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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]

#91

Post by 23B1 »

This is dated. There's no rules to founding your own company.

As a non-technical founder I can

A) Get a technical cofounder which takes me weeks to find, dilutes my ownership, and with whom I have no recourse if their work is sub-par (or we end up just not liking/trusting/vibing with each other)

or

B) Build an MVP with any number of offshoring partners in a matter of weeks and for far cheaper (money, time, opportunity cost). If I don't like the work, we can modify the contract, or I can quickly pivot to another team.

This is also true for technical founders as well, to be clear. You can probably do a lot of the business stuff by outsourcing. You can worry about gelling a team once you've got to 1.

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

#92

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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…

There is a weird local optimisation problem where being an excellent programmer can make one a bad software engineer. (Another: unparalleledly excellent Excel skills making one a worse financier.)

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

#93

Post by WhitneyLand »

ginkgotree wrote: post #84
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.

Second this. I worked in Sales Engineering for 5 years, ended that career selling a $25MM solution to the CEO of a fortune 100. There is no secret sauce, and it is all learnable. The key skills are interpersonal. I know its hard to do as an engineer, but most of (enterprise) sales is shutting the F up, listening, carefully listening, earning trust, and learning to navigate stakeholders and what their potential incent…

I think sometimes the salary market would disagree with that.

At many companies a sales engineer can make more money than a developer.

Personally I think it’s too nuanced a question to answer generally. Depending on who it is and the context “the right” person in either role can make all the difference.

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

#94

Post by notahacker »

gnicholas wrote: post #58
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.

This is more likely to be true where you are selling to other technical people. But it becomes much less likely to be true when you are selling B2C, or to non-technical businesspeople. And of course, the ability of a technical person to learn sales varies quite a bit. Some technical folks pick it up easily, but others do not (or find important non-technical bits like fundraising and sales to be very distasteful/annoy…

And of course the reverse is true. Some "business people" can pick up a huge amount about UX, client priorities, process automation and what is and isn't technically possible and make useful product management contributions even if they never touch the codebase, and some simply aren't interested in that level of implementation detail even if they're really good at selling the big picture and someone really needs to get a handle on that side of the business.

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

#95

Post by gnulinux »

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…

This is what I always say. In college/studying you learn programming, CS, algorithms etc. Once you're a software engineer, you realize that programming, CS, algorithms etc are the easiest part of your job. If the code is too hard for you you're most definitely losing on other things. It sounds very obvious, but think about it, part of being a good software engineer is that programming should be trivial.

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

#96

Post by BadCookie »

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?

Do you mean the “founding engineer” jobs? It can be misleading, but those are not founder roles. They are regular employee roles where the “founding” part of the title is just an honorary indication that the person joined the company early.

YC won’t count someone as a founder unless they have at least 10% equity in the company. Founding engineers are typically getting 2% or less (from what I understand).

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

#97

Post by jmcphers »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #92
alfalfasprout wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is a weird local optimisation problem where being an excellent programmer can make one a bad software engineer. (Another: unparalleledly excellent Excel skills making one a worse financier.)

I've seen this so many times in my career. It happens because interviews (especially at the junior level) focus almost exclusively on line-by-line programming acumen. People who excel at those interviews don't always make great software engineers, and sometimes they make terrible ones.

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

#98

Post by gnicholas »

bob88jg wrote: post #83
gnicholas wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I assumed he got some $$$ - but did he want to be removed or did you tell him he was no longer needed? Was he just as sure that he was no longer needed as u were?

He was the one who walked. He still has his shares, of course.

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

#99

Post by gnicholas »

danjc wrote: post #90
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.

Hate to tell you this but a business cannot thrive if it doesn't innovate. At best, you'll ride on your momentum for a while.

If we were riding on momentum I would expect our revenue to be stable/shrinking, not growing (as it is). I agree that in the long term this is true, but when you start as a tiny speck, you can grow for a long time as awareness spreads. For example, we started our in education and are now getting interest from news/media organizations. This is without changing the core functionality at all.
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