Technical Co-founders Are Overrated « Lederhosen Labs. May 31st, 2011 at 1:24 pm posted by: will Last fall that was my initial reaction to blog posts and tweets crapping on business co-founders. Why all the negativity? I was working on my first entrepreneurial adventure: I had an idea and thought I needed a technical person to build it. While doing research on the pain-point I was trying to solve, I also had feelers out for a developer in Seattle to build my prototype. I hung out at Open Coffee at Louisa’s , attended Founder Dating , stood at the 520 Entrance ramp trying to recruit Microsoft engineers (see photo), and found my way onto the Poker 2.0 invite list. After a few months , I felt pretty good about the business side of things and was getting antsy.
Rails for Zombies : witty, quick, free way to get an overview of how rails works. Railscasts : Ryan Bates’ 10 minute videos on how to build stuff using rails. Ruby Programming Language : great book by Matz, godfather of Ruby. After a few months I had a prototype and it actually worked. Please, please, please stop asking how to find a technical co-founder. Listen guys, I'm sorry.
But, I just can't do it anymore. I can't keep having this conversation with every non-tech founder. It's just too painful. On you, on me, and everyone else that you've approached. I was once on the search for a technical co-founder, so I can empathize. But, seriously, Please stop. Back in the day, I remember going to my favorite startup mentor, Gregg Fairbrothers, and asking him for help finding a technical co-founder.
I can't help you with that, but all the good entrepreneurs seem to figure it out. Man, I still love that answer. You don't find a technical cofounder, you earn one. And that right there is why I get so bored of this question. When you meet people through all these various ways, realize that every technical person has one of three options: A.) How to Earn a Co-Founder Learn to CodeStop everything else that you're doing right now for your startup and learn to code. Find discussion of this post on Hacker News. Alex. Delivet blog - Tous développeur. Je croise souvent lors d’évènements startups / entrepreneurs, des « biz guys » qui ont « la super idée de la mort » mais qui recherchent désespérément un développeur pour la mettre en oeuvre.
Généralement, on recroise ces mêmes personnes 3 mois plus tard, ils n’ont toujours pas trouvé de développeur pour les rejoindre et de ce fait leur produit n’est toujours pas lancé… Dans le cadre de mon « projet secret », j’étais un peu dans une situation similaire et puis j’ai pensé à Laurent Kretz. Laurent est à la base un « biz guy », mais en parallèle de sa boite il n’a pas hésité à apprendre à développer en RoR (je crois qu’il avait déjà fait du php avant) et il a ainsi lancé quelques services assez sympa : FastFwdMe et Grople avec son associé Jonathan.
J’ai donc pris un peu de temps et me suis mis à apprendre Django (un framework en Python). Alors ok, mon titre était volontairement un peu provocateur. Alors, vous allez vous mettre au dev ?