[DelaneyM]

Corollary: you do not need a non-technical co-founder.

My advice to engineers is that it's nearly always easier to learn business/sales than to learn to like a co-founder, especially the type generally drawn to being a "business" founder.

It is good to have a co-founder in general though, get one of those if you can. Just don't worry about finding complementary skills, bias entirely towards someone you can work with.

[ginkgotree]

Second this. I worked in Sales Engineering for 5 years, ended that career selling a $25MM solution to the CEO of a fortune 100. There is no secret sauce, and it is all learnable. The key skills are interpersonal. I know its hard to do as an engineer, but most of (enterprise) sales is shutting the F up, listening, carefully listening, earning trust, and learning to navigate stakeholders and what their potential incentives are to help you.

[WhitneyLand]

I think sometimes the salary market would disagree with that.

At many companies a sales engineer can make more money than a developer.

Personally I think it’s too nuanced a question to answer generally. Depending on who it is and the context “the right” person in either role can make all the difference.

[TuringNYC]

To put some context here, SEs often make so much because of commissions, not due to some crazy salary.

Commission based sales seem like a good thing -- it is pay to perform. "Business co-founders" are not the same thing as SEs, because "Business co-founders" are often paid upfront (via equity) for the future promise of performing. That is not a setup with good alignment of interests.

[sebmellen]

https://nav.al/build-sell

> Bill Gates famously paraphrases this as, “I’d rather teach an engineer marketing, than a marketer engineering.”

[rramadass]

Great quote!

Engineers do very well in Leadership/Management/Marketing/Sales/etc. which i consider ancillary domains in the Tech. Industry.

The reason is that Engineering is primarily quantitative and hence Engineers are taught to breakdown their Problems into smaller pieces and solve them one-by-one by using constraining/limiting abstractions so that each piece can be solved and then integrated into a whole.

In Non-Engineering fields this problem-solving approach is never taught and enforced. Most parameters are nebulous/qualitative/interlinked and more heuristics/opinion based with the result that they never learn to break a problem into manageable pieces and solve them one by one.

[gnicholas]

I would say the reason is actually that teaching engineering requires first teaching a good deal of math and software development, which most marketers don't have (though well-educated ones may have some). Teaching marketing doesn't have as many dependencies that are rare in the general population.

[gnicholas]

Absolutely true. Of course, a non-technical cofounder probably knows more than just marketing. He may add a lot of value in terms of fundraising, product management, and other areas. Teaching all of these things to an engineer wouldn't be trivial.

[sebmellen]

Nonetheless, I think most business functions are more societally established, and for that reason they can be more easily outsourced.

You can find a "pre-packaged" MBA, attorney, etc. because society is very good at churning out those roles. Just go the most recently graduated Wharton batch and hire the top grad for $300k, and you have someone who can do your legal, fundraising, operations, etc.

It's much harder to find someone with unique technical insight and the ability to deliver, which is the true value of a good "engineer".

[WJW]

This is like saying you can go hire the top graduate of your local bootcamp and they can be a decent tech lead. Experience matters for legal and business roles just as much for engineering, much as we devs like to pretend otherwise.

[gnicholas]

Sounds like a chicken-and-egg problem: how do you get the $300k to pay this Wharton grad? (And BTW, trusting a Wharton grad with legal work is a very bad idea — bschool teaches networking, not legal skills. Even a law school graduate would not be prepared to be the lawyer at a startup — 2+ years of relevant legal experience would be required.)

[willsmith72]

The first stages are just sales. You're just trying to find something people will buy and that means a lot of people time.

I've found it rare that engineers will find that natural, it takes a lot of time and discomfort to get good at

[robocat]

> just sales

This sounds like a typical engineer's summary. It is a dismissal - just like the video talks about tech being dismissed.

Recruiting a co-founder is not "just sales". The video is taking about an archetypical salesperson who still can't buy a tech guy (maybe their sales skills are not so good).

