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by po
5158 days ago
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As Jason's technical co-founder, I can say that a large factor in why I personally decided to start a project with him was because his skills were complementary (read: opposite) from mine. It is easy to overlook all of the non-programming work that goes into building a business. Could I have built a system that checked off all of the features of ours without him? Sure. But it would have sat there unused because it wouldn't have been informed by his experience and opinions, the customers and feedback he's brought in, the partnerships he's formed, etc… The days of 'if you build it, they will come' are over and there is a huge amount of work to be done for non-programmers. I think this is actually becoming more true over time… especially in the early days of a startup. You dont even really need a programmer to build an MVP anymore. I've met plenty of the people the original article is complaining about, and there is the caveat that there are exceptions to the rule, but there are plenty of naive, wanna-be developers as well. Non-technical founders live on a spectrum of capability just like developers. You should think long and hard about what will make you say 'yes I will be your technical cofounder' and more importantly: 'I need to do X to convince a biz-dev guy whom I respect to work with me.' |
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I remember reading somewhere on HN once that if you can get a business co-founder who enables you to spend almost all of your time focusing on development, that's extremely rare. As you pointed out, there is a metric ton of non-coding work that goes into establishing any kind of viable business.
Back to the article, what really ruffled my feathers about the article was how it applied a set of awful behaviours and mindsets uniformly to all business co-founders.
Whats most concerning, is if you adapt those mindsets in talking with potential partners/co-founders, you will simply confuse the naive ones, and drive away all the good ones - including the person that would have made a perfect partner for you.