70 First Co-Founder Dates(abeclark.substack.com) |
70 First Co-Founder Dates(abeclark.substack.com) |
OK. I don't deny these people exists, and admittedly, I have a B2B point of view.
But early, cold B2B sales is hell and i have deep admiration for anyone doing it well.
By far the biggest risk of early stage startups is to build something great, that nobody wants. And in my experience the risk of that increases by a good amount with 2 technical founders.
I say this as a technical person as well (as i guess 99.999% of people here are)
I've seen way too many cases where technical cofounders just believe that someone that can use the right buzzwords is as good as any other, and then end up with a defunct sales pipeline. Or you can end up with someone that is great at selling their skills and charisma to technical founders, or even VCs but what you need to convince said people is different than convincing, say, retail executives. The same guy that might be great at raising your seed round, or your series A, might not really be successful at convincing early customers, or knowing what you have to change in your product to be better for said sales. This can fail later too: I have seen companies with a series B, 20+ people in product design and sales, that might not get sales to their name in two years, and then there are major layoffs that don't cut a single salesman, because said sales team's top skill was selling their competence to the executive team.
So it's not that it's easy to be good at sales or product in an early startup, but that interviewing for that is really hard, and that by the time you know whether someone is good or not, your startup is probably in trouble. If this wasn't the case, we'd see far more success in B2B than we see.
If these people are also your customers, it's actually extremely valuable to have someone who speaks that language on your sales team.
Obviously they need to have more than just the ability to speak the buzzwords. You need to ensure they're aligned with your goals and not simply trying to talk their way into extracting as much money from your company as possible.
But if you're selling to the B2B buzzword companies, you're going to struggle without someone who can speak the B2B buzzword language.
I know several non-technical founders of multi-hundred-million / billion dollar startups. Common thread is that these people are really knowledgeable about a particular industry or subject (ie. sewer inspection, restaurant bulk food ordering, mortgage underwriting). The combo of someone who intimately understands the pain points of an industry partnered with a technical founder is a good one.
Bringing on the right business partner is crucial.
One takeaway I found from my experience, using a combination of linkedin and ycombinator co-founder match is just how many non-technical think you are going to be an employee. One meeting was basically 10 minutes of me pitching my idea, then 20 minutes of them asking if I was interested in contract work on an idea that was a year in with no progress. One guy was even like, "look, i need a coder, I can pay you x", not a great way to end a co-founder date.
This is why I limited the meetings to 30min and made sure to ask explicitly about what they are looking for.
If they phrase it as "early employee" or "head of eng" or anything other than cofounder, you're looking at a relationship where you are paid for your time, not respected as a cofounder
89% Male (Clearly a problem!)
As a guess, women are uncomfortable with cofounder dating because too many of them have been burned by men trying to turn it into actual dating.
I don't know how to solve such problems but I feel like that is a big hitch for women in business: How to keep it all business and not have it turn into some issue because some guy thinks you are hot.
> 89% Male (Clearly a problem!)
That's not a problem. That's a massive opportunity. For women, and for people to step up.
Are they currently here on HN, which was around 98 percent male when I originally joined more than twelve years ago? Perhaps they would be so kind as to participate in this discussion, speak for themselves and clue me as to how to get shit done as a woman in a man's world.
Please and thank you. Much obliged.
Unfortunately, we did not proceed. See, I have a family to provide for. I'm in my 40s. I'm not looking for or to build the next unicorn. What I'm looking for is the opportunity to build a consistent, stable, and yes evolving product that produces reliable baseline revenue, targeting reasonable growth. The founder wanted to work immediately towards unicorn status, with cofounders taking in a salary that was approximately half of what my current income stream provided. She is in her early 30s without dependents. For her, this is a reasonable risk that provides a good lifestyle. For me, that was an unthinkable risk to the detriment of my family, including young children in day care. She also wanted to build out a small engineering team paying roughly 60% of market rate - in this hiring environment. What that would mean was a team of inexperience or heading offshore, both of which were non-starters for me.
