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You do need a technical co-founder [video]

ycombinator.com

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

#311

Post by Matticus_Rex »

TuringNYC wrote: post #266
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> 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.

The idea that everything that comes after initial unpaid technical work to get to where you can bring on investment is "all upside and no downside" is so divorced from the reality of anything I've ever seen in any company that I'm having trouble processing it.

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

#312

Post by armatav »

waprin wrote: post #282
TuringNYC wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. 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…

A pitch deck is something you make for investors. I'm not talking about investors, I'm talking about customers. Lots of management consultants can make a pitch deck. Very few can actually find people willing to pay for an MVP of a software product. That was pretty much the point of my post. Most "business" guys are bad at the business side. Making pitch decks and raising funds is not the business side - except in som…

Preach

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

#313

Post by vlod »

thelittlenag wrote: post #163

And here what we need is a business co-founder who can help us crack the nut of getting traction. Sigh.

I think the old manta at here and at YC: "Make something that people want" probably answers that.

A lot of us here have been guilty of building vitamins rather than painkillers.

I speculate lack of traction is an indicator of that.

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

#315

Post by vlod »

TuringNYC wrote: post #300
kragen wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm interested to hear what kinds of things they did and what you did in response. there are probably a lot of good stories there

I'm not the GP, but I know many of the tricks to watch out for: - Offshore partner delivers software, but you dont have any code. Successive rounds of updates become more expensive. You cant walk away because you have none of the code. (Business co-founder has no idea and goes to new partner with binaries expecting updates to be delivered, then gets told they need to start from scratch) - Offshore partner delivers so…

Wow wow wow. I didn't even think that they would be so devious.

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

#316

Post by quickthrower2 »

This is going to age as well as supermarket cheddar. In a year the explosion of nocode and AI driven tools will allow lots of non-technical founders to build great startups. Especially the X for Y ones. No you can’t build a Google, Instagram or Dropbox that way but you can build a business to the point where you can hire a CTO. You can get started without a tech cofounder for many things. All the Uber for X type stuff like Airbnb or that YC one with cleaners for hire a while back are examples.

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

#317

Post by quickthrower2 »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #29

Having started a small business I respect greatly the skills of great sales people and fund raisers and people who are great with people. But I don't respect them when they think they can start a business where they don't take what they actually make seriously and think the product will just work its self out if they sell hard enough.

In am not in Sales but I imagine good at Sales overlaps alot with good at product design/ownership. They are talking to the customer alot. Both the ones who buy a competing product and also buy the one being sold. They probably have done some account management so they know the concerns with onboarding and getting value from the product.

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

#318

Post by TuringNYC »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #311
TuringNYC wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

The idea that everything that comes after initial unpaid technical work to get to where you can bring on investment is "all upside and no downside" is so divorced from the reality of anything I've ever seen in any company that I'm having trouble processing it.

It is a surprisingly common reality for numerous technologists.

That doesnt mean that there arent good situations. I would LOVE to work with business co-founders with these backgrounds

- They already have 10 customers in mind, have done mockups, have done validation with customers, and you can verifiably know that the customers are interested in the technology at a particular price point before you build

- They have a friend/colleague at a key major customer who is willing to be the first customer before the technology is even built, and this can be verified

- They can bring in purchase orders before the technology is built out

- They can bring in conditional purchase orders contingent on some technical milestone

- They can bring in VC to pay technical co-founder for upfront work

- They can get front-row seat with some key industry group or policy-maker with influence

- They have prior verifiable successes (e.g., Steve Jobs, Elon as extreme examples)

All the above are worth gold. What isnt worth gold is someone who wants to sit back and chill while a technologist codes away for six months.

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

#319

Post by quickthrower2 »

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…

The skill here though is the general skill of hiring people to do a job you can’t do yourself. This is a very useful life skill. Have you ever hired an electrician or builder? It is like that.

So if you hire a company to build something think of a way to keep them in check. You could hire an independent person to review their work (like hiring a seperate project manager and architect to work with the builder)

Or you learn the trade a bit and ask lots of hard questions. That fly by night outfit would crumble on asking basic questions because they are not cut out for it. Their happy paths is suckers. As a coder I got sucked into cheap labour coders and never again. Too much skummy stuff going on.

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

#320

Post by gnicholas »

lmm wrote: post #201
gnicholas wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting perspective! So if Dolby had stopped making new versions of its technology and just licensed what it had until people stopped buying it, then it wouldn't have been a tech company? What kind of company would it have been?
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