More importantly, most businesses don't need an "ideas person". They need someone who knows how to run a business. You need a total of one decent idea to start and run a business. You need tens of thousands of little hard choices, emails, and sales calls to keep the business successful, and that means getting your hands dirty. Ideas are not valuable.
Founders also underestimate the degree to which good technologists who’ve worked at several startups also understand the business.
I’ve watched friends who are CTOs get in to the same conflicts over and over with founders and product owners.
The founders and product owners throw out 10 different ideas and push small dev teams to execute on all of them. There’s no focus or strategy, it’s just throwing ideas against the wall.
Expensive-to-maintain ideas with no uptake are held on too for way too long.
Expensive-to-create but sexy ideas are prioritised over cheap-to-create ideas with obvious potential for customer retention or up-sell.
CTOs are often the ones taking about disciplined experimentation to find product/market fit against head-in-the-clouds founders with a vague, uncommunicated vision.
I repeatedly see founders ignoring solid advice until, if they’re lucky, experienced boards say the same things as the ignored CTO.
So often founders seem to think they’re a fictionalised version Steve Jobs, not understanding that Apple’s success was as much down to gritty, detailed engineering as a single visionary. And of course not understanding that they themselves are usually not visionary geniuses.
These impressions are from a small sample of maybe 10 CTOs, but some of them had the same experience at consecutive startups before learning how to screen companies better.
We need more founders who care about the unglamorous nuts and bolts. Or at least value the people who do.
Would you say this is true even if you are not interested in scaling fast and are okay with a slower "organic" growth?
(For context I have a few ideas I'd like to make a startup out of eventually, and I'm okay bootstrapping to a low/mid-volume high-niche area. I don't intend for the startup to really have massive profits, as long as I can keep it net profit and carve out a name in the niche I'll be happy.)
Unless your startup is intended to be more of a boutique consultancy and not some kind of SaaS.
If you're shopping for a high performance $10,000 oscilloscope or 3000 high endurance SD cards a month for the next 12 months, or a point-of-sales system for your small business?
Then the suppliers will have a sales person who'll visit you, demonstrate the oscilloscope's features, offer to loan it to you for a month or two so you can try it out, chase up answers to technical questions ('Can I install antivirus software on this oscilloscope?'), and suchlike.
If you're selling into an industry where that's the norm, you're probably going to need someone who knows how to do it :)
Those are the unsung details that you notice when they're gone but are easy to take for granted.
For me at least that is some of the secret sauce of Apple...
Smartphones weren't a new idea, but Apple got to work and made them better.
On that note, I was really curious as to see what Apple would do with cars, but I don't think there was enough they could do that was different or better enough compared to the huge amount of competition all trying to do the same thing. Tesla was the closest we'll get to an Apple car (car company ran like a software company), and they couldn't even do mechanical engineering properly (car body, welding, etc).
Steve Jobs never tried to make me pay $8,000 extra for a feature that doesn’t exist yet but is just around the corner and will be totally amazing. Elon Musk convinced me to hand over that money, and five years later the feature still does nothing.
Jobs fundamentally wasn’t a liar. When I bought Mac OS X 10.0, it was rough and slow, but it did what was advertised and I was excited to remain an Apple customer to see this platform evolve. Musk sold me a steaming pile of vaporware, making me feel stupid rather than excited, and I don’t want to remain a Tesla customer.
I didn’t want an iPhone, so I looked at the other stuff in stock at the cell phone stores.
I couldn’t figure out how to use the web browser on any of the display models. I ended up switching back to a nokia candybar phone until android came out.
In hindsight, one of the native linux nokia phones would have been nice, but they ran a similar OS as openmoko, and I was frustrated with that software stack’s lack of focus on being a daily driver.
Even the original iPhone touch keyboard was terrible compared to the hardware keyboards on BlackBerry devices. But consumers were willing to tolerate the keyboard because the iPhone was so much better in other ways.
Even after capacitance won, the iPhone keyboard was still snappier. I think they do some smoothing of the touch contact to infer from the glancing of the contact what you might have meant. Eg where did you keydown vs keyup.
If you've ever used one of those in-app banking "security" keyboards you might notice what a keyboard with no smoothing feels like.
It wasn't until SwiftKey that Apple even had to worry about competition
Or the Palm Pilot, which had a special 'graffiti' alphabet for handwriting recognition.
CEO = Sales and funding, maybe product owner very early days but quickly handing off to experienced product folks as soon as too painful to continue with rest of workload.
(n=1 from my experience at a hyper growth startup)
Pick something that already makes money and do it slightly better. Idea not needed (other than "do it slightly better" which IMO is much more in the "how to run a business" camp than the "ideas person" camp). Forgive the ideological soapbox/tangent but this is really what capitalism is all about. You find a way to do something slightly better, faster cheaper - maybe all three - and you can have a successful business.
Another angle is to build software for a non-software industry you happen to be involved in, or that family or friends are at. Unfortunately for a lot of developers, IT is their corner already so there's a lot of startups that make tools for developers, which is a heavily competitive space.
Other industries have a set of software they already use; CRM, inventory management, point-of-sale, websites / webshops, customer support, etc.
One interesting niche that isn't actually a niche was telecom, the soft- and hardware running the mobile network. Very invisible to a lot of developers, but I think it's ripe for disruption as it's currently dominated by old companies like Nokia, Ericcson and Oracle. The company I worked for had an idea, but were IMO still too old-fashioned and not eager enough - happy with slow and steady growth, etc. That said, they were using mid- to late 2000's tech for their front-end and C for back-end, surely there's ways to improve on that. I made an attempt but I didn't get enough support / people from the company itself, so after 2.5 years of trying to build a new configuration system which was the USP of their business on my own I called it quits. The size and complexity of that was more than I've ever worked on, and that was usually in teams of 6-10 people, if not multiple teams.
