[jasode]

>For me, I want to meet a CTO.

You have to realize that it's harder for a "business" guy to attract a technical cofounder rather than for a programmer whiz to attract a business guy. It's definitely a handicap. The programmer can build something and that can jumpstart the cascade of people (including business people) to join the cause.

As a non-tech person, what do you offer potential tech cofounders? If you give off vibes that "I'm the idea man!" or "I'm the guy with the big vision!", it will not impress quality programmers.

Therefore, you have to play up your strengths if you have notable ones. For example, perhaps you can call up some friends & family and raise $750,000 in cash to launch your product idea. A lot of programmers don't have the contacts to raise funds like that. Or maybe you want to create a digital music distribution website and you have Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Lady Gaga's personal cell phone #s on your speed dial as potential first wave of customers. Again, the typical programmer isn't going to have social connections like that.

[notduncansmith]

The idea that technical people are the only ones who can build something is one of the things that drives me away from most potential business cofounders. There are plenty of tools and free online resources that within a month or so, you should have the skills to hack some kind of prototype together in a reasonable amount of time. Lack of investigation into any of those opportunities signals to me that either a) the person doesn't believe enough in the idea to get their hands dirty, b) they consider themselves somehow above that kind of work, or c) that they're simply "not smart/savvy enough". The first two are obviously bad, and the third is not someone who I feel would be able to push through the fear and uncertainty that comes with starting a business.

To look at it from the other side, I wouldn't approach a potential CEO without bringing some business connections of my own to the table and ideally some seed money, or a potential CMO without some existing marketing efforts.

[mhuffman]

Wow! Where to start with this. Have you considered that some people with a head for business just might not grok programming? And vice-versa? Even if they do, have you considered that an amateurish prototype, that looks and acts like shit, might turn off some viable early-round potential partners?

The second point is even more ridiculous. If you not only develop, but have business connections and seed money, why court a CEO? At that point you simply need a couple of investment partners to fatten out your staff and you are all done!

Every person in a company does not need to be able to do everything in that company -- and shouldn't! That is why people have different responsibilities, strengths, and weaknesses.

It is a million times better to have a well-connected and capable CEO, and a talented CTO than to have both a CEO and CTO that both are ok at business and ok at development.

[jameshush]

I have to agree with @crdb. The CEO of the company I work at has a sociology degree, but bought a book on PHP/MySQL because "nobody wanted to program my stupid ideas so I just had to figure it out." He created the MVP himself by using copy/pasta jQuery soup, in line SQL queries and GoDaddy hosted PHP. He was able to get 100,000 customers though and got a CTO on board to convert the MVP to something scaleable (which I'm working on now too).

The CEO doesn't code anymore, but I had huge respect that he learned enough to get the ball going.

[notduncansmith]

The point is not for one person to, as you said, "be able to do everything in that company". The point is to have an appreciable respect for what others do, and have enough faith in your idea to take a solid crack at the parts you don't have an expert to handle yet. I'm not saying the CEO's MVP implementation has to be anything worth keeping. It can be a shoddy Wordpress mess, or even a very thorough clickable demo if they're afraid to touch code - but they should have something that demonstrates some thought put into the actual application (and that they value the skills I, as a potential CTO, bring to the table).

> If you not only develop, but have business connections and seed money, why court a CEO?

Because it takes more than connections and seed money to be a proper CEO. You need to have a strong sense of product direction, and the ability to steer the company in a successful way - something that a developer who has a few investor relationships and a bit of cash may well indeed lack.

> It is a million times better to have a well-connected and capable CEO, and a talented CTO than to have both a CEO and CTO that both are ok at business and ok at development.

I agree, and I don't recall saying anything to the contrary.

[crdb]

> Have you considered that some people with a head for business just might not grok programming?

Bollocks to that. I was an FX trader who copy/pasted values for excel formula results because I was scared they'd go away if I typed something in another cell.

It took a short while but I taught myself. Programming and technology are rational, a set of facts about the world that are inherently understandable at most levels of abstraction unlike, say, volatility trading on a proprietary basis or private equity.

