[hobofan]

I mostly agree. A co-founder interview should be more of a conversation rather than a traditional "company vs. employee" interview. Nevertheless, if it is already a running project, there is an imbalance of trust and skin in the game, similar to a job interview. So going through a technical screening can be a very easy way for the candidate to close that trust gap.

Also, the popular perception between technical co-founder and early employee-CTO is very blurry (unless you go by virtual vs. real shares). Some people will call a CTO that joined 3 months into the project and holds 10% virtual shares a co-founder and some people won't. Same goes for "technical co-founder" vs. "early CTO" interviews.

[TimPC]

If you're joining 3 months into what's often a 7+-year mission (where if you're successful you'll be underpaid for a long-time and make your money on stock) and you expect a 90-10 distribution of shares you better be getting something like a salary (co-founder in name only). These kind of distributions are part of why yCombinator discourages unequal co-founder distributions. You're asking for the company to implode over co-founder issues if you think your 3 months at the start is worth a 90-10 distribution in shares especially when as a non-technical founder hiring a technical co-founder the technical co-founder generally has bigger opportunity costs financially.

[pm]

I'm assuming this is a technical co-founder in the stricter sense, rather than an early-employee CTO. If the case were the latter, I'd most likely be inheriting a dumpster fire built by an agency or a jilted technical co-founder, neither of which is a good position to be in.

If that's the case, then the onus is on the founder as much as me to prove their worthiness. I've inherited too many dumpster fires in my career to implicitly trust the word of non-technical co-founders.