Stop Looking for a Technical Co-Founder, Learn to Code Yourself

I also wasn't suggesting that this is the right strategy for every kind of startup. Some are very tech-intensive, and actually learning everything you'd need to learn would take years. But those aren't usually the ideas that people with no technical expertise and no technical cofounders are having. Usually their innovation is social, not technical, and something that's within their capabilities to build.

As a programmer, I would be more interested in working with a non-technical founder who has these skills:

  - domain experience
  - a good network in the target market / sales leads
  - ability to manage customer relationships and close sales
  - good communicator
  - familiarity with software development process, even if as an outsider

This set of skills would balance well with mine. I don't really care about working with highly technical founders as the second or third person at the company - that's my role. I want to work with someone who can sell and make sure that the product gets in front of customers.

The caveat here is that my interests lie in business systems, not in doing the next Facebook/Twitter/4sq clone.

I went to the same meetup, and also found it interesting how many questions about non-technical co-founders there were. I'll share my story about meeting my "technical co-founder".

I studied Engineering Mechanics for 6 and a half years, so I'm not exactly non-technical, but when I finished and was trying to start a company, it had been probably 6 years since I'd taken any serious programming (or taken a programming class), and I knew nothing about web technologies. When I originally met my now co-founder, he had an up-and-running website generating revenue that he had started building at 16, and developed entirely on his own, from scratch. (He stored all user data in a plaintext file until he learned about databases.)

When I first approached him about starting a company, he gave me the same line he still gives many others who ask him to join about being very busy with his own projects. So, I went home and started myself. I remember coming across a page on Wikipedia about "relational databases" and thinking "yes, this is what I'll need." So, I downloaded some MySQL software and put together some database architecture, then made some storyboards in PowerPoint, and came back to him a week later. He was a little impressed, but still said he didn't really have time to work on this.

So, I went home and bought a ROR tutorial book and built the Pragmatic Programmer Bookstore model, then changed some colors and page titles and went back a week later and met with the co-founder again. This time, a little more impressed, he agreed to help me put together a really basic MVP that I could use to pitch investors.

In the meantime, I had met with a local group of angel investors, and was accepted to pitch, at an "angel live-fire" session at an Entrepreneurship Summit in town. So, seeing as this thing was going to be presented to a group of potential investors, we both had a bit more motivation to work kinda hard on it.

Through this time, we became really good friends, and he finally became convinced that I'm not just some random non-technical person trying to start a company, that I'm really willing to do what it takes. So, a month later when we were accepted to a seed program and took investment, my co-founder deferred an internship at MS to the Fall in order to spend the summer on the startup with me, then turned it down completely when Fall came around and things were going really well. I've also learned a ton about development from him, and we've put together an MVP really fast that we're rolling out in a few days.

The point of this story is that if I had accepted his "no" and not tried to do it myself, he wouldn't have joined me, and if he hadn't joined me, we wouldn't have had a demo to show investors, and we probably wouldn't have a startup right now. So, "Learn to Code Yourself" doesn't mean just found a company yourself, it means that you do whatever you have to do to start a company, and if people see that you are that hell-bent on making progress every day, they'll be more likely to want to join you.

Professionals exist for a reason. That doesn't mean he can't learn enough to establish a MVP and become knowledgeable about the subject domain though.

Being able to call BS from your developers or a perspective co-founder doesn't require you to be a programming god.

I think it's important to learn how to hack, if only simply to be able to fundamentally "follow along." I'm a big "idea" guy; and, most of my ideas have often been internet based. Being a lawyer, it never occurred to me to learn how to hack. This last week I started teaching myself at Google Code University. If you're halfway intelligent, it comes pretty quickly, particularly if you work through the practice problems.