Ask HN: Experienced tech team looking for biz co-founder with idea

7 points by techteam 14 years ago | 4 comments

Do you know anyone in need of a good existing small team to become co-founders in a US company to implement a solution to a strong user problem? What is a good way to find a business-side co-founder with a great idea that needs implementation in addition to various networking events?

We are an experienced 3-person tech & product development team from Europe, looking for a new challenge. We want to make users happy, solve real problems and change the world for a better place.

1 of us is mostly a UX / UI / JS / graphical design person, 1 SW dev / frontend / backend, 1 product design / business (although with tech background). 2 of us have 10+ years experience of working together, the 3rd 2 years. We are a great match working as a unified team.

Our team experience includes designing, implementing and operating both consumer and B2B services, which this far have usually been on the scale of up to a few hundred thousand weekly visitors / ~10 distributed servers. A lot of our previous work has been very backend/database intensive. Have done some HTML5 mobile stuff recently as well.

We are pretty well connected to both US and European investors, accelerators and tech press. Have previously raised both angel and VC funding in US as well as Europe. Currently might be able to bootstrap our costs for some time from our own resources.

We are interested in a setup where we build the product development team in Europe and customer facing operations/HQ in the US. We know the challenges of distributed startup teams and why it is good to be 24/7 in the same room, but also believe this is not a problem with strong people, have seen distributed teams work out well if you know what you are doing. Willing to travel and spend up to 50% of our time either on East or West Coast, but not relocate permanently.

In whatever we do, we also take an active role in discussing the business, idea and customer experience side of whatever company we are involved in.

Our advantage includes also hiring additional developers and tech people at speeds and cost level times lower than in the US.

If you are someone with an exciting B2B or consumer idea who think this might be a good match for you and you need tech co-founders, please do contact us.

You can contact us at eutechteam@gmail.com or give some helpful suggestions / comments here.

rpwilcox 14 years ago |

I think this is a problem that needs solving. Occasionally developers need business people as co-founders (even just to get a SWOT marketing analysis done before you build that MVP).

I think there is a lot of places to meet technical cofounders, or even design/UX cofounders, but not business cofounders.

But sometimes you need a busines cofounder. I'm lucky (business major in college) - I can do it all, but that also takes time away from development. But a business cofounder could take those business tasks off my hands (and frankly, probably do them more efficiently than I could)

(I'd certainly be interested in talking more about this with you guys)

md1515 14 years ago |

Your tech team sounds very experienced and competent, but 3 co-founders is already enough for a startup. Also, the dynamic of a team where three people know each other really well and then one business guy is totally new, might be a bit of a problem.

It looks to me you have all your bases covered - including the 1 SW dev who does business. Honestly, there are so many tech people that do the business side out of necessity. I think you guys should do a 3-man startup by yourself. Just my two cents.

If you really need to find a business founder, then perhaps visit some networking events in an EU startup hub (Berlin, London etc). Best of luck

techteam 14 years ago | |

Thanks! We have done startups ourselves as well on local European level. This time we really would love to work on a project where the strong business lead & problem to execute is coming from the US.

helen842000 14 years ago |

I think if you're looking for a cofounder to work with your team remotely good team fit is essential.

Perhaps working on a smaller project all together initially would reveal if can all work productively. It would also be clear what value your biz co-founder would bring to your team.

I've certainly got several potential ideas that cover both interesting and large user problems that would require an experienced team, however I'm in the UK and I know you're looking for a US co-founder.

However if even trialling a small project first would be of interest to you then I'm helen842000 on gmail.