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You do need a technical co-founder [video]

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Re: You do need a technical co-founder [video]

#201

Post by lmm »

gnicholas wrote: post #78
ChrisCinelli wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you do not have need of innovation? Usually a company with software need to develop new features, reengineering to reduce infrastructure costs and improving performance bottlenecks, maintenance, etc. Do not you have that in your company? And if you do, who is leading those initiatives?

We are not innovating on the core product, which has remained static for many years. Instead, we are pushing adoption through our licensing partnerships. We now have over 250k students using our reading tech through education platforms that we work with. Building more of these partnerships, based on the data we have gathered from our existing partners, is the focus.

Sounds like at that point you're not really a tech company. Your tech might as well be some off-the-shelf stuff as far as you're concerned, if you're not actually working on it any more.

Re: You do need a technical co-founder [video]

#202

Post by waprin »

lainga wrote: post #142
opportune wrote: post #129

Even this article IMO subtly demonstrates the mindset that leads nontechnical founders to not think they need a technical cofounder, by phrasing the search for one as “recruiting” as if they were a subordinate or code monkey. It should be a partner relationship, not a subordinate relationship. This mindset that technical cofounders are essentially “coders” (a term I hate) is very prevalent among inexperienced nontech…

> while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of. I considered it a bit, and you know what, I'd wager that four-fifths of tech business dynamics flow from this statement. Technical expertise is the money printer onto which all manners of value extraction anchor themselves, like barnacles. If not at the creation, then, for a time, it is good. And then it happens anyway 5-10 years down the li…

Technical expertise is very rarely where the core value of a product comes from. If you're really pushing some boundary and just have a better technology product, like original Google or ChatGPT, then sure, tech is your special sauce.

For 99% of software businesses, the tech can cause the business to fail but its almost never what makes the business succeed. Things like customer development and sales are actually far more important.

Its hard to build a well-architected web app that scales, but theres many people who can do a reasonable job at it. But translating that to business value is much harder.

Theres many people can build a React project in a week, fewer who know how to turn that React project into money. That should be self-evident on a site full of people who know how to make a React app, but begrudglingly work for others because they dont know how to turn a React app into money.

The thing about "the business guys" is most of them are actually pretty bad at the business side. And a lot of developers are actually better at the business side, because they have more relevant experience.

The "business guys" get their MBA and learn about merges and acquisitions for billion dollar business and do case studies about how GM optimizes their supply chain, information that's useful in some contexts but mostly entirely useless when it comes to getting your first 100 paying customers for your SaaS.

The developer is actually more likely to have the relevant business skills since they're more likely to have put some sort of SaaS on the internet and tried to get users for it, even if they failed.

I was on YC cofounder matchmaking for a while and was inundated with "business guys" who were just bad at the business side. It didn't bug me that they were non-technical, but their non-technical nature led to some bad business planning. For example, one guy who worked in VC wanted to make a GMail / Superhuman competitor oriented towards VCs. I suggested we start with a Chrome extension for Gmail, he insisted we build an entirely new email stack from scratch for the MVP.

Making a realistic plan is part of making a business plan and his lack of technical acumen made him bad at business.

If someone came to me and said, hey I have a super pared down MVP, it's just 4 screens in Figma with a minimal data model, and I have 100 people who I showed the Figma screens to and they signed up to pay $50 a month, can you build it ? I'd be thrilled to pair up with a "business guy" like that but they are far more rare than a good tech co-founder and the business types that get that far tend to offer things like "founding engineer" instead of actual co-founder because they, somewhat fairly, assume that the skills you're bringing to the table aren't actually that difficult to find.

But to recap, my high level point is that the technical expertise is not really the money printer. The money printer is mapping market demand to technical products, which is a business skill. And that business skill is worth a lot more than technical skills. Its just a type of business skill that you find more often in developers than you do in MBA, and so we don't associate it with "business guys". But it's the most fundamental of all skills to make money from software, other than a handful of "exceptions that prove the rule".

Re: You do need a technical co-founder [video]

#203

Post by [deleted] »

TuringNYC wrote: post #195
opportune wrote: post #129

Even this article IMO subtly demonstrates the mindset that leads nontechnical founders to not think they need a technical cofounder, by phrasing the search for one as “recruiting” as if they were a subordinate or code monkey. It should be a partner relationship, not a subordinate relationship. This mindset that technical cofounders are essentially “coders” (a term I hate) is very prevalent among inexperienced nontech…

>> 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. I get calls weekly from people seeking technical co-founders. The biggest thing most CTO candidates dont realize is the power they have -- unless the "business co-founder" is actually bringing something to the table. I'd LOVE…

[deleted]

Re: You do need a technical co-founder [video]

#204

Post by robocat »

willsmith72 wrote: post #68
DelaneyM wrote: post #47

Corollary: you do not need a non-technical co-founder. My advice to engineers is that it's nearly always easier to learn business/sales than to learn to like a co-founder, especially the type generally drawn to being a "business" founder. It is good to have a co-founder in general though, get one of those if you can. Just don't worry about finding complementary skills, bias entirely towards someone you can work with.

The first stages are just sales. You're just trying to find something people will buy and that means a lot of people time. I've found it rare that engineers will find that natural, it takes a lot of time and discomfort to get good at

> just sales

This sounds like a typical engineer's summary. It is a dismissal - just like the video talks about tech being dismissed.

Recruiting a co-founder is not "just sales". The video is taking about an archetypical salesperson who still can't buy a tech guy (maybe their sales skills are not so good).

