261–270 of 381 posts
The first non-founder employees of a company usually end up with the worst deal financially. Take that into account if you're the technical guy working for the startup.
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Could you name some (not commonly known ways to get fuck you money)? As a young tech guy doing stuff in startup spaces, I'm genuinely interested. Of course, "no silver bullet", especially to make big money, but I'm curious, from the perspective of someone who'd place around 1.3 on the spectrum you described.
The easiest way to get fuck you money is to reduce your consumption.
If you work at a very high paying job in finance or at a place like Google or FB, I might agree with this. Some people in those groups make a lot and spend a lot (sometimes more than they make).
For people with more modest salaries, I think that this is tragically wrong for fuck you money, but probably right for relatively modest “nest egg” money.
There is a limit to how much a person can gain by cutting, but that same person is essentially uncapped in earning potential.
The easiest way to get fuck you money is to start a business that solves business problems. Knowing sales, business operations, and tech is a relatively easy way to access this market. Not easy overall, but relatively easy compared to other options that lead to fuck you money.
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> 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…
I STRONGLY disgree with your take as a universal take. At the pre-Seed stage, the technology is the only thing. Without that, you dont have a technical business. You just have a pitch deck.
Of course, once you prove out the idea and reach product market fit, that enables you to either have cashflow or raise funding -- so technology becomes less critical because you can use the $ to hire technologists.
If "mapping market demand to technical products" was really the money printer, every management consultant would be running a unicorn. Every MBB consultant would have a side startup. You actually need the technical product, or some MVP of it, to map a market demand to it, to do demos, to raise funding. If you dont, you just have a pitch deck. Sure, if you can raise on a pitch deck, that is winning, but how many can?
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That doesn't seem relevant. A co-founder isn't part of your market or audience.
That's why the willingness of a software developer to drop everything to work with you might not necessarily signal anything wrong with your vision. If you can't find a single software developer who believes in your plan for better APIs or project management tools or consumer internet apps, it's a pretty good heuristic that your vision or ability to sell it sucks, or that you add less value than the dozen other peopl…
“We’re making the world a better place through paxos algorithms for consensus protocols.”
“We’re making the world a better place though software defined data centers for cloud computing.”
“We’re making the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between end points.”
“We’re making the world a better place through scalable, fault tolerant distributed databases with acid transactions.”
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I've been burnt multiple times by this. I think they believe in the "Build it and they will come" and then they just coordinate and tell you what to do afterwards, rather than making hundreds of cold calls (i.e. grinding).
>> I've been burnt multiple times by this. I've similarly had so many technical friends burnt by this. My new suggestion for "business co-founders" pitching ideas to technical friends where "business co-founders" propose techies do all the upfront work is -- If you have no Purchase Orders, no Funding, no Transact-able Relationships, no prior wins (esp publicly verifiable wins) -- then you put in money. Find some reas…
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> Technical expertise is the money printer onto which all manners of value extraction anchor themselves, like barnacles. An even easier way to look at this is in general: Business people somehow don’t understand that the value comes from the labour
The other parts of the business are labor as well. Products don't magically go to market. Business models don't magically create and evolve themselves.
You are right, but it is about which labor comes first. The first labor is taking 100% of the risk without others taking any risk. Others have all upside and no downside. They have a free-option for the upside as the technologist does all the upfront work.
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I've been burnt multiple times by this. I think they believe in the "Build it and they will come" and then they just coordinate and tell you what to do afterwards, rather than making hundreds of cold calls (i.e. grinding).
>> I've been burnt multiple times by this. I've similarly had so many technical friends burnt by this. My new suggestion for "business co-founders" pitching ideas to technical friends where "business co-founders" propose techies do all the upfront work is -- If you have no Purchase Orders, no Funding, no Transact-able Relationships, no prior wins (esp publicly verifiable wins) -- then you put in money. Find some reas…
That's a good way to put it. I'll remember that. Thanks!
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…
This is pretty well said. I tend to agree and as a founder of multiple companies, as a well an engineering-background co-founder myself, I have definitely had interactions with "non-technical" founders looking for people (like me) and totally got the vibe of the needing a "technical co-founder" because they just need some "coder" as if that's the missing key to success (or whatever). That said, there are plenty of ve…
Agree, I think business co-founders can add tremendous value. But that value needs to be shown -- upfront. Otherwise, why would any technologist sink hundreds of hours on a mere promise? Business co-founders should have already drawn out solutions, spoken to customers, perhaps gotten conditional sales POs from friends/contacts, raised funding, set up VC meetings, etc.
But a Business co-founder who hasnt done any of these, and just wants the upside after a bunch of technical work is done, isnt the type of Business co-founder you want.
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.
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Maybe. Those posts offer preposterously low equity, so I wonder whom it is supposed to attract. Suckers? Y Combinator sincerely wants people to succeed, I don’t think it’s reactionary or myopic like that. That said, to fill whatever hundreds of spots nowadays, they’ve exhausted Math 55, it graduates all of 12 people every year. They’re dipping into a far greater supply of nepo babies than ever before. Those jagoffs c…
What’s Math 55?