As an engineer and ex startup founder, I recommend only partnering with someone technical and being very careful when doing so. Have a very high bar for who you choose to work with.
YC largely only invests in companies with technical founders. The biggest red flag is a non technical founder hiring you as an employee rather than a founder (when nothing has been built or launched yet) or asking for an unequal equity split with zero lines of code written. Such people proposing these unfair arrangements are not trustworthy.
Remember, it is easier for a technical founder to learn business skills than a non technical founder to learn coding.
For a pure tech company this might be good advice, but lots of startups require domain expertise from very early on even if that means partnering with a nontechnical founder. E.g., my background is in insurance, I've seen lots of insurtech startups founded by engineers without insurance backgrounds, and in my experience they don't tend to be successful.
In an ideal world you'd want every founder to have background in the relevant industry and strong business sense and the ability to build the product, but being strict about all of those criteria would result in a lot of false negatives.
as an engineer who actually launched a YC company, I can say that this is not true and prevents engineers from being good cofounders. The fact is, unless you are the 0.1% of engineers who can create truly novel products, our skills are largely commoditized. I was doing well as an engineer at google, but the product I was building could be replicated by engineers out of India / China etc. Having a co-founder who could actually build relationships, have good product vision, and most importantly SELL were crucial. Don't have the hubris that OP mentioned above - it's a surefire way to fail.
This also jives with my experience as a technical founder.
I have built systems from the ground up used by big corps. I've worked for a YC startup. I've built systems from the ground up at other VC-backed startups. I've built my own systems from the ground up. I'm building two right now (https://turas.app is one).
Except for the rare cases where you have something that's an instant hit, doing anything that's B2B SaaS is incredibly difficult without warm intros. Even getting calls to talk to potential customers in some spaces is difficult without the right network or know how to get connected to that network.
Having done this a few times now, it is more clear to me what I want from a non-technical co-founder:
- Be a domain subject matter expert. Most interesting problems require understanding some process or flow of information, documents, money, etc.
- Already identified and quantified the price for removing some friction or cost from that process/flow.
- Have high level industry connections (C-level, VPs, IT decision makers). If you're building B2B SaaS, being connected to the people that will actually make the decisions will make your life a lot easier.
- OR have proven track record of marketing. Consumer and e-commerce are really, really hard spaces. You really need to know what you're doing with marketing and social media. Managing those is a full-time job and as a founding/sole engineer, it's a poor use of time.
- Already have letter of intent to buy or other commitment to pay for a product that solves some problem if B2B. One startup I joined, the co-founder had sold the product as a set of requirements. The enterprise customer was so excited for the solution, they paid for a pilot based solely on the requirements.
None of these things require technical background or hamfisting a no-code solution.
Did your company work out? I understand and agree that a million engineers could build a product. But, many good engineers could also go work at Google et al. As a nascent company without a product, you have very little leverage. As an engineer, why would I want to build this thing for you so that you can go enrich yourself? If your product honestly could be built by people in China / India, then absolutely do that. Don't even bother with a technical co-founder, why would you?
obviously, the split should be 50 / 50. I'm trying counteract this narrative on hacker news that if you're technical, you're the star of the show. The fact is both the technical and non-technical founders are equally important. Don't have the hubris that you can do it all, unless you are truly exceptional.
Oh, I see. Totally agree. Knowing what users actually need and knowing how to sell it to them is the most valuable thing in an early stage company. Way more valuable than engineering talent.
I do agree with you. I wouldn't recommend engineers without product vision to start a company either.
Starting a successful company is hard. It's not just about coding things. That said, you can find technical founders who are good at both product and coding.
I would even argue that 0.1% engineering skills aren't needed, although engineers in this top echelon are more likely to have the general fluid intelligence needed to succeed.
The Steve Jobs archetype is an anomaly in a world where success itself is already one. Ultimately, there is no hubris, the real barometer is market success. Build something people want (and as a corollary / table stakes, have the skills needed to do so).
> Having a co-founder who could actually build relationships, have good product vision, and most importantly SELL were crucial.
I agree with you. I made my attempt at founding a company without a co-founder possessing such "soft skills", and I believe failed primarily because of that.
However, I still see a risk for technical co-founders there: the ability to establish connections, sell and leverage a valuable network has to be made clear before a partnership can be established.
I shut down my company a few months before the peak of the startup frenzy in my country. Suddenly, lots of people wanted to leave their jobs, found a startup and "build a platform".
They were extremely passionate and optimistic about their ideas -- often something along the lines of "It's like <popular product> but focused on <nonsensical niche>"; ideas apparently inspired by some "how to build your startup" content farm article or social media influencers' BS.
But they brought essentially nothing to the table. No money, no useful expertise, no network they could leverage. Heck, some were not even willing to leave their jobs and dedicate themselves exclusively to the new company. They just had a ton of naive optimism and overconfidence.
And I've met a handful of young fellows swallowing the bait, lured by the dream of owning their very own company, picking their preferred tech-stack and doing things The Right Way.
I think many of these people are behaving in good faith. They just have no idea exactly how useless they are when it comes to building something from nothing.
When you only have "an" idea it is not much. Once you start building it you find out that there is a whole continuum of things it could do, and then how to take advantage of the synergies you find.
Once you build something then it is easier to build something else, but you don't really know that until you build that first thing. A single idea is not very valuable, the implementation is because it typically it has to consists of many ideas.
You’re absolutely right. If I can develop it as an engineer, I can also sell it alone. I don’t need a dead weight called “business guy”. Of course exemptions exist, I know wealth people with rolodex full of very useful contacts. I might team up.
YC largely only invests in companies with technical founders. The biggest red flag is a non technical founder hiring you as an employee rather than a founder (when nothing has been built or launched yet) or asking for an unequal equity split with zero lines of code written. Such people proposing these unfair arrangements are not trustworthy.
Remember, it is easier for a technical founder to learn business skills than a non technical founder to learn coding.
Hope this comment helps someone.