The main problems I see in 99% of the cases of a founder looking for a technical co-founder are:
1. The founder sees themselves as the ideas person but doesn’t have the situational awareness to recognize that their ideas aren’t that unique.
2. The founder doesn’t understand that the value in a startup isn’t the idea but the ability to execute and build on that idea. For every very successful startup in X space there were 10x more with the same general idea but that failed to execute. The founder wants someone to built it for them but wants credit/equity for having the idea. In 99% of cases the value is created by the builders (technical cofounder) which instantly creates awkwardness of the founder wanting far more equity, credit, and control than their contributions warrant
For the above reasons I’d avoid 99% of asks for a technical co-founder like the plague.
Steve Jobs has a great quote about this, from The Lost Interview:
“… it's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people "here's this great idea" then of course they can go off and make it happen.
And the problem with that is that there is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get in the subtleties of it.
And you also find there's tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can't make electrons do. There are certain things you can't make plastic do or glass do. Or factories do, or robots do.
And as you get in to all these things, designing a product is keeping 5000 things in your brain, these concepts. And fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
It's that process that is the magic."
Which is all somewhat ironic coming from Steve Jobs.
I recommend finding people who worked at Apple while Steve Jobs was around. He was more involved than just barking I want "An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator."
Steve Jobs founded Apple. It revolutionized the world. They fired him, Apple became a joke. They hired him back, it revolutionized the world again. He died, and... they're becoming a joke again. Say whatever you like about the man, but whatever he did actually drove innovation like nobody else.
Apple are becoming a joke? I must have missed that memo. That was certainly a possibility when Jobs died but you have to hand it to Tim Cook, Apple has drifted far less from its Jobs-era culture and style than many people predicted. It's been nearly a decade and a half since Cook took over, but Apple are still doing tremendously well. The Apple Vision Pro might not be the right category of product to go mass market, but none of the reviews suggest it is anything less than Jobsian in its attention to detail and overall approach.
Compare that to the level of change between Ballmer-Nadella or Schmidt-Pichai. Apple has displayed remarkable constancy.
Public sentiment is that Apple is a litigious monopolistic bully that is coasting of their former glory. There you have the memo now.
You’re projecting.
That is 100% not the "public sentiment" where I am, from anyone I know.
You can't be serious. The "public sentiment" toward Apple could not care less about the nerd rage du jour, they are as oblivious to it as ever. All evidence suggests that normal people don't care about any of this, same as every other time. It isn't like everyone is using a Linux desktop with Firefox, chatting over Signal, running their own mail servers, using GNU software, etc. The people that care about this are a small bubble, even within the broader tech community.
Most non-technical people I know genuinely like Apple, it is a great experience for them. They don't know, and don't care, what "side-loading" etc means.
Maybe within your particular bubble. The vast majority of people I know have positive associations with the Apple brand.
I agree that Apple is a company that is doing quite well and making generally good products.
However, I absolutely don’t think Steve Jobs would have let the Vision Pro in its current state sit on store shelves.
I just can’t imagine him greenlighting a product so close to the prototyping stage, especially in an environment where Apple had zero urgency compared to the past.
And yet he launched the iPhone, which, in its first generation, didn't even let you install apps on it. The point is not to excel in all areas. The point is to excel in relevant areas where the competition can not easily catch up with you.
I’d argue that the iPhone had way more points where it excelled. Web browsing, multi-touch, pinch to zoom, and it even offered a better cellular plan along with it (cheaper than BlackBerry).
The Vision Pro doesn’t have a lot of features where it excels. Running apps on it is inferior to using your phone or tablet. Watching movies is inferior to your home television. Productivity is inferior to a standard computer. Games are inferior to existing VR gaming systems like Index or Quest. Reviewers universally describe it as lonely, dystopian. Eyestrain is still a problem, dizziness is still a problem.
The iPhone had things about it that were better than existing solutions in a product category (cell phones and smartphones) that was proven and growing.
The most optimistic thing you can say about the Vision Pro is that if it were more like a pair of sunglasses and got rid of all the downsides to using it, it might be a really good true AR experience where your brain forgets about the fact that you’ve augmented reality. The problem is, there is no physical hardware technology that is on the horizon that will ever feasibly bring it to that place.
Not being able to install apps was completely resolvable by a software update. The hardware problems of the original iPhone like the lack of 3G were resolved within a calendar year with the next model, and the original model had an acceptable level of battery life.
If a similar situation to the iPhone was happening we should be seeing a Ming Chi Kuo type of rumor about a Vision Pro coming in 2025 that scuttles the external battery, enables the system to get through an entire Hollywood movie without charging, and solves the problem of the headset messing up your hair and making you interact with the world through ski goggles. These improvements are impossible within the next 10 years or so.
There was also way more urgency with smartphones. If Apple had waited one or two years the iPhone would have been snuffed out by competition. We would see a market dominated by other players in the market like Nokia, Microsoft, BlackBerry, or Palm.
In contrast, the VR/AR market is literally a contracting one with the only major players being Valve and Meta. The iPhone entered a market that was clearly in an upward trajectory.
Would anyone be surprised if Meta announced the shuttering of the Quest division within the next 5 years or so? It has never made money. It has never come close to breaking even, it’s a complete moonshot money sink for Meta. The Quest 3 is selling slower than the Quest 2 did. Microsoft quit on the market before Apple even entered it. Valve hasn't made a follow-up headset and might not ever do so.
A reminder of this story from a few years back: https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/13/apples-ar-vr-headset-repor...
