Co-Founders

If you watch Hacker News and blogs written by VCs and entrepreneurs, you’ve probably seen a lot of conversation about co-founders and equity splits recently. And of course that’s accompanied by the endless articles about finding or evaluating a technical cofounder, or, if you’re a technical co-founder type, how to evaluate the business co-founder that will inevitably approach you with some world-changing idea.

This ethos is all helped along by programs like Startup Weekend (which I’ve never attended, so don’t really have a valid opinion on) and countless other incubators and events and institutions all designed to pair up the magical technical-business co-founder team that’s going to make everyone rich.

I don’t think this is healthy.

I think that any business partnership is a complex relationship to handle. For example, someone has to be the CEO, and someone needs to take orders, between two strong-minded founders that’s not always an easy decision to make.

Regardless of who’s in what role, being a co-founder is realistically a long-term deal. This “I have an idea now all I need is a hacker with a keyboard” thing will lead to a lot of enthusiastic but short lived partnerships.

Just two years ago, I was the business/idea guy on the hunt for a technical co-founder. I looked around my network for someone to work with and I did find someone. It was a great learning experience.

Since then I’ve taught myself to code well enough in Rails to prototype just about anything I can think of.

The next time I go looking, it won’t necessarily be for a technical co-founder, and I wouldn’t recommend that hunt to any other “idea/business” folks out there now. The best thing you can do is spend a few months building your idea — it is really not as hard as you think.

Then you’re in the position to take Mark Suster’s advice and hire your co-founder for significantly less equity dilution than you would have before, and you’ll be in a much better position to get good, talented technical people because they’ll see that you’ve gotten your hands dirty.

In fact, if your prototype works, you now have the luxury of looking for a co-founder with other areas of expertise (say you want someone with enterprise sales experience, or a deep understanding of the food health & safety market, or the oil & gas industry, or medicine, or anything else you don’t have but the business would benefit greatly from).

So if you’re on the hunt for a co-founder, I really recommend taking a step back and thinking about what your business will really need to make it work, and whether or not you’re trying to find someone to build you something you really could prototype out yourself.