All in all, I think she got some really bad advice from her SV peers. Her idea could have easily generated 100k MRR with a moderate amount of effort. I couldn't even put a number on the immense value of the data she would have been amassing as a side-effect of her idea. Our personalities were a match, we had the same philosophies and ideology was similar enough as to not provide room for conflict. We both thought the idea had incredible merit.
At the end of the day, it was a generational divide that proved too large to overcome.
They continue going on meeting after meeting, looking for a mark. Meanwhile, the genuinely good non-technical (or technical, for that matter) co-founders are quickly selected out of the pool.
It's the same reason that you're far more likely to encounter someone who can't FizzBuzz during interviews than you are as a coworker: The developers who can't do the job are doing 10-50X more interviews than the developers who are good at their job, so you're going to see far more unemployable devs than employable devs with a random sampling of interviews even though most devs are employable.
While it’s true technical people have a higher floor and can’t get by on bullshit, many strong technical people are terrible founders for a variety of reasons.
However building a successful startup requires a certain kind of hustle and resourcefulness that is not limited to technical folks. We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water due to all the “idea guy” wannabes flooding the space. Someone who can sell, someone who can hustle, someone with strong charisma and story-telling skills—these are incredibly valuable traits that can form an amazing complement to a technical founder that wants to focus on building.
That would be the most painful part of all this for me. If I were forming a startup, I don't think I would consider pairing with someone non-technical. My personal idea of hell is having a bunch of marketing people spew buzzwords while I write and debug all the code.
Furthermore, the best fit might be someone who is not on the cofounder market, that way I might be able to recruit them first.
Interesting approach by OP. As a technical founder I am similarly taking the approach of meeting as many people as I can and sharing, building in public, being helpful, but not with the frame of cofounder dating. If we really vibe with someone, then we can take it further. Meanwhile I make progress on my idea that I find meaningful.
Good luck on your journey, Abe!
I definitely agree with this. I feel fortunate to have met a few people that seem like they could be a great fit, but we are still early.
It takes time and working together to really ensure a great cofounder pair.
The experiment will continue!
Made me think of https://dilbert.com/strip/2015-09-11
The vast majority of the engineer/non-engineer speed dates that I remember from the Cambridge University entrepreneurship scene were basically versions of this.
The other type was "A: Hi, nice to meet you! I have a great idea for a startup. Would you like to join me in implementing my idea?" "B: No! Because I have a better idea for a startup. Would you like to forget about your idea and instead join me in implementing my idea?" "A: No thanks, I still like my idea."
I have a rubric of sorts I use to rank people and ideas. This makes it very easy to avoid the dilbert scenario.
Some of these people are very advanced (have contracts / LOIs, MVP, funding)
But honestly much nicer to just get it done and move on.
What places / sites / channels of info are good to visit or tune into to get in touch with the startup world? Or just to find out what's new and interesting? I would have no idea how to even get 3 co-founder contacts from the article's description.
I don't have a lot of personal contacts to do this (I suppose this is similar to someone who doesn't live in the Bay Area but wants to work there some day), so would be glad to hear any advice!
Another option could be to sign up for YC Startup school (https://www.startupschool.org/) or apply for OnDeck (https://www.beondeck.com/)
I’ve used the latter and can confirm there’s more than enough candidates for high quality, if you’re willing to search, read bios, and do (email) outreach.
But tbh, it's much harder than it feels like it should be.
I think places like Human Capital or OnDeck are taking a cool hands-on approach to this.
The thesis being, let's find the best people, help them find eachother, then invest.
We should cut them out and relegate these marketers to a contract role, and exclusively pursue business models where customers don’t derive confidence from a CEO sales guy. Mainly because they waste our time, they can’t even judge the character of people in their network assuming they even have a network, and take way too much equity in a conversation that would be better off avoided.