This is a product that was in development hell that had pressure to ship. A more courageous executive would have seen the struggles at Meta and killed the project years ago.
The Apple Car idea was legitimately way better and would have taken less time.
Sure, it was him alone doing all that, not the 10,000 employees, within a 40M people ecosystem such as California which is the tip of the spear of a yet bigger ecosystem such as the United States which in turn is the tip of the spear of the entire 4 million history of mankind progress up to now.
The cult and the propaganda causes a whole lot of illusion/delusion. Then you actually get to meet these people and you are as disappointed as the groupies who were asked to self cut their veins by Led Zeppelin for their satanic rituals.
The fact that there were 40M people in that ecosystem and only one Steve Jobs is exactly the point. Yes it took an environment like that to make it possible, but it also took a certain person to make it actually happen. (A deeply flawed person to be sure, but that's not the point here).
Nope, it would have happened anyway and the lucky guy would have been Stuart Bojs with his company called "Pear"
Humanity as a whole makes progress, individual humans just partecipate in a giant lottery for monetary and recognition allocation. The latter has nothing to do with the former, much like winning a car race on a racetrack has nothing to do with building the track nor the car.
Max Verstappen won the Las Vegas GP. The GP , the cars, the track itself are the byproduct of billions of humans at work and every minute of work towards that has approximately the same value, if there's a positive outlier is very minimal and perhaps that person has never been to the track at all or doesn't even care about car racing.
This is what happens when there's 8bn of us right now with a total number who ever lived standing at 10-12bn
If we can credit physicists like Albert Einstein for being the ones to discover fundamental facts about the universe that someone was going to discover sooner or later anyway, we can credit business founders for creating businesses a certain way that weren't necessarily ever going to be created that certain way. They're not the same thing in many ways, but I'd rather err on the side of giving more credit rather than less.
Had Einstein or Jobs been born in Laos they'd have had very different worries and concerns, and besides what does "credit" even mean practically speaking besides singing the praise which is essentially worthless gossiping anyway.
Let's make a practical example in order not to keep talking past each other:
If you owned a resturant and they were still alive would you offer them a steak or cancel another reservation to make room for them?
I wouldn't , don't care if you are Jesus H. Christ, you gotta pay me.
Could other people have been Jobs? Sure, but they weren't. Would other people have done a much worse job of it than Jobs? Yes, very much yes.
Are they? I don’t see it. They’re more profitable than ever and are still extremely competitive in multiple markets.
The arguments against this have been the same for decades: Apple is overpriced, Apple’s product are inferior to competition, and yet here we are with large chunks of the market share and larger chunks of market gains.
Some products are stupid, but it’s not like Steve hasn’t pushed dead products out before.
Only on HN can a company earn a net income (that's profit mind you, not gross sales) of nearly $34 billion and be dismissed as a "joke."
How much does Boeing make?
Boeing has had negative net income (i.e., has been losing money) for years:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BA/financials/
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BA/boeing/net-inco...
You beat me to it.
Steve was great because he hired great people. For that he deserves a lot of credit. He also (for better or worse) had a very keen idea of what was workable or reasonable in terms of UX - essentially he had taste.
Apple has numerous very talented people who do all the rest of the required work to get products created and built.
That he defrauded his buddy Woz on one of their first ventures when Woz was the one doing all the tech work is really the ironic part. When it came to running Apple, Steve was very good. But he hired good people and those people are doing well (if not as good as Steve) now.
Hmm...no it didn't.
I suppose using switched-mode PSU in the Apple II was revolutionary to me at the time, but someone else would have figured that out pretty quick. They were already in TVs.
Yes, he was also haranguing and leaning on and verbally abusing Apple employees to get the most productivity out of them.
Just as everyone else did in the 80s. Judge people by the times they lived in, for you will be judged the same.
(Without a doubt, something you think is OK, and everyone else does, will be seen as a horrible monstrosity by your descendants. It won't be something you can think of, and yet you'll be judged for it as a monster by some.)
Even in the 1980s, people who intentionally parked their unregistered Porches in handicapped spaces were considered monsters. Don't try to retcon Steve Jobs into something he was not. He was a brilliant scumbag.
Don't forget that he leased them new continuously so that he always kept them unregistered and therefore wouldn't get ticketed!
A little voice in the back of my head, recalls something along the line of this.
There are a mandated number of unassigned, non-employee dedicated handicapped parking spaces per overall building size/parking spaces. And that in some cases, there are far too many for the building/business's use case.
An example? A shopping mall needs lots of handicapped parking spaces. Yet an office will assign close spots to employees with special needs, as the generic spots aren't for-use by employees. Thus there can be an excess of generic handicapped spots.
There are only so many spots available close to the building, and Jobs would obviously take one. So by using one of the many never-to-be-used generic handicapped parking spaces, Jobs was saving a high value parking space with prime location. And also allowing others to have use of a close to door space, all without depriving any handicapped person of a place to park.
It was a social hack, one he may have been quite proud of.
He did it at work, and justifying an asshole's behavior with some "social hack" explanation puts you squarely in the wrong my dude.
Clearly the handicapped are taking too many resources and we need the billionaires to have some.
By all accounts Steve carried on managing the same way when he returned to Apple in 1997.
He was a pretty huge jerk to his wife and kid even by the standards of the day. He seems to have just not been a very nice guy. Jerks can invent interesting tech, right?
I didn't say he wasn't a jerk. Totally, and it wound up infecting every company after the iPhone success because that's the lesson people got from him - be an asshole and find success. Not the good part about being insightful, having good instincts, and seeing beyond user feedback to what people will actually want, etc. etc.
