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Ask HN: What do you consider a technical cofounder?

by kiddz on 7/23/19, 11:39 PM with 1 comments

I am curious about what people think about how to judge who is and who is not a technical co-founder. For instance, if someone has a solid understanding of MVC and Ruby on Rails, understands version control, and how to break down features into user stories tracked on pivotal tracker (or whatever), are they technical? Especially if they are not actually writing the code? Or even let’s say that the development is maybe using React.js or Vue wrapped into the rails project, and they have little idea of how to actually write that code. Are they still qualified as a technical co-founder? Another way to ask it, if something breaks but they have to rely on other team members to fix it, are they the a technical co-founder?

I ask because tech stacks often change and often change underneath the feet of a founding team. And at some point, and maybe I’m wrong, no one person can fix all things.

So is appreciation for how to do development the qualification to honestly say you’re a technical co-founder, or should you only say that if you know the entire stack of your product to a high degree of individual competency? Asking for a friend ;-)

  • by mtmail on 7/24/19, 12:27 AM

    I see co-founder owning 30-50% of the company and taking care of IT/development. Could be 20% if there's many founders or others brought in much more initial cash. I've seen job offers asking for a co-founder offering 5%, that's an employee share in my opinion.

    Then it's between the founder to decide their roles. I don't expect a non-technical person to be good at filing taxes, writing marketing text or customer acquision (great if they are of course), so I don't expect the technial person to know everything either. It's about taking the initial responsibility as part owner of the company.

    If it turns out the first hire is a much better developer it won't change titles. I think somebody joining 6 months later shouldn't be called a founder (ideally by then the market fit of the product is proven, investment raised, overall less risk).

    Judging others before starting a startup is hard. Naturally you want the best person in all regards. Look for generalists though, not only the tech stack, lots of assumptions about the business will change, sometimes rapidly.