My hope is to see that number increase. Not the right post to explore it, but I'd love to help!
Or: being an impressive fintech founder requires high intelligence. Men have wider spread of the bell curve and are overrepresented at both ends.
I disagree and am not up for trying to engage in a meaty way at this time, but I always appreciate a good faith effort to bat about ideas concerning why there is a gender gap. Understanding why it exists is a first step in trying to move those numbers.
> early 30s without dependents
Its my observation that co-founders usually fall into this group for better or for worse. A natural consequence of this is that they often have less experience, a smaller network, and an entirely different risk profile that favors, go figure, high risk ventures. I believe this also makes many in this founder demographic easy prey for VCs and others with the ability to doll out predatory contracts - and makes the role largely unappealing.
> a small engineering team paying roughly 60% of market rate
So this has obvious consequences, but you also don't need to bake "good" software this early on. You can launch shit software, as long as its just not-shitty enough to lock-in a few lucrative clients early on. This validates your idea and allows you to hire the "good" engineers to build the """good""" software, or at least more scalable version, going forward. The real hit is on the CTO or VPE or technical lead who has to break their back making the in-experienced team work. That's a lot of stress that more often then not leads to huge amounts of burnout.
> bad advice from her SV peers
Yeah this sucks, everyone has advice to give and almost nobody takes responsibility for its fall-out. But being a SV founder is generally lucrative enough (even if its just in networking) that I have little sympathy for those who fall into the trappings of "greedy" bad SV advice (like underpaying your workers!). That's not just on the people giving advice, that's on the founder too. Distancing yourself from such behavior is a no-brainer.
If you're raising money from a good fund today you're definitely not subject to "predatory contracts". People are raising a lot of capital for pretty low dilution, and there's plenty of secondaries availability.
I also don't know what you mean by founders having a smaller network or less experience; if you really spend time with good founders you'll see that a lot of them 1) have expertise in their area of focus 2) are pretty well connected.
I'm worried about too much of this narrative being repeated on here; just like with any other job, some people have only be exposed to bad managers / co-workers. That doesn't mean the whole industry is like that.
This is an excellent point that I should have made. Ironically, I've spent much of my career unrolling and re-working/writing code for companies that have done this. The amount of money spent on this after the fact continues to shock me. Personally, I don't think I could lead a team writing "bad" code, knowing it was bad, to race to a KPI or some such. It's just not who I am, and maybe that's a bad limitation for a tech cofounder. I do still think her idea could have been done "the right way" first, given the clients, early adopters, and contacts she already had lined up based on her wireframes.
But yes, excellent point.
In my decade and a half of software engineering experience, this has happened exactly once - we cobbled together something to validate a concept, then completely fucking scrapped it and built it from scratch.
I honestly don't know if it'll ever happen to me in my lifetime, and I wouldn't bet on it. Supporting the "shit software" for the lifetime of the business isn't something I'd want to do.
I'm very opposed to the idea that founders need to eat ramen for 4+ years when raising venture money, and I think VCs are slowly warming up to that fact.
But, yes, you will take much less salary than at a normal engineering gig.
I think 100-150k is relatively palatable. 150-200 is possible. Above 200 almost unheard of at pre-seed / seed stage.
The irony is to hire your first engineer, you'll almost certainly need to shell out 200k+.
I also have a wife and 2 kids, so I am looking for a cofounder that can respect this and give the salary needed to live a decent life.
To be an equal you need equal equity but it is not that simple. Two friends holding 66% can dilute you, move your work into another company assgin a low value and cut you out. The many ways to get screwed is extremely high.
fwiw, my original plan was to be a solo founder. I ended up killing that idea a few months in because I missed some of the key red flags a business focused person likely would have caught.
Could you give a few examples of such flags? I'm pretty curious as someone hoping to be a technical solo-founder myself. Do you think that some management training would have caught some/most of these?