Re: You do need a technical co-founder [video]

#205

Post by gary_0 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #180
gary_0 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said, there are different failure modes for purely technical people not understanding business. A common one, I think, is technical people thinking management or business expertise is easy (or even beneath them) because they're so smart in other areas--and any problems they might have can surely be solved with the same tools they use to solve engineering problems, right? Which is kind of the flip side of the a…

The biggest business gap seems to be assuming other people won't screw you over, given enough money on the table and the opportunity. I assume most MBAs already know this. Lots of technical people learn the hard way.

> given enough money on the table and the opportunity.

In my personal experience it was never even that much money. Some people just really want to feel like they've pulled a fast one, even if all they really end up doing is wasting everyone's time. As a nerd who is generally not motivated by Machiavellian shenanigans, I have a hard time seeing these kinds of predators coming.

Re: You do need a technical co-founder [video]

#206

Post by kragen »

distortionfield wrote: post #199
kragen wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes. why would you want the three people doing those three specialized full-time roles to be nontechnical? it seems to me that, given a nontechnical person who's good at one or more of those roles, they'd obviously be even better at it if they also understood the technology. ignorance and incompetence are weaknesses, not strengths as for having some money, the context of this discussion is startups with angel or vc f…

Because good luck finding those three roles where they’re from a technical background? I’ve worked with a grand total of one PM who was from a technical background. He was actually a great engineer but he was absolutely the exception to the rule. Sure, if you can flesh your team out with entirely technical people filling those roles, great for you, but that’s like asking why you wouldn’t only hire 10x engineers. Well…

right, so people who are looking for a cofounder to fill those roles aren't looking for a nontechnical cofounder; they're looking for a cofounder. they may have to accept a nontechnical cofounder, but that's not what they're looking for. that's why there's no advice to be found on finding a nontechnical cofounder

i feel that my first comment in this thread already explained this with perfect clarity and you've just been trolling

Re: You do need a technical co-founder [video]

#207

Post by WendyTheWillow »

TuringNYC wrote: post #195
opportune wrote: post #129

Even this article IMO subtly demonstrates the mindset that leads nontechnical founders to not think they need a technical cofounder, by phrasing the search for one as “recruiting” as if they were a subordinate or code monkey. It should be a partner relationship, not a subordinate relationship. This mindset that technical cofounders are essentially “coders” (a term I hate) is very prevalent among inexperienced nontech…

>> 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. I get calls weekly from people seeking technical co-founders. The biggest thing most CTO candidates dont realize is the power they have -- unless the "business co-founder" is actually bringing something to the table. I'd LOVE…

I have substantially less exposure to this space than you seem to, but even when trying to start projects with friends, this holds true. So often, I get pitched by pals who think the idea is what they've done, and at that point, it's up to me to "code up." What I would love to hear is, "I've been talking with these three businesses already, and they seem interested." or even, "I'm really worried about the sales and marketing side of things, so that's the problem I'm going to focus on."

Nobody's ever come even close to that. It takes zero coding to have those things already started, and yet nobody even goes down that path before looking for a "code monkey."

Re: You do need a technical co-founder [video]

#208

Post by gopher_space »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #75
alfalfasprout wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this is largely true in software engineering in general. Programming is easy. Perhaps being an excellent programmer is much harder but for many things being mediocre is good enough. The hard part is building things sustainably at scale (people wise or performance wise). That's when a combination of knowing how to manage systemic complexity and knowing how to communicate very well (soft skills) really come int…

IMHO the hard part with a startup is you don't want to build something that works sustainably at scale. You want to build something that could plausibly morph into something that is sustainable at scale.

I've started to look at scaling like you're killing a golden-egg-laying goose but there's a 1 in n chance that it'll pay off for you. n starts higher than you'd hope and rises as you make tradeoffs.

I've been thinking about scaling a bit because I've been digging into a large SaaS product for a client and find I am able to replicate their locally relevant output at a fraction of the cost. Scaling up has allowed this SaaS to serve an entire country but a majority of their user base think in terms of one or two local counties. Consuming their output means subsidizing work they do that's irrelevant to (or might actually compete with) your own interests.

Re: You do need a technical co-founder [video]

#209

Post by robocat »

anovikov wrote: post #40

That's explainable, Dunning-Kruger effect. Whole custom development industry is based on it. Otherwise it will never exist as there are whole agencies with 20-30 year history that never seen a tiny bit of what they produced working in production: everything is a throwaway paid for by these would-be founders. It's like clouds: AWS exists because enough stupid people don't understand available hosting options and can't…

Using Dunning-Kruger as an explaination is a very Dunning-Kruger thing to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38415252

Re: You do need a technical co-founder [video]

#210

Post by puniaviision »

waprin wrote: post #202
lainga wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while treating you like an idiot savant they can easily take advantage of. I considered it a bit, and you know what, I'd wager that four-fifths of tech business dynamics flow from this statement. Technical expertise is the money printer onto which all manners of value extraction anchor themselves, like barnacles. If not at the creation, then, for a time, it is good. And then it happens anyway 5-10 years down the li…

Technical expertise is very rarely where the core value of a product comes from. If you're really pushing some boundary and just have a better technology product, like original Google or ChatGPT, then sure, tech is your special sauce. For 99% of software businesses, the tech can cause the business to fail but its almost never what makes the business succeed. Things like customer development and sales are actually far…

This whole comment was beautiful.

Especially this part:

"But to recap, my high level point is that the technical expertise is not really the money printer. The money printer is mapping market demand to technical products, which is a business skill. And that business skill is worth a lot more than technical skills. Its just a type of business skill that you find more often in developers than you do in MBA, and so we don't associate it with "business guys". But it's the most fundamental of all skills to make money from software, other than a handful of "exceptions that prove the rule"."

As an ex-shitty business guy, I taught myself how to code thinking that would solve my problems. Nope. Now I'm just a shitty business person and a shitty dev. Forcing myself to do the actual work of talking to customers now.

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