I'm simply pointing out he's not the same category of non-technical founders being discussed in this post
You have to be remarkably good to be able to afford being an asshole.
Well, that or own the company.
Time and place play into this as well.
We know a lot more about hardware and software development than we did even 10 years ago let alone 50.
Those of us who came into tech in the last 20 years through today did not have as many unknown unknowns to stumble through. It’s all so much more streamlined. There inherently cannot be another Jobs or Gates in IT land same as there will never be another Christopher Columbus
Idolizing the prior generation is a fools errand. The discovery phase is over. We get the maintenance phase
The folks downvoting you would do well to listen to the recent _Behind the Bastards_ series about Steve Jobs.
Jobs' terrible attitude is at this point widely known, dissected and discussed to death here and everywhere else. Calling it out does not adding anything new or insightful to this discussion.
His terrible attitude is also entirely orthogonal to his product management sensibility. The fact that he was a jerk does not mean he must be generally canceled and his unique product development theory and insight ignored. The two are not directly related, and it is possible to appreciate one while condemning the other.
This may be true. A lot of the things that fans ascribe to him though, have been invented elsewhere and then were copied, or bought. He was not the visionary inventor, that he is often believed to have been.
Tech titans like Jobs/Bezos/Gates are always part myth. Their reality is astounding enough, so we just smooth out the edges of their mythology :)
Why? Do you think Jobs was a hands-off idea man who let others sweat the details?
Very much not the case.
I was on the iPod software team 15 years ago, and let me tell you, we got plenty of detailed feedback from periodic "SJ reviews". My manager (a line manager of a small team) went to those meetings and came back with lots of very specific things we needed to change.
One year (fall 2008) Steve was going on vacation to Italy for a week or two, and asked for a development version of the iPod shuffle we were working on to take with him on the trip. (We were terrified, because it wasn't really ready for that level of scrutiny.) That was at a time when the iPhone 3G and the original iPad were also under development, and yet we got a bunch of feedback on the humble little iPod shuffle when he returned.
He really was in the details, to an astonishing degree, and not just for the headline products, either.
This seems to just re-enforce that he was an ideas man.
I've yet to hear a story where Jobs was the one who discovered the fix, only stories that he pointed out the things that needed to be fixed.
He's lauded as a visionary, not as an engineer. And all the stories about him are about him pushing others to realize his vision.
Edit: Lots of people seem to disagree with me, but then pointing out how he was an extremely skilled ideas man. Perhaps that term has too much negative connotation for Jobs' visions (ideas) to be associated with?
Being able to point out the right things that need to be fixed is an important skill. Most people can tell when something is off about a product but can't tell you exactly what it is.
You can easily identify the wrong thing as the problem then end up trying to hide a symptom instead of fixing the problem. Medicine is notorious for treating symptoms when the underlying problem is usually related to something else like diet or (lack of) exercise.
You can also completely fail to identify an obvious problem such as the games where you end up stuck and having to Google how to progress because the game is poorly designed. This poor design isn't going to be obvious to anybody working on the game every day because they designed and already know the solution but it would come up if somebody else played the game and got stuck.
I'm not saying that it's not an important skill. I am saying it's not a technical skill.
Realizing that the iPod had to be thinner was a visionary idea. Making the iPod thinner was a technical feat.
One had the idea, the other had the technical ability (even if they had given up before Jobs pushed them harder).
Nobody's claiming that he was a programmer. From what I've read, though, he had a very keen sense of design and product. Here's an anecdote: https://www.folklore.org/Calculator_Construction_Set.html
I think "ideas guy" doesn't capture this. He had big ideas but also was super particular about details.
(Which doesn't justify being a prick, to be certain)
Maybe the lines are more blurry, but design, marketing, and product are not just “ideas.” I’m not going to weigh in on what Steve contributed, but it’s perfectly plausible that he did so without writing code or holding a soldering iron.
Not to say ideas guys aren’t prevalent, but for all his faults I would argue that Jobs wasn’t one of them.
I used to think very similar to you, I mean Woz was the engineer! Jobs didn't build or design the ipod. But I have since worked with product managers, both good and bad. I have worked in companies and on products with a good vision and a poor vision. Being able to get a good idea for a product, envision that product, and guide people through the whole process of building that product and keeping that vision through everything is very difficult and is a useful skill.
The iPod has never been surpassed in my opinion. I refurbished one and still use it to this day. I think having a clear vision for it was critical for that.
I consider him one of the true titans of the tech industry. It is easy to ignore their flaws and wax poetic, so I always try to understand the full human with all their flaws. The flaws are almost essential to their strengths. As a whole though, these human beings moved the entire tech universe through force of personality, will, and intelligence. It’s a short list. Gates, Bezos, Jobs, Page/Brin, Zuck, — what they accomplished was never obvious or a given when they were doing it. It’s easy to see the business at present. There are also “sub-Titans” as I call them that were instrumental. But the execution at that level requires so many long hard years of consistently good decision making and vision it is very hard to not admire those parts of them.
I think your sentiment might be rooted in never having worked with a good product manager. What Jobs described is what I expect from a good PM. However, frequently PMs have so little understating how the product they manage works and is built and aren't that amazing at their own core skill set that developers either must push them up a hill or make these decisions instead of the PM turning the product manager into more of a project manager or mouth piece at best. It's a real shame because a good product manager can provide exactly the value Jobs is describing.
project manager (pm) is the bare minimum that Product Manager (PM) has to do.
Unfortunately, a lot of PM's only check the project manager box.