The cost of being technically incompetent - and by that I do not mean knowing how to follow instructions for how to build a RoR app on a blog, and deploy it on Heroku's free tier (OK, I used bottle.py and JS, but it only took me 3 days) - is incredibly high for a non-connected business founder. There are a lot of people out there with slick talk and "great" "technical" CVs which will impress someone used to navigate in finance-land where the rules are different. These people also happen to be expensive, both in hard cash raised for the company, opportunity cost of launching slower or ruining your reputation, and in the future value of the cash flow you'll inevitably have to outlay to fix the code rot they set in motion before they job hopped yet again. I'm not going to go into what happens when you hire a student "because he's cheap and I just need an MVP", that should be pretty obvious.

When my business friends ask me how to do the technical part, I tell them they have a choice: either they go and read the books I give them (SICP, Codd & Date, etc.) or they trust me entirely, let me hire the CTO, and trust HIM entirely with the technical aspect of the business. Only one took me up on that last offer; they got on well, he trusted the guy, who built the product, they raised USD 600k within a few months, and I just heard that they did 200k USD in revenue last week. Well, a second also did, for an internal team; but they tried to micro-manage the guy against my explicit instructions and he quit 3 months later, letting me know his thoughts on the way out.

I'm not saying become your own CTO. My co-founder solves problems around 30x faster than I do - the ones I can solve, anyway - which we know because I've had to write, badly, some of the codebase for some of our clients (in one case, ~12% of total LoC and 80% of the SQL, although 0% of the Haskell). But being aware of what's going on, being able to help with SQL, HTML and CSS, knowing what dev ops is, figuring out the BI by yourself, being able to talk to clients and write a good functional spec that really separates model and implementation, it doesn't come naturally. You have to study and lay the bases and understand just enough about the field to know how to work with the technical side.

[mhuffman]

I get what you are saying but disagree with your original premise.

It is akin to saying, "It is silly for a programer to not already be a businessman (businesswoman) when seeking a partner, because there are books and websites online and in just a few days he ought to be able to get by in the business world".

It is nice for you that you made an MVP for yourself. Likewise it is nice that you have plenty of business contacts, etc.

However, my point is that it is absurd to think that just a few days of intense study will turn a programmer into an MBA or and MBA into a programmer.

People recognize this and that is why they seek people that are strong where they are weak. So together they are more than individually.

[crdb]

Months, not days (really, this "I want it tomorrow" culture is quite harmful). And yes, I do think developers who become co-founders or C-levels should take some time to familiarize themselves with basic legal and financial concepts as well. Things like optionality and the time value of money, and protective provisions. And basic accounting. And, in our case, international tax and labour laws. Helps when those discussions come up. Helps filter out incompetent but slick sales types (after all, Sturgeon's Law also holds for businessmen).

Nevertheless, it's not black and white. I personally think that being familiar with a little bit from all the fields that you will eventually touch as a founder, is immensely value adding. But if you have a good network in a trustworthy environment, you can get away with not.

[mhuffman]

There is a huge difference between knowing enough on a subject to do a "bullshit test", and what you recommended in your top post, which was for businessmen to go learn to program and make their own MVP. While an admirable goal, that seems ludicrous for most.

Obviously, if you are going to be an entrepreneur, you need to know your business, and that includes the high-points from all divisions, but that is a far cry from your first recommendation.

[blazespin]

Definite up votes. Or you have an MBA from Harvard that VCs love. Or a successful exit under your belt. You have to bring to the table real assets and accomplishments. Personality is not a plus at first and will only play out over time. Same thing with brains/creativity. These are not easily measurable.

That being said, if you are unproven, you could relax your standards and try to convince a kid out of university to be your CTO.

[shalmanese]

I disagree. I've found in my experience it's far easier in theory for a business guy to attract a technology co-founder than the other way around. This insight isn't clear from the outside due to a) the existence of "business" guys who do no business and complain vocally and b) the existence of tech+some business guys who know enough business to get their product off the ground and then find a good business guy to balance them out. Every purely tech guy I've seen come to me looking for a co-founder, I've had to tell them I could help you find one but you'd basically have to throw away all your code and start again from scratch. For the tech guys for which their code is their baby, this is not a welcome message and they instead go find someone else to tell them how they've made the best mousetrap in the world.

Here's how to be a non-technical co-founder that makes tech guys excited and willing to hop on board:

* Articulate a vision that's broad, compelling and unique. Filter tech guys by the ones who are already excited by that vision rather than trying to convince them away from their pet cause.

