Advice to young people who want to be technical founders
There are too many startups with a professional pitch deck and 5 year product roadmap struggling to assemble their MVP. Many of these companies boast to be building AI product and not have any founder experienced in tech let alone AI. Strong technical founders are in short supply (and perhaps have been for the last few decades).
Most staff engineers or tech leads at big tech are capable architecturing complex tech solutions from ground up, but a comfortable life and fat paychecks prevents them from taking risk. For young grads who want to eventually become technical founders I have a few words of caution.
- It’s great to have other co-founders especially when you are young, but don’t box yourself as the technical co-founder too quickly that you are limited to search only for business co-founders. Finding other co-founders with technical background could turn out great too, as someone might be able to step up and learn sales / product too. Many great companies were built where all founders where programmers.
- When you start searching for other co-founders, you may be approached by many business co-founders who have a “great idea”. It’s important that you learn how to evaluate ideas independently so that you aren’t easily convinced. The business person might be passionate about the idea (most likely they have worked in that industry) but you need to figure out if that industry or problem statement will excite you for 5 - 10 years.
- Business founders generally are more confident, extroverted, and have prior leadership experience so their communication/storytelling sounds very convincing. Tech founders on the other hand struggle with impostor syndrome, lack of assertiveness etc that tilts the dynamic not in their favour.
- Avoid “idea” only founders. Those who believe their idea is so novel and great it’s only a matter of time that they will be a unicorn. Ideas are dime a dozen.
- If you are evaluating a young business founder, look for their work ethic. Young business founders need to be hustlers, who will get through doors of clients or investors through persistence. A young founder who doesn’t bring a hard skill (such as coding) or work ethic to the table isn’t a good scenario.
- If you are evaluating a business founder who’s older in age to you, look at their past achievements within the startup space -- previous exits, leadership position at previous companies, huge network etc. In the dynamic of older business founder + young tech founder, it’s important to clarify what the split of equity and responsibilities are going to be. Worst case, don’t become a founding engineer with a founder title. Too many business people want their product built by someone else for penny equity.
- Discuss clearly what upfront risks are both founders taking. Sometimes it happens that technical founder is asked to build the complete MVP while the business founder has put no effort till that point. A bad business co-founder will keep asking more features to be built before the product is “ready” to sell. A good business co-founder will get clients in waitlist, bring purchase orders, or raise funding in parallel.
Relevant read - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39902372