Please stop asking how to find a technical co-founder.

What would you consider fair and reasonable? I'm one of the people who needed to read this article, because I am not as technical as I need to be to see my idea through, but I'm also not a "business" guy--and I am coming into this endevour with little to no baggage or pre-conceived notion on how things work--I honestly thought if I ever did find someone technical (I'm paying freelancers right now) it would be a 50/50 split--but in your opinion is that undervaluing a technical persons worth on a project?

You don't earn a technical co-founder any more than you earn your first secretary. Every person who is recruited to join a business must be convinced that he or she is going to get something out of the deal.

The problem quite simply is that there are a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs out there who expect someone with technical chops to join them when they a) don't have an existing relationship, b) don't have a proven track record of execution and c) don't have anything to give besides equity that isn't worth anything. In other words, "co-founder" is little more than a title bestowed upon the person you need to build your product but can't actually pay to do the work.

It's no surprise that it's hard to find a "co-founder" of any type under these circumstances. When somebody you briefly spoke to at a meetup asks you to be a "co-founder" in exchange for 10% of a company that doesn't exist yet, you're naturally going to be skeptical. If that person adds a reasonable salary to the equation, you're far more likely to take the proposition seriously.

Additionally, I think it's worth pointing out that wannabe entrepreneurs have a lot of misconceptions about what type of technical skills they need. Instead of looking for someone who can build a basic web app (which is what 99% of them want to build), they look for a hipster developer whose resume is filled with all the buzzwords of the day. You do not need a Ruby on Rails developer with MongoDB experience to build a web application where individuals can organize and share pictures of their pet goats.

Good post. "Entrepreneurs" nowadays seem like a bunch of whiners. Maybe it's the internet that encourages such passivity and hand-holding over the internet.

You want to succeed? Do whatever it takes. Learn how to code even if you won't be the one coding the program. Learn to speak the language, whether it's VC/investing, tech, or business. Sell your idea to a tech cofounder.

I agree idea guys who can't do sh are pretty much worthless. But I worry that there's been an overemphasis on the technical side. Sorry hackers, you aren't as special as you think you are. You have some personal projects you want to work on? Most personal hacking projects are worthless and even worse ideas than the ones business guys come up with.

Also worrisome is the attitude hackers have of only working with people with successful track records. I think that's the exact opposite of what you should do. People with successful track records have more to lose, and may have just gotten lucky the first time around. We should pay attention to the idea, not necessarily past success. You don't see business guys recruiting hackers based on whether they founded twitter/facebook/google do you?

A great hacker needs to be paired with a great vision guy. If hackers were as important as they thought they were then all hackers would have made it big already, and that is very far from the truth.

I have a strange view of this. I wouldn't generally consider myself a technical co-founder, but keep getting approached as one. I think I am better at the business side of things but get forced into the technical side because who else will do it? The constant business pitches are somewhat boring, I haven't seen one where I thought, 'damn I need to join that guy/company.' It feels like most approaches are somewhat desperate, and that's a turnoff. Instantly what comes to my mind is 'why didn't someone else take up this offer if it's so good?'

I can only speak for myself, but it wouldn't surprise me if others used similar reasoning when being pitched (perhaps on both biz/tech side). Almost always, these things seem forced rather testing interest and seeing if there is any match. If a founding team is like a marriage, these guys pitching you to join them as a cofounder are asking you to jump straight into bed with them, there is no real courting period or build up. I feel like that's what's missing.

Because non-technical people lack the skill of implementing ideas in code, their experience in following through with ideas and learning from that process is extremely limited.

Clearly, coming up with ideas and trying them out is not something you can only do in code, but when you do code you do that all the time. Every day, every hour, maybe even several times an hour.

Ironically, a self-described non-technical "idea guy" has relatively little experience in coming up with an idea, implementing it, testing it and iterating on it.

I'm speaking in general terms of course, some "idea guys" are simply brilliant and have an amazing vision. But they're the rare exception.