I'm not sure about the pm part. They certainly have to worry about it, but scheduling and delivery logistics to a large degree need to be a shared responsibility between product and engineering leadership. This is where the role responsibilities can get quite messy.
A good product manager is key.
I don’t think people realize how shitty everything you make is. It’s only through continuous improvement and iterations that it becomes really nice.
Unless it’s something you’ve done many times before, if no one is pointing out problems with your design in the first version, it’s probably hot garbage.
Huh?
From everything I’ve read, Jobs was deep in the weeds with all that stuff. In terms of asking all the relevant questions, finding the right experts, the suppliers to provide the right inputs at the right price, finding alternative solutions to problems, etc.
I doubt very many people knew more about bringing a new product idea to fruition from beginning to end than him.
Steve Jobs was technical though...
Acquaintance of mine bought an iPad. Proudly showed it to me how he can draw this and that. 6 months later he somehow forgot the password, entered it wrong too many times and the iPad is a brick. He's 75 years old. He can't find a receipt, there's no way to restore it. There's no way to put Linux on it. There's no way to do anything. Another example - my mom. I was feeling generous, bought her an iPad as a present. Now nothing works on it anymore. You need some type of ID. The one I have never works. The whole thing is a brick. Useless piece of crap. She's 77 years old and uses her small phone screen to do anything. So that's Apple products for you. They benefit the company, not the owner. You shell out thousands of dollars, end up with a brick. I will never buy another product from Apple again. (My wife just bought a brand new iPhone. Lol). Let's see how long that will work for her.
Makes you wonder why they are so popular if this is the average user experience right?
Because people in general don't do risk analysis. Like in the 80s when everyone still smoked despite the risk of death being well known. Oh it won't happen to me!
Then when you have to throw away that perfectly functional $1000 apple device because apple decided you can't use it anymore, only then you realize you've been had.
I think this was tongue in cheek but some reasons:
* Apple products are status symbols
* Induced demand through marketing
* Ecosystem lock-in, once you go Apple it's hard to switch back out
I mean, obviously it’s not the average user experience. For most people Apple products are not perfect but overall very solid and reliable.
Also, it’s not bricked. Just needs to be wiped:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211078
Why they're so popular? I'll tell you why.
Because 90% of the people are irrational buyers. They buy to impress their annoying cousin, or prove that they're more worthy than his wife's sister's husband. Because Apple's products are pricey and iPad case costs more than a iPad's competitor itself.
Same reason why my friend business owner in Dubai says his employees from India buy the most expensive phone with their first salary. Just because you buy the most expensive product, doesn't mean you get the best quality. And good marketers know it.
Whoever set up the device is to blame. An iPad can do everything your phone can do so its security is taken seriously. Just write down the password if you can't remember it. Or make it your dog's name. If you can't find the password anywhere then how can you expect Apple to tell the difference between you and some criminal?
The purchase history? They have a record of your ownership.
The problem here is that apple, in their infinite arrogance, feel that they continue to be the owner of the device you bought. The owner is who gets to set the policy. Apple here is setting and enforcing this bricking policy thus they are effectively the owner. But they still want you to pay for the device as if you were purchasing it!
The job of a vendor is to provide mechanisms to implement any kind of policy the buyer wants; the job of a buyer is to establish the policy that is best for them.
Apple wants to sell a device but continue being both the vendor and the owner of it. That is wrong.
These stories are semi-ridiculous. I don't doubt this person is in the predicament you describe. But why can't he just go to an Apple Store and have them unlock it? Does this person not own an ID?
More importantly, most businesses don't need an "ideas person". They need someone who knows how to run a business. You need a total of one decent idea to start and run a business. You need tens of thousands of little hard choices, emails, and sales calls to keep the business successful, and that means getting your hands dirty. Ideas are not valuable.
This. Over and over.
Founders also underestimate the degree to which good technologists who’ve worked at several startups also understand the business.
I’ve watched friends who are CTOs get in to the same conflicts over and over with founders and product owners.
The founders and product owners throw out 10 different ideas and push small dev teams to execute on all of them. There’s no focus or strategy, it’s just throwing ideas against the wall.
Expensive-to-maintain ideas with no uptake are held on too for way too long.
Expensive-to-create but sexy ideas are prioritised over cheap-to-create ideas with obvious potential for customer retention or up-sell.
CTOs are often the ones taking about disciplined experimentation to find product/market fit against head-in-the-clouds founders with a vague, uncommunicated vision.
I repeatedly see founders ignoring solid advice until, if they’re lucky, experienced boards say the same things as the ignored CTO.
So often founders seem to think they’re a fictionalised version Steve Jobs, not understanding that Apple’s success was as much down to gritty, detailed engineering as a single visionary. And of course not understanding that they themselves are usually not visionary geniuses.
These impressions are from a small sample of maybe 10 CTOs, but some of them had the same experience at consecutive startups before learning how to screen companies better.
We need more founders who care about the unglamorous nuts and bolts. Or at least value the people who do.
Something I've always reluctantly admired about Apple (as an anti-fan) is their love of details and the work they pour into so many details that people will never notice. My personal favourite is how good the iOS keyboard was ahead of its competitors for so long in the early days of iPhone.
Those are the unsung details that you notice when they're gone but are easy to take for granted.
For me at least that is some of the secret sauce of Apple...
Apple was never praised for its original ideas - although they had some I suppose - but always for their execution and improvement of existing ideas.
Smartphones weren't a new idea, but Apple got to work and made them better.
