You do need a technical co-founder [video] • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by twelve40 » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 8:35 AM UTC

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've dealt with someone like that once but if they are any good they will never sit around and wait for 6 months. That person hustled very hard, cycled through several upwork teams and CTOs. through ruthless arm twisting kept all the code and underpaid everybody, finally settled on a CTO with 0 self-esteem and slave terms, and ended up building a rather successful company by now.

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

#352

Post by kragen » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 11:50 AM UTC

gkoberger wrote: post #143

kragen wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you need a cofounder but there's no benefit in them being nontechnical

Do you really think there’s no skills or archetypes that are valuable on a founding team that doesn’t involve writing code?

i have never said anything that even vaguely suggests i think that

your attempt to attribute absurd opinions to me is deplorable and repellent

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

#353

Post by kragen » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 12:00 PM UTC

robocat wrote: post #213

kragen wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would you want a nontechnical cofounder to do the pm/marketing/bizdev side of things? a nontechnical person might be able to do those things, but technical ignorance or incompetence are not necessary for them, and aren't even assets; they're just less serious drawbacks there than elsewhere you might genuinely need some nontechnical people in your startup, but if you have some money you can always pay people to co…

You are undervaluing non-tech skills. Ironic given that you are commenting on a vid where tech is undervalued; plus your comments are getting flagged for your communication skills. I suggest you learn not to make the same mistake as those plonker non-tech guys.

to correct your error: nontechnical skills like marketing, grit, forgiveness, and negotiation are far more critical to business success than any technical skill

my single comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38479157 got flagged, i think, for being extremely rude, not for failing to communicate

you are the third person here to incorrectly attribute to me an undervaluing of non-tech skills, but that's on you three, not me; you're just pattern-matching what i said to some kind of stereotype and guessing what kinds of opinions i might hold on questions i haven't talked about. it's as if i had advocated abortion rights and you attacked me for advocating gun control

but i'm not in favor of gun control, and i value non-tech skills very highly. you guessed wrong, and you should be ashamed of yourself for falling into fox-news-style stereotype-based reasoning instead of thinking about what i actually said

the particular communication skill i need in this case is the skill to avoid communicating with people who will ignore what i actually said and substitute something they would prefer to argue with

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

#354

Post by alephnan » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 12:01 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #125

gkoberger wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree, and I say this as a technical founder with no cofounder. Once things start to take off, a majority of the things you deal with are non-technical. There’s so much that goes into building a company, and you really need someone who understands how businesses work and can run G2M. Sure, you can hire for it… but you’ll almost never find someone as invested in it as the founder, and it’s just as important as the…

you need a cofounder but there's no benefit in them being nontechnical

You’re presuming technical problem people have superset of skills of nontechnical people, or you that a company only needs technical skills.

There are very little businesses where the latter is true. For the former, no one can be good at everything.

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

#355

Post by kragen » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 12:11 PM UTC

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…

whoa. these are obvious in retrospect (they're the same ftbfs and saas tricks debian spends most of its time fighting) but i wouldn't have thought to expect them in this context. thank you

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

#356

Post by kragen » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 12:21 PM UTC

23B1 wrote: post #241

kragen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to get from zero to one, which i think is what you're referring to with your 'once you've got to 1' line at the end, you need to first find a market that's at zero; a product/service that doesn't exist. but that isn't enough; then you have to take it to one, a product that does exist. there are three piles here: 1. product categories that are technically feasible and profitable and where products already exist; 2. pr…

> you need a technical cofounder to be able to distinguish between pile 2, which is very small, and pile 3, which is enormous Huh? A technical cofounder doesn't have any sort of monopoly on feasibility, and there's dozens of ways to understand opportunity space, PMF, and all the many other key considerations early-on. As a nontechnical cofounder, what I bring to the table is enough wisdom and experience to get to a s…

> technical cofounder doesn't have any sort of monopoly on feasibility,

it's hard to tell what you're trying to say here, but people with the technical understanding of a field do in fact have a 'monopoly' on understanding what is and isn't technically feasible in that field, to the extent that anyone understands it at all

for some products they also have a 'monopoly' on understanding what products there's a market for in the field. if you're developing a new kind of swiss lathe, your customers are going to buy it, or not, in large part based on technical features like mrr, repeatability, and cycle time. if you don't understand the technical field, not only won't you understand what is technically feasible, you won't understand your product's value proposition. this obviously doesn't apply to mass-market products

in a gold rush, though, selling shovels to gold miners is more reliably profitable than mining gold

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

#357

Post by notahacker » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 12:24 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #264

notahacker wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your product could be boring and useless except to a niche audience, but still a great business opportunity. In that case, people will only work on it for the money, and that is fine. Some ideas are simply harder to sell to potential employees: “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…

Yeah, I think the big difference is that devs might actually [be the only people to] think those sound like interesting problems to work on, whereas making the world a better place through [equivalent jargon in niche logistics/tax/pensions etc] only excites a small number of people who aren't devs, especially if it's not that much of a technical challenge and the hypothetical moat is just sales and business logic. Which leaves money, and unless the founder with the business model hires rather than looking for tech cofounders, it's really only a possibility of future money for working unpaid on something they don't understand on offer...

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

#358

Post by kragen » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 12:29 PM UTC

alephnan wrote: post #354

kragen wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you need a cofounder but there's no benefit in them being nontechnical

You’re presuming technical problem people have superset of skills of nontechnical people, or you that a company only needs technical skills. There are very little businesses where the latter is true. For the former, no one can be good at everything.

what i was saying wasn't either of those, but it's closer to the former: some technical people have a proper superset of the skills of some nontechnical people, because that's kind of the definition of “technical people”

while it is true that nobody is both as good at soccer as lionel messi and as good at programming as jeff dean, you can definitely be good enough at everything to start a company. and lots of people are bad at everything. everyone starts out bad at everything

being bad at programming or biology or whatever the relevant technical field is doesn't make someone good at management or bizdev

so don't look for nontechnical cofounders

just look for cofounders who don't have to be technical

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

#359

Post by kragen » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 12:32 PM UTC

oulu2006 wrote: post #302

kragen wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you need a cofounder but there's no benefit in them being nontechnical

I disagree. I'm the technical co-founder and my co-founder non-technical; he's brought in so many soft skills around process, finance, sales, recruiting, etc.. that I would have (and would still) struggle at to replace. He's also a domain expert in our field so for me it was definitely the right choice to make.

he doesn't sound nontechnical if he's a domain expert in your field, but presumably he would be even better if he also had whatever technical skills you're saying he lacks, not worse

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

#360

Post by j45 » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 12:51 PM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #350

levleontiev wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

It was about non technical founders who don’t give technical founders equal footing for the work they’re doing that they can’t.