know how to hire people in a way that doesn't expose you unduly to lawsuits.
You need to know bookkeeping well enough so that you don't need to hire someone for that right off the bat.
There are tons of things. I know that I don't even know how much I don't know, because I've only ever had a small rinky-dink business.
Oh my God. You are right. Better leave "asking for someone else" to the professionals.
Seriously? THIS is the road block?
Therefore, the way to be "found" as a co-founder (technical or not) is in fact all about finding the right product you are willing to be a co-founder for, rather than "just" an employee. This is crucial, because if you don't truly believe in the product it will simply not be worth the effort.
I also have gotten some good traction from writing this post: https://blog.usejournal.com/im-looking-for-a-technical-partn..., maybe you want to do something similar in the inverse?