How to find a Technical Co-founder for a non-technical founder...
http://getslice.co
How to find a Technical Co-founder for a non-technical founder...
I'm currently thinking of adding a technical founder to getslice.co, a meal planning service. Is there a good way to go about this? How do you evaluate which applicants/skills are right for your project?
If you have advice or experience, let me know!
It works the same way that a non-woman finds a woman to marry... You go to where they are, hang out with them, create reasons to spend more time with the ones you get along with, and eventually propose to work on something big together. If none of them want to spend time with you, then you accept that you're currently low-value and find ways to make yourself more valuable in the short term (by describing/presenting yourself better) or in the medium-to-long term (by building new skills/insight/whatever).
The startup version of "dating" is to work on side/hobby projects together. So that's your goal once you put yourself into a place where you start to bump into interesting techies. If you can't develop the relationship to a point where they take you seriously enough for a weekend side project, then they certainly won't be joining as an equity partner, and at least you can problem-solve it sooner rather than later.
Great analogy :)
The bigger point is that people treat finding a cofounder as a transactional thing, like ordering a mail order bride. They expect to just show up somewhere and create a deep, decade-long, high-trust relationship. But relationships don't work like that (unless you want a mail-order-bride quality relationship).
Folks accept that reality with marriage, and they invest a lot of sustained effort, over a long period of time, in finding and getting to know the type of people they want to partner up with.
But they somehow reject that reality when it comes to cofounders, and think they can just go to a meetup and "find one", which is completely absurd when you think about the depth and importance of the relationship you're trying to form.
(Also, to nitpick your nitpick, most people would not be happy marrying any available person of the correct gender(s). Rather, folks are vastly more discerning (age, interests, lifestyle, goals, location, income, attractiveness, etc etc), so I wouldn't necessarily think the raw percentage odds are anywhere near as different as you suggest. But the main thing is to accept that finding good people for long-term relationships is a multi-year process, and to treat it that way, and not an ecommerce purchase which happens at your own convenience.)
I like this analogy and it makes sense. Thank you.
Also, you might just want to hire a techie, which is a totally different thing from getting a technical cofounder. In the case of hiring someone (and paying them from the start), you just put out a job ad and do the normal interview and testing with small projects. My earlier answer was obviously about equity cofounders, but it depends what you want.
It's going to be very hard for you to evaluate people's skills unless you have similar skills to a degree.
If at all possible, I'd try to bring on a personal friend you trust. If you can't do that, then your best bet is to learn what you need to build it far enough that you can just hire people.
That might be what I'll do, I'm at the University of Minnesota and there are lots of devs looking to build businesses just here on campus that I know
I'm in Mpls too. Have you gone to Hackers and Founders? https://www.meetup.com/h-f-minneapolis/
No! It looks awesome though and a good way to get involved locally. Thanks for linking.
You’re welcome : )
Oh you're in great shape then! I so wish I'd gotten into tech when I was in college but I foolishly looked down on it until years later.
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if you look at history of how co-founders found each other, usually it is pretty hard from founder "dating" websites:
Stripe: Brothers.
VMware: Married couple.
Flickr: Married couple.
Houzz: Married couple.
NewToy Games (words with friends, bought out by Zynga): Brothers.
Facebook: Chris Hughes a cofounder was roommates with Mark, and others are college classmates.
And infinite example of college classmates or former colleagues.
If you are still in college, look at classmates, if you have a job, talk to friends at work. If people who work with you and know you don't want to start a company with you, why would a totally stranger?
When co-founding a startup, it is so hard already, and require so much trust of each other. Without strong relationship/friendship as foundation, it can easily fall apart.
I sympathise with with non technical founders when they're looking to get a co-founder on board who is technical, there are a large amount of things that go into finding a technical co-founder, I think you should also have someone who you know that is technical validate the capabilities for your soon to be co-founder, this is actually something that I do so feel free to reach out https://nespite.io
Thanks! I'll reach out soon.
Hey Kyle, how did finding a technical co-founder go?
Hey! I actually ended up learning the basic functions of javascript to get the project where I wanted to to move forward with the project. It took a bit of time but now I'm comfortable moving forward with the product and improving it over time post-rev when I have the funds to hire devs.
Have a look: https://cofounderslab.com/
https://medium.com/@mattangriffel/how-to-find-a-cto-for-your-startup-f6fb35577796
Huh. That's a bit odd. C++ and Java are both very common in mobile apps (Java for Android and C++ for cross-platform code). PHP and Python are both extremely commonly used to build the API backends for those mobile apps. In fact, I've used all four of these for mobile apps I've worked on.
My take on this is that people looking for experience with specific languages are doing it wrong. For someone with the deep technical skills you want as a CTO, the language used won't really matter and they'll possibly change the tech stack depending on the needs of the project.
This is important to me
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