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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]

#231

Post by Yeroc »

FuckButtons wrote: post #154
simonw wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the way you put this. It also doubles as a great explanation for why programmers shouldn't be worried that ChatGPT is going to steal their jobs: ChatGPT is good at the garble of weird text, but it's terrible at the "wrangling systemic complexity in a good, sustainable and reliable way" piece.

You know what computers couldn’t do 10 years ago? Understand and write coherent code. Why do you feel confident in your opinion that they won’t be able to do that in the next 10 years?

What we describe as common sense isn't actually common. That is, over-hyped things like microservice architectures saturate the Internet. Since content of the Internet is generally what will become content for LLMs etc it stands to reason they'll be similarly biased towards hype.

Yes, it's certainly possible for content to be curated and models to become biased in other ways but...

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

#232

Post by manicennui »

syrusakbary wrote: post #197

I'm a technical founder working in a deep-tech startup. If I am completely honest, I think the recommendation of having a technical cofounder while useful for startups in the past might not be as useful for the startups of the future. Why? I strongly believe AI will cause a paradigm shift, and I'll adventure stating that AI will make non-technical people be able to do more and more with less. Which will make the requ…

Comments like this make it difficult to take the HN community seriously.

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

#233

Post by csa »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #216
csa wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lik…

I wonder where Sam Altman would (objectively) fit and where he and others think he fits.

Great question, and I thought about mentioning Sam specifically.

First, these nice little boxes I made are somewhat arbitrary and imperfect. That said, they have a use.

Sam is currently a 3 imho, but he has enough tech chops to be able to work with 2s effectively. I think any sufficiently large tech company, especially if the tech is complex and/or consumer-oriented, needs at least one 2 and one 3. OAI is a great example of this.

I’m pretty sure Sam can’t do any of the AI work on his own, but he knows enough (or learned enough) to be able to empathize with the AI leads, clear roadblocks for them, and otherwise support their work in an effective manner.

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

#234

Post by 23B1 »

nurple wrote: post #133
23B1 wrote: post #91

This is dated. There's no rules to founding your own company. As a non-technical founder I can A) Get a technical cofounder which takes me weeks to find, dilutes my ownership, and with whom I have no recourse if their work is sub-par (or we end up just not liking/trusting/vibing with each other) or B) Build an MVP with any number of offshoring partners in a matter of weeks and for far cheaper (money, time, opportunit…

Heh, good luck. As a tech cofounder, I attempted to do just this and I have extensive development and management experience. It was a nightmare, EVERY SINGLE offshoring company tried to play us as a group that didn't know their stuff, and when put to the iron they couldn't produce anything that would stand up--technically--against a mild sneeze. If I hadn't been there, my other founders would have gotten up to their…

Sorry you've had those experiences, but mine have been consistently profitable and pleasant. I think a big part of that was that I asked around before I selected an offshore partner, instead of just choosing the cheapest or the first.

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

#235

Post by darajava »

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…

What term do you prefer over “coder”? I’ve had this issue with pretty much any term for what I essentially do. I don’t like “developer”, “programmer”, “techie”, “IT… guy”? (The last two being particularly bad)

Even “engineer” is a bit strange to me and I feel it doesn’t really fit, so I actually never knew what to call myself.

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

#236

Post by esafak »

gedy wrote: post #108
jeremyjh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish I'd read this 25 years ago, but probably I wouldn't have believed any of it.

I don’t know, I’ve mostly followed this approach over my 20 year career, but it really depends on your surroundings, and honestly hasn’t led to great success. E.g. If you’re surrounded by yes men who will code whatever without question, product people greatly prefer that, and you end up sidelined. There’s also plenty of companies who don’t want engineers getting involved with decisions, and product and UX people work…

I wonder how you could open up product development to the whole company (including engineers) without the product organization getting overwhelmed?

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

#237

Post by syrusakbary »

manicennui wrote: post #232
syrusakbary wrote: post #197

I'm a technical founder working in a deep-tech startup. If I am completely honest, I think the recommendation of having a technical cofounder while useful for startups in the past might not be as useful for the startups of the future. Why? I strongly believe AI will cause a paradigm shift, and I'll adventure stating that AI will make non-technical people be able to do more and more with less. Which will make the requ…

Comments like this make it difficult to take the HN community seriously.

How so? If you think I'm missing something important, I'd love to hear it!

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

#238

Post by 23B1 »

ilc wrote: post #183
23B1 wrote: post #91

This is dated. There's no rules to founding your own company. As a non-technical founder I can A) Get a technical cofounder which takes me weeks to find, dilutes my ownership, and with whom I have no recourse if their work is sub-par (or we end up just not liking/trusting/vibing with each other) or B) Build an MVP with any number of offshoring partners in a matter of weeks and for far cheaper (money, time, opportunit…

Honestly as a technical guy: You come off as greedy. As a technical founder, I face the EXACT same risks. What if the business guy can't drum up money? What if he can't sell the damn pen. Most companies fail, the strongest firms will have strong business and technical people. If you want to stand on one leg. Go for it. You'll piss your money away overseas. When you need someone to help you get across that line... the…

I just mitigate as much risk as I can, as early as I can, and it's worked so far. Tech is littered with hundreds of companies that died because of personality conflicts - which can be readily mitigated with an MSA and SOW.

As I note in my original comment, my approach can absolutely be utilized by technical founders.

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

#239

Post by waprin »

puniaviision wrote: post #210
waprin wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Thanks!

I'm in a similar boat. I'm not lecturing anyone having learned from success but having learned from failure.

I just spent an entire year spent building software products and they almost all failed. I wrote a long retro (too long, not edited, more for myself than for others, but if curious: https://www.billprin.com/notes/one-year-retro ) and the #1 cause of failure I wrote down was not doing enough talking to customers and customer development.

The one project I have that has a tiny bit of recurring revenue was not originally a project I had set out to build. I cold-DMed some people in a Facebook group and pitched a different project, and one guy told me he didn't like what I built but might pay if I built something different in the same space. And that was the only product I have thats worked. Goes to show the obvious - talk to users!

I see a lot of indie hackers talk about "audience building", and my initial read of that the purpose was that if you get a ton of followers on Twitter, then when you launch a product, you have a bunch of people ready to sign up. Increasingly, I'm thinking the much bigger value of audience building is that it's easier to get people to tell you what to build in the first place.

So yeah, customer development is not some magical thing that requires you to be a "business guy" or anything else, but it's hard, it's important, and sounds like we both need to do more of it :)

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

#240

Post by gnicholas »

happydev wrote: post #230

When I met my current cofounder he was paying $5,000/month to a dev agency in Eastern Europe that was ripping him off with slow progress, inflated hours, and very poor quality code. Their developer was brand new to the tech stack and made many glaring mistakes. As a non-technical founder he had no way to judge the quality of their work, he was completely at their mercy and they took advantage of him. I do not know ho…

For sure. I'm a non-technical startup CEO but did two years of CS in college. Also, my product is on the simple side, from a technical perspective. These two facts have definitely helped as I've overseen dev work and brainstormed new product ideas. If you've never done any coding, it's hard to know what is relatively easy versus relatively hard. I'm still not perfect, but at least I don't make the completely uninformed mistakes that I would make if I'd not done a little 'hello world'-ing of my own.
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