* Become so educated in the field that you can confidently answer any of the tech guy's questions and that you can educate and provide insight into the field from the very start of the conversation.

* Talk to customers, find ones for who this is a hair on fire problem, take a short video of those customers explaining their needs and edit it down to a short sizzle reel.

* Create a landing page, put in a field for explaining why leads are signing up, demonstrate to the tech guy that you're not just capturing random email addresses but passionate fans.

* Use that same landing page to A/B test pitches, show data on how you can hone product/market fit via experimentation.

* Get signed Letters of Intent from businesses detailing what their purchase commitments are willing to be if a set of well defined features were to be built.

* Map out a series of go-to market strategies, research the pros and cons of each one, demonstrate you have some unique insights or resources that would give your startup an unfair advantage.

* Build out an early front end prototype using non-technical tools. Have it hooked into a completely human powered backend (it's surprising how far you can get with just SMS for example, or email), run the entire system yourself to better understand the user's needs. Show how a small piece of technology could immediately super charge both the quality and scalability of the operation.

* Go out and raise money contingent on finding a co-founder and search for co-founders contingent on raising money. Both groups are risk averse and like to see validation. Providing the mutual validation gets both to hop on board at the same time.

* Learn programming in your spare time using free tools. Demonstrate to your tech cofounder that you're committed to understanding where they are coming from and respect the work they do.

* Help everyone you can in your local community. Offer advice, intros, free work (but not too much) and be known as the connector and who everyone needs to know. Follow up with people on a regular interval and ask how they're going and see if there's anything they need help with that you're uniquely suited to do. At the same time, be cynically strategic about this. Like hangs out with like and you eventually get connected with higher ability tiers of people if you demonstrate the value you can bring. Find people slightly above your talent range and deliver the world to their plate. Skill up and repeat.

* Just, in general, be a nice person and someone people want to work with. There's many different shades of nice and you also have to be someone authentic to your personality. Don't be afraid to be polarizing, I'm personally the "asshole nice" person in person and that turns quite a few people off but the ones who it clicks with, we click really well.

In general, when I meet a non-business co-founder who's in the process of trying to get something started, I advise them not even to start looking for a technical co-founder yet. You can get so much done nowadays without touching technology and the class of people you're able to attract exponentially increases the further along you are. The people who get excited about hearing this message, I pay attention to more and try to help in any way. The people who balk at this, I can't see them ever getting far.

edit: Another psychological factor that makes a huge difference is shifting from what I call a "scarcity" mindset to an "abundance" mindset because scarcity attracts scarcity and abundance attracts abundance.

For example, it's immensely frustrating to me when I meet people who are job hunting and I ask them what they're after and they reply with some version of "Oh, I could really work anywhere". The reason they say that is because they think any job is better than no job and better to be overly broad so as to not miss out on any opportunities. In actuality, it's the opposite, telling me you could work anywhere means I can't find anything for you.

Instead, where I can really add value is if you outline a set of broad theses about what you're excited about and I can suggest companies working towards those aims I know people at. During the course of that conversation, other areas of interest or other companies come up and by the end, there's usually 3 or 4 very strong intros I can send. The reason why these people are successful is because they are in an abundance mindset where they feel like they could work at a lot of places and are really more concerned about finding the right place for them and they're willing to be polarizing to do it.

For job hunters, especially junior ones, I'm willing to go through the work of shifting them from a scarcity mindset to an abundance one and help them when networking with other people in the future. If you're at the co-founder stage though and you're still in the scarcity mindset, I have no sympathy for you and I'll just politely disengage.

[rokhayakebe]

Honestly, most of the things you list above make one sound like a semi-technical founder.

[shalmanese]

What about it sounds semi-technical? I've helped two people (a doctor and a restaurant chef) who I was the first person they've ever talked to who knew programming and I helped push them through these steps and they got pretty far. But they were people who were in the top 0.1% of something else and were thus, willing and able to be helped.

[88e282102ae2e5b]

But that's the thing. You have to understand your business in order to lead it. It's like some people want to be CEO of a car company even though they don't have a driver's license.

[sharemywin]

you had me at step 3...lol.