On that note, I was really curious as to see what Apple would do with cars, but I don't think there was enough they could do that was different or better enough compared to the huge amount of competition all trying to do the same thing. Tesla was the closest we'll get to an Apple car (car company ran like a software company), and they couldn't even do mechanical engineering properly (car body, welding, etc).
As both a Tesla customer and a long-time Apple customer, there’s a massive difference in the experience.
Steve Jobs never tried to make me pay $8,000 extra for a feature that doesn’t exist yet but is just around the corner and will be totally amazing. Elon Musk convinced me to hand over that money, and five years later the feature still does nothing.
Jobs fundamentally wasn’t a liar. When I bought Mac OS X 10.0, it was rough and slow, but it did what was advertised and I was excited to remain an Apple customer to see this platform evolve. Musk sold me a steaming pile of vaporware, making me feel stupid rather than excited, and I don’t want to remain a Tesla customer.
The PR turnaround for Tesla on HN is incredible. Shows how effective peer pressure from journalists is.
You sure that's the reason?
I think it’s a big one. They are always in tune.
I’d say Apple is known for original ideas, but in the details.
That seems like a bad example. The Apple iOS keyboard only added swiping in 2019, well after the competition.
Even the original iPhone touch keyboard was terrible compared to the hardware keyboards on BlackBerry devices. But consumers were willing to tolerate the keyboard because the iPhone was so much better in other ways.
But consider that the pre-iphone status quo for on-screen keyboards was this: https://youtu.be/wm5omDCENPo?feature=shared&t=624
Or the Palm Pilot, which had a special 'graffiti' alphabet for handwriting recognition.
I'm comparing it to all the other touch keyboards of the time. Sure they were slow to implement swiping which is why I specified early day but the iPhone came out when a lot of touch phones when LG were still trotting out resistive screens.
Even after capacitance won, the iPhone keyboard was still snappier. I think they do some smoothing of the touch contact to infer from the glancing of the contact what you might have meant. Eg where did you keydown vs keyup.
If you've ever used one of those in-app banking "security" keyboards you might notice what a keyboard with no smoothing feels like.
It wasn't until SwiftKey that Apple even had to worry about competition
I thought the competition was hardware keyboards like blackberry, that were and still are much faster to use than a touchscreen.
I remember shopping for a smartphone a few months after the iPhone arrived. (I had just broken my openmoko, which never really could make phone calls reliably, but that was roughly my bar for cell phone polish.)
I didn’t want an iPhone, so I looked at the other stuff in stock at the cell phone stores.
I couldn’t figure out how to use the web browser on any of the display models. I ended up switching back to a nokia candybar phone until android came out.
In hindsight, one of the native linux nokia phones would have been nice, but they ran a similar OS as openmoko, and I was frustrated with that software stack’s lack of focus on being a daily driver.
I'd rather find someone with marketing and sales experience than anything else. Good sales people can hone in on the parts that part. They want to invest in the things that make selling easier.
Would you say this is true even if you are not interested in scaling fast and are okay with a slower "organic" growth?
(For context I have a few ideas I'd like to make a startup out of eventually, and I'm okay bootstrapping to a low/mid-volume high-niche area. I don't intend for the startup to really have massive profits, as long as I can keep it net profit and carve out a name in the niche I'll be happy.)
I think it's still true. Bootstrapped businesses need to bring in money to pay the bills. They can't just dump VC money into growth. Sales is just as essential if not more with a bootstrapped business.
At some point you'll want to switch from sales-led development to establishing product though, otherwise your product will simply be a hodge-podge of feature requests meant to satisfy individual clients with no real cohesion, especially if you want to go self-serve.
Unless your startup is intended to be more of a boutique consultancy and not some kind of SaaS.
you still have hand hold larger clients.
It depends on your product and industry.
If you're shopping for a high performance $10,000 oscilloscope or 3000 high endurance SD cards a month for the next 12 months, or a point-of-sales system for your small business?
Then the suppliers will have a sales person who'll visit you, demonstrate the oscilloscope's features, offer to loan it to you for a month or two so you can try it out, chase up answers to technical questions ('Can I install antivirus software on this oscilloscope?'), and suchlike.
If you're selling into an industry where that's the norm, you're probably going to need someone who knows how to do it :)
How significant would this be if you have nearly negligible running costs (beyond say the cost of registering a business and renewing it)? Starting from a semi-hobbyist position where I would be the first client (think something like the stuff on Hackaday or tindie), I'd imagine nearly zero other bills. (I'm talking about a very low volume, building-in-your-garage type of thing.)
Amen. Build it, or sell it, there's no third seat on this ride.
Depends, cause a good salesman can be selling 10 different crap easily.
This matches my experience.
This describes my current situation so precisely. The only thing keeping me on is the engineers I brought in and the initiatives I'd like to finish. I'll probably "retire" early in a few months and work on passion projects.
Exactly what our startup is now. CEO is super good at sales, but that also means were running around executing 10 different ideas with no cohesion whatsoever.
Honestly I don't even believe you need a decent idea. There are thousands of boring businesses, including in software, that make a ton of money.
Pick something that already makes money and do it slightly better. Idea not needed (other than "do it slightly better" which IMO is much more in the "how to run a business" camp than the "ideas person" camp). Forgive the ideological soapbox/tangent but this is really what capitalism is all about. You find a way to do something slightly better, faster cheaper - maybe all three - and you can have a successful business.
I really think this is the way. The world is full of shitty software made by bloated companies who can’t sell it cheaper, and you just need to be able to do it better and cheaper to win the clients.
