Ask HN: Where to meet non-technical cofounders?

I wouldn't co-found with a business person (whatever that means). You need as many people as possible who actually make the product (developers and designers), and someone who is passionate about solving problems in a particular domain and talking to customers (a product manager). Sometimes these roles are just one person, sometimes two or three. Sales & marketing can be handled by the same team or hired for. You can hire sales people with existing networks if that is needed. I think that if one person can handle all of these roles, he should.

From Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html):

> The good news is, choosing problems is something that can be learned. I know that from experience. Hackers can learn to make things customers want. [6]

>This is a controversial view. One expert on "entrepreneurship" told me that any startup had to include business people, because only they could focus on what customers wanted. I'll probably alienate this guy forever by quoting him, but I have to risk it, because his email was such a perfect example of this view:

    80% of MIT spinoffs succeed provided they have at least one management person in the team at the start. The business person represents the "voice of the customer" and that's what keeps the engineers and product development on track. 

> This is, in my opinion, a crock. Hackers are perfectly capable of hearing the voice of the customer without a business person to amplify the signal for them. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them "engineers." Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted? It seems to me the business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who obligingly flew Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started.

Respectfully this is awful advice, as someone who’s worked at FAANG and early stage startups. The idea that working for early stage startups will help you start your own is a myth propagated intentionally by founders/VCs to recruit SWEs with lowball offers.

FAANG is actually way better to meet cofounders. At Google you can have lunch with a talented person every day (there’s internal apps to network like this), plus countless other opportunities to network both formally and informally.

In contrast, at an early stage startup you’ll mostly work with the same people every day and your network will stagnate.

Furthermore, early stage startups tend to have a ton of work that needs to be done that they hire there engineers to do. Unless you get CTO title, you’re probably not going to get exposed much to the BD side or get investor access.

Finally, being able to work full time on your startup to get demo ready to pitch is super helpful. A nest egg from FAANG RSUs is key here, startup ISOs are probably worth nothing and will reduce your cushioning.

If you want to do a startup, go to networking events, apply to YC, etc but leaving FAANG to be an early stage employee w goal, not closer, especially if you don’t at least get CTO title.

I have to agree with ditonal. Going from a FAANG company to a startup for anything less than a CTO role is a bad idea. I know this because I did this. While it all worked out in the end (I wanted to move to Los Angeles to do heavy metal stuff with my heavy metal friends anyway) there's definitely a hard ceiling at a startup.

Stay at the cushy high paying job and network on nights and weekends. Even better, make a point to ask a person out to lunch every week at the FAANG job once the pandemic is over.

"Networking" for me has just been hanging out with my music and YouTuber buddies. Turns out if you know how to SPELL PHP or HTML you can provide HUGE value to non-technical friends. Doing something as simple as fixing a typo in some JavaScript tracking code for friend's websites makes me look like I've shown them fire for the first time. Find a hobby you like that's non-technical (for me it's learning Chinese, salsa dancing, and metal), show up, have a good time, and within a year or two you'll have a high quality network of non-technical partners.

Deprioritise your current work. Do things outside of it.