> This mindset that technical cofounders are essentially “coders” (a term I hate) is very prevalent among inexperienced nontechnical founders. I know I’m preaching to the choir here but a lot of technical people have deep industry/business/product knowledge and have social skills. It is very frustrating when some Ivy League 25 year old PM/management consultant tries to pitch you on their vision while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of.
This is nicely worded, but I would like to expand on it. This is coming from someone who is a businessperson who programs — I’ve been programming since I was 10, but I’ve never had the job of a programmer.
tl;dr - I think that both programmers and business people can be delusional about their value add, but folks who can do both are easier to work with, and folks who can do both have more opportunities than just hyper-growth startups.
In generalities, there are four groups of folks on the tech-business continuum.
1. Pure tech folks with little or no business acumen. Some of these folks think “sales” or “marketing” are fighting words. I find many of these folks very difficult to do business with. To be charitable to the “Ivy League” folks you refer to, they have probably met enough of these pure tech folks (some of whom are actually idiot savants) such that they erroneously over-generalize to think that all tech folks are like these pure tech folks.
2. Tech folks with business acumen. The business side usually comes from experience. I think pg advocates for tech folks who do start ups to develop into this. Overall much easier to do business with, but sometimes they make product-oriented decisions that miss the forest for the trees. The best tech businesses come from this group, but they get outclassed on the business side unless they embrace the business side aggressively (Zuck and Gates being prime examples). I think the “Ivy League” folks lose a lot of business due to lack of respect for this group.
3. Business folks with tech acumen (this is me). Great at taking over tech business that are poorly run and optimizing them either as a c-suite executive or as a buyer (this is what I do). While I don’t refer to programmers as “coders”, and I don’t treat programmers as idiot-savants, I know how to find and pay programmers to solve my business problems. Interestingly, I run into some programmers who are doing commodity work who want a percentage of the business. My offer is always the same — zero. I’m not building a startup or complex software. Their skills are largely fungible to me, since most of the value is in finding the solution rather than the nuts and bolts of development. The exception is for folks in group 2 who want to move to group 3, but at that point they become a businessperson rather than a programmer.
4. Business folks with no tech acumen. These are the “Ivy League” folks (and a lot of VCs, tbh). These are the “idea people”, the people who are clueless about tech and tech development, often the people who are also bad at business, but they happen to have access to money and/or critical buyers. Fwiw, many of these folks treat other business people even worse than programmers — they just treat most people like idiots, sans the savant. I sometimes have a hard time doing business with these folks, because they frequently don’t know the value (or lack thereof) of their business, and/or they are only looking for suckers to do business with. Many/most of these folks are all style and no substance. If they had some substance, they would be in group 3 (or try to be).
Obviously these are people on a continuum that are separated into somewhat arbitrary groups. That said, these archetypes exist.
How do these archetypes matter for tech businesses?
If you’re in group 1, you’re at the mercy of whatever business person you can work with. You hope that you end up more like Woz than most of the pure tech folks who get restructured out as the business grows. I strongly recommend that the pure tech folks focus on getting paid primarily in cash rather than equity, since any non-benevolent business person will structure out the tech person’s equity as soon as possible.
If you are in group 2, you are in a strong position to develop a successful startup or successful tech business. Just realize that you are a cog in the VC machine, and they only value you for your potential to hit home runs. You can make more reliable money (think 8 or 9 figures) in a “lifestyle business”, but it is not likely you will become a billionaire… unless you shift to group 3.
If you are in group 3, you need to realize that most of your value will be by doing very boring shit. Billionaire status is possible, but it will be a boring trip, and you are not likely to appear in any sexy tech write ups unless you engage in aggressive self-promotion in these areas (some should, most probably shouldn’t). The biggest mistake I see group 3 folks make is to think that they are in group 2, especially if/when they try to develop a consumer-oriented product without getting a group 2 cofounder.
Group 4… well, group 4 is what they are. There is some jiujitsu by which their egos and ignorance can be used for greater good. If you engage with these folks, I would only do so with that type of interaction in mind. If you engage with them on their terms, you will almost certainly lose.
Why did I write all of this? To clarify options for various level of tech people.
The HN/Ycombinator narrative to push for technical co-founders is very valid for start ups (the pg kind that are built to grow fast), but there many other ways to make money as a tech person or a tech-oriented business person than start ups (especially now in the 20s compared to the 90s or 00s), and some/many of these are more reliable ways to get to a “fuck you money” level. I don’t think a lot of highly skilled tech folks realize this.