Also, never give up control of the finances - abdicating that responsibility means you will probably get screwed. You need to be technical about ensuring your efforts are not stolen.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-ab...
Comparatively, I feel like the tech part is the easier part. I know (generally) what we have to build, and I'm confident I can build it and build up a team as we scale.
Almost all successful startups have good business leadership, sometimes from a technical founder, but usually not.
My personal idea of hell is cold-calling randos all day, trying to get them to pay me for half-finished software.
Business want someone that understand their needs and can communicate in their terms - not 'someone that can code'.
Having lived on 'both sides of the fence' it took me several years to develop the perspective, maturity and skills necessary to be able to communicate 'with confidence' to customers, and it's not some kind of bluster.
While the bar is certainly lower for someone to 'just have an idea' and so there's a lot of chaff and noise ... for most startups that don't require exceptional technical chops (say for example, not a new kind of DB), a 'good CEO' is worth far more than any technical contributor, at least nominally.
Technical contribution in more clearly defined areas is more or less just skilled labour.
The big advantage of being technical at an early stage is that that labour can come very cheaply with long hours etc. and the material reality of a startup is that there is 'a lot of work, and it's mostly technical'. Also - it needs to churn quickly, which is difficult to do for regular staff engineers at an established company.
The best thing any young technical person could hope for is a competent, trustworthy, conscientious, somewhat business savvy CEO who can communicate, as a partner.
Edit: The #1 issue I see among youngish new companies making pitches, is that they are building something that nobody wants. They have no specific insight into some kind of market need, and don't have the ability to communicate with material confidence around specific issues. Sadly by the time someone has been working in industry long enough to do this (and this is a minority, not everyone develops insight), their opportunity cost is usually pretty high and they're less interested in 'startups'.
For example, in a recent discussion with a major retail exec., listening to his woes, a 1/2 dozen solid concepts came out of a 1hr. discussion, but they're opportunities that could only be addressed by someone with that insight, and would be hugely benefited by someone like him doing the selling.
Sure, emotional intelligence and charisma and communication skills are important in this proposed technocracy, I’m just saying that the non-technical people with no capital should no longer be able to grift their way into double digit share ownership. We can go vertically integrated and switch the distribution of ownership, much more heavily than it already is.
Having spent the last N years with sales cofounders, I wish I'd taken that advice on board earlier. (Though, there's certainly value in learning sales from skilled practitioners.)
It would be interesting to unpack that concept with actual data.
I think this is a good summary of the initial Y Combinator investment philosophy.
Probably not the perfect setup. In retrospect, I should have baked in some breaks.
I didn't expect such a response and suddenly looked at my calendar and was like....ooooo dang. :)
> I also don't know what you mean by founders having a smaller network or less experience
I'm insinuating that if founder demographics skew young they will have less experience and smaller social circles.
If you are looking to be a cofounder, "founding engineer" is far from it.
Like 40% down to 2%
Technical founders who don't have those skills need somebody who can handle it - and it's very valuable.
Was it the proposed technocracy part? I'm not sure how people could get that impression. /s
No, but really, I mentioned that technical cofounders should pursue businesses that don't need the other personalities. There are enough of them. So in that subset of businesses, the technical cofounders would have all the equity, and in the remaining businesses their value would be seen as deserving more of the equity than what currently happens. Just requires coordination.
Some of it was trying to not allow my own biases to cloud things. Some of it was hoping to offer a hand up to others who may not get as much attention. Some of it was wanting to just run an experiment and see what happened.
I think the best method is finding a good community to start from. As I alluded to, YC matching has not done this for me.
The other thing is to pay attention to why you didn't like a given cofounder/idea. I identified a handful of industries that just were not for me (hadn't realized this consciously previously)
My glean from the article was that Cambrian has a group for this, but they seem to be focused on fintech -- do you know if there's a similar high-quality community for biotech?
I've heard good things about OnDeck, but I'm not sure how much biotech is there.