[joshklein]

I still can't understand how this gets missed in every one of these posts; a great business cofounder can be someone with an insane level of domain expertise either selling something like the thing you're making, or selling to the exact same people you want to sell to.

If you're making, say, web analytics software for online retailers, your best business cofounder would be a guy who had just spent a year convincing online retailers to buy his company's Magento extension (or whatever). This guy will make your product better, will know what to say to customers, and will probably even dial up all the people he already sold to so he can also sell your new product. A second best fit might be someone from an ad agency, for example, who had pitched and won the business of a few online retailers.

Don't buy this visionary, motivator, fundraising, connector bull. If you need a life coach, hire a life coach. There's only two critical functions to your startup: Make the thing, Sell the thing. You can fake the rest if you do the big two.

[AmericanOP]

I'm going to project my experience on everyone else to make it sound more legitimate- every business guy looking for a cofounder goes through a phase where they contact Magento developers and try to pique their interest. I wonder what the success rates are like in reverse. I stopped- I've never met a team of guys who built a successful product who met via random ambitious emails.

More to the topic, a proven sales person is not the same as a business cofounder. Sales experience is a minimum, but with this model it's basically assumed you have a sales ready product.

Domain expertise is great too.. in all hires.... if you can find it. That's where you'll source your "strong-vision guy" if you're lucky. Very lucky.

Marketing (real, user-adoption marketing), PR, design, and perhaps channels to funding and recruiting-- that's what I consider business-side startup execution.

Where do you find these people? I don't know- it's different for devs. People can say, "I can program." It's less cool for people to say, "I can market. I can run a PR campaign." It's not the primary factor, but I think it's a factor.

Signed, Business Guy.

[fleitz]

I really liked the hustler archetype, to me the hustler is the biz guy equivalent of the hacker. They are doing things they aren't supposed to be able to do and like the OP said are more scrappy than polished. As you said there are two critical functions, making and selling. Hackers make stuff, hustlers sell stuff.

[itmag]

Off-topic but relevant: everyone should look at this guy's book: http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Work-Breaking-Stupid-Results/d...

[joshklein]

Although I'm happy to be mistaken for that Josh Klein (he's great!), we are two different people. We met once and the universe didn't explode, so I'm fairly certain about this.