The problem is just that a sufficiently mature product has been battle tested already, so it’s difficult at the beginning.
The problem is actually higher ups network and or sales/marketing. You'll be amazed at how those CEOs and sales people can sell trashes at diamond value. Tech cofounder will need them as CEO cofounders.
find one pain point or use case that resonates with at least a subset of people.
Indeed. It's been said that it's impossible to lose money selling software maintenance contracts. Or start a company that builds websites: you don't need an idea at all, the customers bring you their ideas, you just implement them. Ka-ching! Oh, and by the way Sir, you'll be needing a maintenance contract...
For me, Sales is much more difficult than coding. I had sales training that was reputed to be the best in the industry; I wasn't made for sales, and switched to support as soon as I'd completed the sales training. I like working with salesmen; I understand the game; but I can't play it.
But also, do your research; the world doesn't need yet another todo or note taking app with cloud storage as payment model.
Another angle is to build software for a non-software industry you happen to be involved in, or that family or friends are at. Unfortunately for a lot of developers, IT is their corner already so there's a lot of startups that make tools for developers, which is a heavily competitive space.
Other industries have a set of software they already use; CRM, inventory management, point-of-sale, websites / webshops, customer support, etc.
One interesting niche that isn't actually a niche was telecom, the soft- and hardware running the mobile network. Very invisible to a lot of developers, but I think it's ripe for disruption as it's currently dominated by old companies like Nokia, Ericcson and Oracle. The company I worked for had an idea, but were IMO still too old-fashioned and not eager enough - happy with slow and steady growth, etc. That said, they were using mid- to late 2000's tech for their front-end and C for back-end, surely there's ways to improve on that. I made an attempt but I didn't get enough support / people from the company itself, so after 2.5 years of trying to build a new configuration system which was the USP of their business on my own I called it quits. The size and complexity of that was more than I've ever worked on, and that was usually in teams of 6-10 people, if not multiple teams.
CTO = Builder first, then lead the building of both the technical systems and engineering culture.
CEO = Sales and funding, maybe product owner very early days but quickly handing off to experienced product folks as soon as too painful to continue with rest of workload.
(n=1 from my experience at a hyper growth startup)
I've been at more than a few startups (one that could be called some form of high+ growth, although it was ultimately unsuccessful), and this tracks. People do what they know; CTOs know how to build, CEOs (usually/often) know how to "business develop", marketers market, PMs design... People do what they know.
Back in 2010 or so I had a series of meetings with someone about being a technical cofounder for them. I wasn't super passionate about the domain (don't even remember what it was at this point) but it was interesting enough and I had just enough technical experience at the time to think I could pull it off. We had everything figured out in broad strokes until we realized that of the 80/20 equity split, we both thought we were getting the 80. His exact words were "I just gave you this great idea why would I only get 20%?"
Anyone who sees themselves as an "ideas person" as if that is a defining or valuable characteristic is a cancer.
Honestly people who think their ideas are hot shit and worth 80% of a business need to fuck off.
I can understand a people person and a tech person working together; one person handles the business and finance side, sets up meetings with investors and all that while the other does the implementation side. These are separate and both complicated affairs already; if a founder takes all that on board, great, you get a share.
But you don't earn a share for an idea. Anyone can come up with a dozen ideas in an hour's time. It's low energy, low effort and you don't get a pat on the back for having an idea.
That is basically what I told him and we parted ways. I don't know what he's doing now but at some point he was shilling some "put your business card on a website!" nonsense.
Curious that neither party recognized 80/20 as being unfair. There is just as much non-technical work required to get a business off the ground as there is technical work. And if one or both parties did recognize it as being unfair, thinking they could capitalize on the other's misfortune, that is not good ground to start a relationship on. At least the bullet was dodged.
You're lucky, my business partner and I put a cap table in writing where he wrote I had the most shares of anyone. Then I found out 9 months later he took nearly all of the shares for himself behind my back.
I was in this situation once. I joined, recruited the team, built the product... only to discover he couldn't sell it. Sales were abysmal. He could raise money and "sell the dream" though. That only goes on for so long without results. He also refused to pivot after 5 years of slow growth.
Company nearly went broke and was "acquired" by one of the investors for pennies on the dollar. I say never again... but, I like early stage companies. Maybe not that early.
"Ideas person" sounds awfully close to "thought leader". Just a bunch of butt-sniffers
You are lucky, best to avoid this situation immediately.
It's not 1 great idea, it's thousands of good ideas, more or less on demand.
“Mr. [Founder] is new to the business of having ideas, and so when he has one, he becomes proud of himself for having it. He has not yet had enough ideas to unflinchingly discard those that are beautiful in some aspects and impractical in others; he has not yet acquired confidence in his own ability to think of better ideas as he requires them. What we are seeing here is not Mr. [Founder]'s best idea, I fear, but rather his only idea.” --https://hpmor.com/chapter/78
I met a "Business Co-Founder" once who cornered me at an industry dinner and literally said to me with a straight face -- "very few people in the world have the product vision I have, very few people can see 10 years into the future"
The person had never run a business, never been a product manager, never built a product, could not code. I almost choked on my coffee but tried to be cordial.
Confidence is a hell of a drug.
"Leadership" is a hell of a drug.
And just like that, the server forfeited his tip.
I think the real value of a non technical founder is:
1. Discovering the real requirements to make the product succeed.
2. Being really really good at sales.
Technical people often lack those skills, and even if they build the best product in the world, it’s worthless without someone who can get it in front of the right people and convince them to pay for it.
