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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]

#361

Post by kragen »

vlod wrote: post #315
TuringNYC wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

these can even happen through accident or inattention, though in this case malice is more likely

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

#362

Post by 23B1 »

kragen wrote: post #356
23B1 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 f…

Nothing you just described requires an entanglement with full-time technical cofounder. I could get a ROM estimate on, say, your lathe from a product design/engineering firm for a few thousand bucks, use that as PRD + go/no-go, then take it to prototype/evt/dvt/pvt with any number of experienced partners on contract.

Don't know why we're having this argument. Outsourcing is a very common thing.

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

#363

Post by singhrac »

vlod wrote: post #212
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'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 get a lot of inbound in this form and after the first disaster I'm much more aware of what a nontechnical founder needs to be doing. I think part of the problem is that they imagine themselves as having CEO responsibilities at the start (e.g. setting vision, hiring, etc.). But that's not what a nontechnical founder does on day 1. On day 1 they are the sales rep, QA, point-of-contact, and customer interviewer. They are every entry level position at the same time, because that's what the company needs.

The big smell here is offering not-equal equity to technical cofounders who join early (first year). YC's proposed solution for later joining cofounders is just to give them equal equity but start their vest later, which I find very incentive aligning. The usual explanation is that they've done all the "market research + product/idea development" already, which is useless.

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

#364

Post by jjeaff »

choppaface wrote: post #53
oooyay wrote: post #36

I like Michael's take that the real value in a founder is their ability to recruit the right team. What I don't think was said explicitly here is that typically technical people are progressively marginalized as the business grows. We get some harrowing stories where that doesn't happen, but I don't think that's the standard story. Like they allude to, it's a story of what the people who handle the money and investme…

> typically technical people are progressively marginalized as the business grows I know three YC technical co-founders who were ousted by their CEOs, and a justintv alumn who got nothing from the follow-on exits. When YC says “you need a technical co-founder” they mean it like you need a disposable lawyer. The essay here is about targeting growth and flipping, not high-performance teamwork.

This does seem to be the pattern. I was a technical cofounder in one startup (not YC), even though I do have the chops and experience as a startup CEO. You have to focus so much on the tech and tech hiring early on that you are left out of a lot of the deal making and fund raising. It seems to slide you over into the same bucket as early employees pretty quickly.

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

#365

Post by gnicholas »

rramadass wrote: post #345
sebmellen wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

I would say the reason is actually that teaching engineering requires first teaching a good deal of math and software development, which most marketers don't have (though well-educated ones may have some). Teaching marketing doesn't have as many dependencies that are rare in the general population.

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

#366

Post by jschveibinz »

TuringNYC wrote: post #287
jschveibinz wrote: post #158

I'd like add to this conversation this two other important facts: 1) you (or your partner) do need domain experience and expertise. If you want open a bakery, or even try to automate a bakery, you really need at least some commercial baking experience. I see so many folks pitching a product in an area where they have zero experience. 2) you (or your partner) do need some organizational and/or business management expe…

>> 1) you (or your partner) do need domain experience and expertise. If you want open a bakery, or even try to automate a bakery, you really need at least some commercial baking experience. I see so many folks pitching a product in an area where they have zero experience. I'd love to deep-dive into your example. Lets say this is the case. Suppose you are the technical co-founder coding for 80hrs/wk. Does the baker al…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14070135

Prior discussion on 80 hours a week.

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

#367

Post by dontupvoteme »

Satam wrote: post #101
dontupvoteme wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're (probably) rapidly shifting to a reality where your biggest value will be Agentifying as many things as you can. Even if it's mediocre, it's basically free, and has almost no costs. Compare that to the incalculable potential switching costs of us meatbags and our many non-linearities.

Hmmm, an extremely interesting thought! Basically, agentifying might be the next programming. Do you have a guess how that would play out or how likely that might be? It seems like the main blocker here would be if the agents remain relatively weak in pure reasoning.

I have no clue how it will play out, but Autogen looks like it's going down the right path + has MS behind it.

I am able to get some pretty nice ideas out of LLMs by gaslighting them into larping as tenured professors at .

I haven't really tested yet if using actual people's names helps or hurts.

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

#368

Post by handy2000 »

twelve40 wrote: post #348
handy2000 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get those too. Even if the founders gave away 10-20% to investors, actually building the project under the "management" of inexperienced founders and getting 1% doesn't seem like a fair deal. At this early stage when there is not even a product, hiring a founding engineer is a cheap way to sidestep the need for a technical co-founder who would be entitled for a much larger share of the company. The responsibilities are vast, I can't see that being worth 80-99x less than the contribution the founders make.

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

#369

Post by robocat »

kragen wrote: post #353
robocat wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

> to correct your error

Condescending and rude. I made no error.

> abortion rights > gun control

Wow - that's an irrelevant tangent. HN guidelines are to avoid flamebait and politics.

> why would you want a nontechnical cofounder to do the pm/marketing/bizdev side of things?

This is what my comment relates to. It seems to me that you are dismissing the potential value of a non-tech co-founder. A co-founder is not telling the dev what to do. Partners whos skills complement each other. I helped co-found a successful business with 4 founders: 1 sales, 1 BA, and 2 dev - although we were all tech types with far wider skills than the stereotypes of the labels I used suggest.

To be clear: some people don't need a non-tech co-founder, but I have seen devs try to start businesses where I felt the devs would have done better partnering up with non-dev co-founders. Also if one can't sell a business to a high-value co-founder, then my guess is one likely lacks the skills to be successful.

> 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

I am replying because I felt you ignored what I said, and you substituted something you preferred to argue with.

I'm not trying to change your mind - I'm just trying to explain how your comments come across to me - it is about me not you. I'm not trolling to make you angry - HN is not for that and why waste your time or mine. All good.

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