[willsmith72]

"just" as in, an emphasis on the importance of sales, not a minimisation of it.

sales is everything at the start, and a huge amount of the reason why technical people usually need non-technical.

(i would have second thoughts about a non-tech founder without sales skills)

[robocat]

> My advice to engineers is that it's nearly always easier to learn business/sales

Technical people mispredict the value of a business co-founder in a similar way to how this video talks about tech co-founders being misvalued. Cue jokes about sales-droids. But there is a mirror between businessy people undervaluing tech and tech undervaluing business.

A key point of the video is recruiting (albeit a form of sales): it is hard to sell "adventure" and belief.

We see this every time an engineer tries to shift to a managerial rôle and fails. In theory business skills can be learnt, in practice it is hard and perhaps easier to co-found with someone with the skills already. There are risks, but if you can't judge ability and integrity then you're already hosed.

The best example I can think of who cogently explains how they learnt is Jim Keller - talking about how he changed AMD.

[Eumenes]

I generally agree but if you're developing a product for a niche industry and that non-technical co-founder has a shit ton of insight and connections, it will 1000% open doors. Then again, perhaps you can partner with those folks in other ways vs giving away 50% equity.

[edgyquant]

By that logic the person with that domain knowledge can partner with technical folks for less than 50% equity. Which is what normally happens in my experience

[VoodooJuJu]

I'm currently the technical guy and would love to learn how to also be the business guy - what do I need to do to develop those skills?

Getting your hands dirty is the best way to learn anyhting, so with technical topics, especially programming, I would just dive into projects and start coding, building things, and that's how I learned. In terms of business skills, what projects can I realistically undertake on my own that would help me develop those skills? Should I start a low-stakes business selling soap on Etsy or something? Is that adequate? Completely different ballgame from the corporate startup world - but would any of the skills from such a humble venture transfer to the larger stakes ones?

How might a technical guy become the business guy?

[threeseed]

Read and understand the Gitlab handbook:

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/

[GamerAlias]

Are you serious? If so why? Could you elaborate about why one should read such a long text? Doesn't seem a clear answer to his Q

[threeseed]

Very serious. It's an exceptional source of information about how to run a real-world, successful tech business.

And if you think that it is too much information to learn then don't be a CEO. Because you are going to be expected to know all of it.

[DelaneyM]

You become a business guy the same way you became a technical guy!

Don't waste time selling soap though (unless you really love soap) - my best advice is to try to sell something you've made. It could be your time (as a consultant), or it could be a product.

I would suggest waiting to develop these skills until you know what product you want to bring to market as an entrepreneur. No sense in learning B2C growth hacking when you end up in enterprise sales (or vice-versa).

[throwaway5752]

Let's just say - there are some critical things you have to be good enough at and those correlate with commonly observed corporate structures. Some degree of Sales, Marketing, Legal, Security, R & D, and Finance competencies need to exist across the founders. Sometimes one person can do it, but they also need to know how and when to bring in experts if they are lucky enough to need to scale up.

On a very basic level, not having a cofounder in any capacity can create a structural bottleneck when two important things have to happen at the same time. A trusted second party provides resiliency.

[gnicholas]

This is more likely to be true where you are selling to other technical people. But it becomes much less likely to be true when you are selling B2C, or to non-technical businesspeople. And of course, the ability of a technical person to learn sales varies quite a bit. Some technical folks pick it up easily, but others do not (or find important non-technical bits like fundraising and sales to be very distasteful/annoying).

[notahacker]

And of course the reverse is true. Some "business people" can pick up a huge amount about UX, client priorities, process automation and what is and isn't technically possible and make useful product management contributions even if they never touch the codebase, and some simply aren't interested in that level of implementation detail even if they're really good at selling the big picture and someone really needs to get a handle on that side of the business.

[choppaface]

Need somebody who can do product and sales. Often this person is predominantly non-technical.