Number 1. is so important. I want to be able to build, to use the technical skills that I have, and not waste a ton of effort building something no one wants. I like coding but not enough to do it without solving anyone’s problems!
A CEO who knows a bunch of stuff I don’t know about the domain, who talks to users more than me, and who sits her ass down and researches the hell out of stuff to bring me back useful knowledge—I’m glad to have.
#1 often comes from #2, or at least is much much much easier to do if you have someone who is doing #2.
Technical folks often dramatically underestimate sales for the same reason that sales dramatically underestimates technical folks - they require very different mindsets, and almost everyone is insecure about it on one side or the other.
What value would you put on marketing and selling the product? I always assumed that is what the non-technical founder would take care of.
Ideas are important. Building a product is important. Both achieve nothing unless you can actually sell what you have built.
I both agree with you and disagree. As a technologist, I agree sales are the only thing that matter. Most technical things are easy to me, and ultimately they are just code unless they can be monetized.
But I disagree on the value question -- they are only valuable if they are being done before the build-out. If there is just a promise of sales after free upfront effort from a technical co-founder, then the value is tenuous.
A good Business Co-Founder would be selling early, ideally at concept phase, such that there is no question of value becuase you already have pre-sales or purchase orders.
If the non-tech guys says "Here is my idea for a product, please build it" that is worth very little.
If the non-tech guy says "Here is my idea for a product. I've been working in this domain for 15 years and I know what the pain points are. I have XX customers that have expressed an interest and paid a deposit (or committed to pay once the company starts)." then that I think is worth something.
I've been shipping software, my entire adult life. It's what I do.
My stuff tends to be pretty good. Sometimes, I give exactly what was asked for, which might not be so good, but what I make, works; even if rather ugly.
If I'm allowed to work iteratively, with a good creative, we can make something very good.
I don't usually come up with uniquely original ideas, myself, but I'm really good at turning vague ideas into reality. I Make Stuff Happen. I've been doing that, since I was in my early 20s.
What I have encountered, is that folks put no value, whatsoever on that ability. Like, to the point of being downright insulting. They don't like the cold wash of reality, bringing their lofty ideals into the world of the achievable. I've been told that I'm a "negative naysayer," but nothing could be farther from the truth. I want the thing to happen, and recognize the hurdles that need to be vaulted.
When I was younger, and part of much larger organizations, I had to eat the disrespect poo.
Nowadays, not so much. I guess folks think I'm a cranky old prima donna, but I won't accept being treated like crap. I'm quite aware of the sheer value of what I can do.
Those are the same kind of folks who put "I want a Facebook clone" on Upwork for £300.
Fully agree, most non-technical people have no way of measuring the value created by a good developer, so they assume it must be insignificant.
I typically try to encourage my potential future clients to shop around and maybe ask a famous consultancy for a quote. After they recover from the shock, they are then much nicer to work with.
Not to mention the fact, people who can execute have plenty of their own ideas already. People who only have ideas are not economically valuable. If someone wants to get money out, they have to contribute capital or labor. Ideas are neither.
Nobody should bring just ideas. Ideally a non-technical founder would bring whatever skills are required to guide the evolution of the idea. Engineers like to assume product-led growth guided by data, where the external human factors that determine success or failure can be explored in a BI tool, but there are a lot of B2B domains where engaging with customers to understand their business and understand their buying process, understand who buys the software and what their incentives are, is how you learn what to build.
Ideas are like currency: you can find them on both sides of the balance sheet.
the business person needs to bring sales and marketing to the project. building something no one wants or knows about is just wasting time. if your resourceful enough to bring a list of potential buyers no you'll be able to get developers interested.
this. bring me people/businesses with a problem, and i'll help you build a solution.
"their ideas aren’t that unique"
A successful business consists of customers and money, not unique ideas.
I would say that the idea behind a business is one of the least useful things of a business. It helps with marketing, recruitment, and sales, but really, the idea itself is irrelevant. Execution counts for much, much more.
In fact, the idea that ideas must be unique is the #1 problem with startups. There's plenty of space in the market for companies doing what other companies are doing, but just better.
The challenge is, a lot of 'non-technical founders' are obsessed with the idea and consider it their 'golden ticket' reason for getting everything, and completely discount actual execution.
Often the attitude is because 'execution is someone else's problem who doesn't matter much, I can just pay them peanuts'.
Which is why all the hate from the engineering side, because they aren't looking for a technical co-founder but someone to do all the actual work while being told they don't matter. Often while being paid like they don't matter either.
I feel worth saying about 1: a non technology/software technical co-founder can still be technical but deep in their domain of expertise.
Unfortunately, you're wrong on both counts.
1. The founder being unaware that their ideas aren't unique is a feature not a bug. If Silicon Valley stopped reinventing the wheel, it would cease to exist. 2. The idea is what matters because ideas (and charisma) convince investors, and the goal is to make money, not a product.
Ideas are nothing but a (potential) head start, execution is everything.
The article felt like a list of very predictable things that a hot shit young programmer who's steeped in the startup world's groupthink would have floating around in his head.
Here is IMHO a more real world take on the question (can you find a technical co-founder?).
* There are three problems in business. They are 1) Distribution (sales), 2) Product/Service (the thing being sold), and 3) Operations (broad but lets say e.g. Legal, Accounting, HR).
* In very small business (e.g. startups) the Ops is not a ton of work yet, so in practice we talk about having potentially two founders, one needs to deliver a product, one needs to deliver the distribution.
* If you can provably bring the distribution on day one you will have zero problems finding a technical co-founder. In fact you'll have so many options you probably won't need a co-founder, you can just hire someone on a nice package.
