[mratzloff]

The opinion of your trusted friend or acquaintance is often just as illusory as your ability to judge for yourself. After all, you aren't subjecting your buddy to the same rigor you would a candidate, and you are just as incapable of judging their actual ability as the candidate's. You may trust your friend to give you good feedback, but if your friend is inexperienced or in a completely different technical domain (therefore lacking context), their opinion can even be counterproductive.

And how are you selecting your friend? How many tech people do you really know? Surely not that many if you're non-technical and interviewing for the position instead of partnering with one of them.

Time and again I see founders choose poor technical cofounders. Often it's enough to get the business off the ground, but then as the company grows they fail to grow with it. Now they're a CTO without the ability to handle strategy or manage people.

The sub-optimal recourse in these cases is often to hire a VPE to manage people while the CTO acts like the principal engineer. Now the VP reports to a CTO who is incapable of doing that job and (privately) insecure about it.

Basically I'm saying a non-technical founder selecting a technical cofounder is a crapshoot and people don't answer enough uncomfortable questions up front. Management skills (or at least aptitude) should be part of the selection criteria. There should be a discussion up front about how the position will evolve over time, and what the success criteria are at each stage, and what happens if those aren't met (mentoring, career counseling, step into new role with reduced title)? And the same conversation should happen in reverse, from the CTO to the CEO.