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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]

#71

Post by dontupvoteme »

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…

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.

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

#72

Post by skummetmaelk »

bob88jg wrote: post #61
gnicholas wrote: post #41

This is generally true. I had a technical cofounder for the first 4 years or so, but once our tools were built it was less clear what his ongoing role would be. This is because at that point, our focus turned to licensing our (patented) technology to businesses. We still have B2C customers who use the tools that he originally built (and which have been updated by contractors after he left), but now the vast majority…

What so the person who "provided a lot of value in getting us to where we are" got ditched in the end? Is that your story? Use people and then chuck them to the curb once everything u need has been extracted?

Classic suit brain.

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

#73

Post by gnicholas »

bob88jg wrote: post #61
gnicholas wrote: post #41

This is generally true. I had a technical cofounder for the first 4 years or so, but once our tools were built it was less clear what his ongoing role would be. This is because at that point, our focus turned to licensing our (patented) technology to businesses. We still have B2C customers who use the tools that he originally built (and which have been updated by contractors after he left), but now the vast majority…

What so the person who "provided a lot of value in getting us to where we are" got ditched in the end? Is that your story? Use people and then chuck them to the curb once everything u need has been extracted?

Absolutely not — he vested founder's shares just like me. And then I continued to work with no salary and no additional vesting for years after that. Also, I was working full-time while he was working nights/weekends.

Perhaps don't assume the worst?

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

#74

Post by cmrdporcupine »

threeseed wrote: post #39
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.

History has shown them to be right. There are many terrible products in this world that were successful only because of good sales and marketing. And vice versa.

It's just survivorship bias though. There's also boatloads of startups that had crap product and just died right away, and we don't talk about them.

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

#75

Post by bcrosby95 »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #51
atoav wrote: post #4

This is what I constantly tell my students: The hard part about doing a tech product for the most part isn't the what beginners think makes tech hard — the hard part is wrangling systemic complexity in a good, sustainable and reliable way. Many non-tech people e.g. look at programmers and think the hard part is knowing what this garble of weird text means. But this is the easy part. And if you are a person who would…

I mean, this is largely true in software engineering in general. Programming is easy. Perhaps being an excellent programmer is much harder but for many things being mediocre is good enough. The hard part is building things sustainably at scale (people wise or performance wise). That's when a combination of knowing how to manage systemic complexity and knowing how to communicate very well (soft skills) really come int…

IMHO the hard part with a startup is you don't want to build something that works sustainably at scale. You want to build something that could plausibly morph into something that is sustainable at scale.

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

#78

Post by gnicholas »

ChrisCinelli wrote: post #64
gnicholas wrote: post #41

This is generally true. I had a technical cofounder for the first 4 years or so, but once our tools were built it was less clear what his ongoing role would be. This is because at that point, our focus turned to licensing our (patented) technology to businesses. We still have B2C customers who use the tools that he originally built (and which have been updated by contractors after he left), but now the vast majority…

So you do not have need of innovation? Usually a company with software need to develop new features, reengineering to reduce infrastructure costs and improving performance bottlenecks, maintenance, etc. Do not you have that in your company? And if you do, who is leading those initiatives?

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.

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

#79

Post by doctorpangloss »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #16

There have been multiple ads/posts recently from companies citing YC__ looking for a technical cofounder. So, is this post correlated?

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 can’t do anything - not programming, let alone sales - so whom is this advice really for? Those companies will “succeed” anyway, I mean they won’t fail. You can make a ton of money as a technical cofounder, but for the minimally intellectually stimulating problems of some moron's meaningless app, for that moron to get all the glory? Just to polish life off by marrying your subordinate and sending the kids to Day School? And shoveling all that money right back into meaningless angel investments?

This is a stylized comment of course, but it's just to say, yeah, you need a technical co-founder, really easy for Y Combinator to say. I too would like extremely talented people to give everything and take nothing.

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

#80

Post by sebmellen »

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.”

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