* If you can't provably bring the distribution you are borderline worthless. That's the nature of sales, it is an uncomplicated discipline. In sales you produce or you're out.
So the author of the post kind of addresses this when he asks why you as the non-technical founder don't have the money to just hire. That part's more or less right. The "biz" founder with distribution already lined up is more valuable than the technical founder. Yeah the tech founder is more valuable than the biz guy who can't produce.
The idea is worth less than nothing. If your idea is any good, someone with more resources than you will just copy it faster than you can say Mississippi.
"It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.) To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.
To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until I see their execution."
https://blog.codinghorror.com/cultivate-teams-not-ideas/
The problem isn't the ideas. It's the fact that these ideas people want you to validate the idea for them by building out the product. Well then, their idea is basically worthless.
Ideas are like assholes ... everybody has one and they're usually full of shit.
Some problems I commonly see in people's analysis of situations:
- believing themselves to know things which are unknowable ("the ideas person doesn’t have the situational awareness to recognize that their ideas aren’t that unique", "value in a startup isn’t the idea but the ability to execute and build on that idea", etc).
- representing (and I suspect perceiving) subjective, heuristic based opinions ("aren’t that unique") as facts.
- using inadequate variable types when describing (and I suspect perceiving) the problem space ("the value", "wants credit/equity for having the idea").
- making up facts ("In 99% of cases")
This entire thread (as are most threads when the prompt is of a certain class of topic) is chock full of all of these, and many of the people in this subreddit are arguably genuine "The Experts" on this sort of thing...which is (or can be) kinda funny if you think about it for more than a few seconds.
And yes, I do realize that I "should" just "know what you meant"....except: how should I go about doing that?
And if these silly delusional founders should not believe silly delusional things, should that rule not extend to everyone?
OTOH, there are a lot of things a non-technical founder can bring to the table that makes a co-founder request a lot more interesting. A non-technical cofounder with a track record in getting funding, in sales, or in marketing _can_ bring a lot to the table. There's hella lots of things that have to get done besides building a product to make a successful company, and if a non-technical cofounder can nail those things, and you can work with them, it could be a good arrangement.
The non-tech founder needs to do the sales/marketing stuff.
Managing social media, meeting with prospective users, translating feedback into product requirements. They should be taking every little thing we work on, whether its a napkin sketch or a working MVP and putting it in front of people so we can steer the product as intelligently as possible. If they do all that they are more than lifting their weight. That would make me almost feel like a slouch just doing the coding.
A very Hacker News comment.
Not all execution is technical. 99% of the time, you aren’t building something that technically impressive, so I’d say that most execution isn’t. You’re probably building some CRUD database app and are throwing your VC funded development team at solving your own flavour of the same old scaling issues that they all solved at their last startups.
To categorise 99%+ of serious^ nontechnical cofounders as just* contributing an idea and not meaningfully and positively contributing to some aspects of the actual execution very much paints you as having one of the typical shortcomings of a developer: you think that nothing else matters.
"no, no, you do all the work and I keep all the money. What's your problem? You're _technical_, that's the way this works!"
One way I can put it is that a non-technical co-founder must bring tangible business skills, that's what they provide, not "the idea".
If a technical founder is sitting down and writing code until 2am on the weekends the non-technical founder better be making phone calls and sending emails, etc...
The inexperienced "idea guy" thinks by sharing "the idea" they have done their part and are just now going to sit and watch as the "the programmer" implements it.
The best startups have both.
You can execute, great. But if you have poor industry understanding and no idea what is going to work in that space. Let alone something that is going to revolutionize the space. It is, similarly, not going to work.
Your industry expert need to have 20-30 years in the space. Understand it from the ground up. That guy is actually valuable.
It's not one idea, it's comprehensive understanding of all the current struggles in the space.
You have a great list, but as a potential (and very reluctant) technical co-founder candidate, i'll two more major items to the list:
3. UPFRONT RISK: If you are doing this with sweat equity (no salary) then the Technical Co-Founder is taking almost all the risk. They are putting in all the time upfront, before the Business Co-Founder does. Smart Business Co-Founder would sell the idea to potential customers also, or get POs, or raise funding to pay for the technical effort, or invest their own $ to pay for the technical effort. However, a situation where one co founder (technical) puts in all the effort while the other gets a free option to put in effort later, is a very bad setup.
4. LEVERAGE: The Business Co-Founder essentially gets more leverage the more work the Technical Co-Founder does -- because now there is sunk-cost and a psychological shackle. The Technical Co-Founder just wants to be done with the build-out so the business can proceed and make money -- but the Business Co-Founder has every incentive to expand the MVP more and more since they are putting in no effort (possibly have not quit their job either) and wants more and more before the system can be sold.
ADVISE TO POTENTIAL TECHNICAL CO-FOUNDERS
- You be the "Business Co-Founder" also, no need for another person
- If there is a Business Co-Founder, equal out the contribution at every stage. A PRD is not enough to equal out a build-out. Some ways to equal out the contributions:
- Business Co-Founder has proven record that attracts success guaranteed (e.g., prior major exits, IPOs, huge online following, extreme case would be Elon -- i'll be a technical co-founder for him any day :-)
- Business Co-Founder sells concept to clients, gets Purchase Orders before build-out
- Business Co-Founder gets huge list of potential customers, ideally with pre-orders
- Business Co-Founder raises funding and pays technical co-founder for upfront effort
- Business Co-Founder puts down their own money (or takes a loan) to pay Technical Co-Founder for upfront build