[andrew_]

I spoke with a very adept founder this last fall, who was looking for a technical cofounder to evaluate and build out the platform for the company. It was a compelling idea with clear need, B2B, well-wireframed, well thought out, and she (the founder) brought a litany of information about funding already in the works, contacts, market fit, and to-market strategy. I was thoroughly impressed, and I was on board.

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.

[tmp_anon_22]

I agree with your conclusion and want to expand on a few points.

> 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.

[FanaHOVA]

Sorry that your experience has been influenced by people that are obviously not good at their jobs (both on the founder and VC side). What you describe definitely happens, but is not what the best founders and VCs actually do.

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.

[tmp_anon_22]

Fair points - there is a large dose of cynicism in my comment and cynicism is rarely an accurate reflection of reality.

> 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.

[andrew_]

> 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 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.

[pavel_lishin]

> 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.

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.

[tomnipotent]

I've seen just as many examples of well-written software failing to meet the needs of the business as I have of "shit software" that couldn't be cleaned up. This is doubly true in growth startups, where your programmer headcount grows fast enough that by year three you're producing more software in a quarter (or month) than you did in your first year.

[blast]

Why does your having different priorities mean that she got bad advice? It sounds like you're at different life stages and have different risk tolerances. That's natural and doesn't make either person wrong.

[andrew_]

Perhaps you're focusing solely on one aspect of the story. There's a lot more there than risk tolerance.

[abeaclark]

Yes, I think this is very common.

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.

[jacquesm]

VCs tend to believe that market validation can be done with engineers at any level of competence so why not go cheap? Then once you have that market validation you can always decide to hire competent people to clean up the mess. That way they get to take more shots, and solve the hiring problem as well because it is far easier to hire kids than it is to hire seasoned pros who might have a bunch of demands.