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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]

#341

Post by halfcat »

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…

> getting your first 100 paying customers for your SaaS

How do I get my first 100 paying customers for my SaaS?

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

#342

Post by sgu999 »

WendyTheWillow wrote: post #207
TuringNYC wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 m…

How do you even find these people? I somehow managed to surround myself with highly technical individuals who are only interested climbing a corporate ladder, not any kind of serious entrepreneurship.

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

#343

Post by jjav »

TuringNYC wrote: post #259
jjav wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this. I've been in many startups but only once as a founder. I was the technical one, the only one with deep expertise in the core business area of the startup. Well, my title was founder. All the other founders were on the board, I was not. All the other founders controlled budget, I did not. So really, despite the words on the offer letter I was just an employee. The founder title granted me the right to work…

>> Well, my title was founder. All the other founders were on the board, I was not. All the other founders controlled budget, I did not. So really, despite the words on the offer letter I was just an employee. The founder title granted me the right to work 90 hour weeks with no help and no support and no budget to hire help. >> At least didn't waste too many years on that one. Firstly, i'm sorry to hear about your si…

> I'm curious why you didnt negotiate harder some time into this.

I guess it comes down to being a techy engineer that doesn't know how to even begin to negotiate confrontationally.

Thus my thought that if I ever consider such a role again I'll find a startup employment lawyer to tell me what to do.

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

#344

Post by csa »

akaljotc wrote: post #332
csa wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is an agency in this context? Successful tech agencies that have been started by people I know: - programming - digital marketing - social media - web development - SEO - data science - AI (this is emerging) The agency is a business that goes to other businesses and offers to solve one or more of their business problems for a fee. Sometimes these fees are one-time payments, sometimes they are recurring, someti…

question(s): would you consider a small saas product in this realm? that is, is there a clear distinction for what could be considered an agency vs a saas product? or is the line blurred in some contexts?

Yeah. If you have a SaaS that has product-market fit, you are way ahead of the game.

Cash cows don’t have to be agencies, but agencies are easier to spin up than a SaaS.

In terms of nomenclature in general, productized consulting is a thing. Whether you can spin a healthy amount of recurring revenue from it depends on the SaaS product.

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

#345

Post by rramadass »

sebmellen wrote: post #80
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.

https://nav.al/build-sell > Bill Gates famously paraphrases this as, “I’d rather teach an engineer marketing, than a marketer engineering.”

Great quote!

Engineers do very well in Leadership/Management/Marketing/Sales/etc. which i consider ancillary domains in the Tech. Industry.

The reason is that Engineering is primarily quantitative and hence Engineers are taught to breakdown their Problems into smaller pieces and solve them one-by-one by using constraining/limiting abstractions so that each piece can be solved and then integrated into a whole.

In Non-Engineering fields this problem-solving approach is never taught and enforced. Most parameters are nebulous/qualitative/interlinked and more heuristics/opinion based with the result that they never learn to break a problem into manageable pieces and solve them one by one.

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

#346

Post by handy2000 »

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…

The worst example of this is the "founding engineer" role. I get a lot of these offers, and it just feels like a scam every single time. Founders often sell that as some incredible opportunity, zero-to-one, full codebase ownership, huge scope, no eng team, etc, etc. All of that for an amazing 1% equity.

So yeah, the expectation is that I will build the whole project, drive product decisions, help hiring the rest of the eng staff, spend the next 1-2 years basically working on this project 24/7. They keep 99% and I get 1%. Great, thanks.

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

#347

Post by levleontiev »

gnicholas wrote: post #335
j45 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the years, when I meet a non-technical founder looking for a technical founder, I ask them if they're ok owning as little of the startup that they offer to the technical person, until they can deliver sales. Technical people, in large do deliver a product and something that works. It might not be what the market wants, or the right thing, but speed of iteration, is again technical, and something the technical fo…

This is an interesting idea — variable vesting based on milestones. It would be a great way to reduce risk, though of course there are issues that could arise that would make this complicated. For example, if the technical person vests based on hitting certain product-related goals, does he get penalized if part of the dev team gets hired by another company, which makes it harder for him to hit the milestones? Or for…

>does he get penalized if part of the dev team gets hired by another company, which makes it harder for him to hit the milestones?

Of course yes. The part of executive responsibility is to maintain the team and calculate the riscs .

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

#348

Post by twelve40 »

handy2000 wrote: post #346
TuringNYC wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

The worst example of this is the "founding engineer" role. I get a lot of these offers, and it just feels like a scam every single time. Founders often sell that as some incredible opportunity, zero-to-one, full codebase ownership, huge scope, no eng team, etc, etc. All of that for an amazing 1% equity. So yeah, the expectation is that I will build the whole project, drive product decisions, help hiring the rest of t…

to be fair, if they took investment, it's rarely 99%, cuz investors took a chunk, and a pool of stock gets set aside for future employees, etc. But if the there isn't even any funding yet then 1% is just stupidity.

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

#349

Post by mtizim »

csa wrote: post #297
mtizim wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Could you name some (not commonly known ways to get fuck you money)? To clarify, I put “fuck you money” at about $10m-$20m. This amount enables a relatively comfortable life in perpetuity without touching the principal. The ways are all commonly known, but they aren’t commonly followed. tl;dr — it’s boring. As a tech person: 1. Learn sales. 2. Learn business operations. 3. Solve business problems, possibly using te…

Thank you. I don't know if it's for me, but doesn't look that boring.

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

#350

Post by gnicholas »

levleontiev wrote: post #347
gnicholas wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting idea — variable vesting based on milestones. It would be a great way to reduce risk, though of course there are issues that could arise that would make this complicated. For example, if the technical person vests based on hitting certain product-related goals, does he get penalized if part of the dev team gets hired by another company, which makes it harder for him to hit the milestones? Or for…

>does he get penalized if part of the dev team gets hired by another company, which makes it harder for him to hit the milestones? Of course yes. The part of executive responsibility is to maintain the team and calculate the riscs .

Oh sure, but if the reason the employees were poached was because the non-technical founder refused to pay the dev employees more, then whose fault is it?
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