Indeed. It's been said that it's impossible to lose money selling software maintenance contracts. Or start a company that builds websites: you don't need an idea at all, the customers bring you their ideas, you just implement them. Ka-ching! Oh, and by the way Sir, you'll be needing a maintenance contract...
For me, Sales is much more difficult than coding. I had sales training that was reputed to be the best in the industry; I wasn't made for sales, and switched to support as soon as I'd completed the sales training. I like working with salesmen; I understand the game; but I can't play it.
The problem is just that a sufficiently mature product has been battle tested already, so it’s difficult at the beginning.
Anyone who sees themselves as an "ideas person" as if that is a defining or valuable characteristic is a cancer.
Company nearly went broke and was "acquired" by one of the investors for pennies on the dollar. I say never again... but, I like early stage companies. Maybe not that early.
I can understand a people person and a tech person working together; one person handles the business and finance side, sets up meetings with investors and all that while the other does the implementation side. These are separate and both complicated affairs already; if a founder takes all that on board, great, you get a share.
But you don't earn a share for an idea. Anyone can come up with a dozen ideas in an hour's time. It's low energy, low effort and you don't get a pat on the back for having an idea.
“… it's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people "here's this great idea" then of course they can go off and make it happen.
And the problem with that is that there is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get in the subtleties of it.
And you also find there's tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can't make electrons do. There are certain things you can't make plastic do or glass do. Or factories do, or robots do.
And as you get in to all these things, designing a product is keeping 5000 things in your brain, these concepts. And fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
It's that process that is the magic."
I don’t think people realize how shitty everything you make is. It’s only through continuous improvement and iterations that it becomes really nice.
Unless it’s something you’ve done many times before, if no one is pointing out problems with your design in the first version, it’s probably hot garbage.
Unfortunately, a lot of PM's only check the project manager box.
Compare that to the level of change between Ballmer-Nadella or Schmidt-Pichai. Apple has displayed remarkable constancy.
Most non-technical people I know genuinely like Apple, it is a great experience for them. They don't know, and don't care, what "side-loading" etc means.
However, I absolutely don’t think Steve Jobs would have let the Vision Pro in its current state sit on store shelves.
I just can’t imagine him greenlighting a product so close to the prototyping stage, especially in an environment where Apple had zero urgency compared to the past.
And yet he launched the iPhone, which, in its first generation, didn't even let you install apps on it. The point is not to excel in all areas. The point is to excel in relevant areas where the competition can not easily catch up with you.
The Vision Pro doesn’t have a lot of features where it excels. Running apps on it is inferior to using your phone or tablet. Watching movies is inferior to your home television. Productivity is inferior to a standard computer. Games are inferior to existing VR gaming systems like Index or Quest. Reviewers universally describe it as lonely, dystopian. Eyestrain is still a problem, dizziness is still a problem.
The iPhone had things about it that were better than existing solutions in a product category (cell phones and smartphones) that was proven and growing.
The most optimistic thing you can say about the Vision Pro is that if it were more like a pair of sunglasses and got rid of all the downsides to using it, it might be a really good true AR experience where your brain forgets about the fact that you’ve augmented reality. The problem is, there is no physical hardware technology that is on the horizon that will ever feasibly bring it to that place.
Not being able to install apps was completely resolvable by a software update. The hardware problems of the original iPhone like the lack of 3G were resolved within a calendar year with the next model, and the original model had an acceptable level of battery life.
If a similar situation to the iPhone was happening we should be seeing a Ming Chi Kuo type of rumor about a Vision Pro coming in 2025 that scuttles the external battery, enables the system to get through an entire Hollywood movie without charging, and solves the problem of the headset messing up your hair and making you interact with the world through ski goggles. These improvements are impossible within the next 10 years or so.
There was also way more urgency with smartphones. If Apple had waited one or two years the iPhone would have been snuffed out by competition. We would see a market dominated by other players in the market like Nokia, Microsoft, BlackBerry, or Palm.
In contrast, the VR/AR market is literally a contracting one with the only major players being Valve and Meta. The iPhone entered a market that was clearly in an upward trajectory.
Would anyone be surprised if Meta announced the shuttering of the Quest division within the next 5 years or so? It has never made money. It has never come close to breaking even, it’s a complete moonshot money sink for Meta. The Quest 3 is selling slower than the Quest 2 did. Microsoft quit on the market before Apple even entered it. Valve hasn't made a follow-up headset and might not ever do so.
A reminder of this story from a few years back: https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/13/apples-ar-vr-headset-repor...
This is a product that was in development hell that had pressure to ship. A more courageous executive would have seen the struggles at Meta and killed the project years ago.
The Apple Car idea was legitimately way better and would have taken less time.
Are they? I don’t see it. They’re more profitable than ever and are still extremely competitive in multiple markets.
The arguments against this have been the same for decades: Apple is overpriced, Apple’s product are inferior to competition, and yet here we are with large chunks of the market share and larger chunks of market gains.
Some products are stupid, but it’s not like Steve hasn’t pushed dead products out before.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BA/financials/
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BA/boeing/net-inco...
Hmm...no it didn't.
I suppose using switched-mode PSU in the Apple II was revolutionary to me at the time, but someone else would have figured that out pretty quick. They were already in TVs.
Sure, it was him alone doing all that, not the 10,000 employees, within a 40M people ecosystem such as California which is the tip of the spear of a yet bigger ecosystem such as the United States which in turn is the tip of the spear of the entire 4 million history of mankind progress up to now.
The cult and the propaganda causes a whole lot of illusion/delusion. Then you actually get to meet these people and you are as disappointed as the groupies who were asked to self cut their veins by Led Zeppelin for their satanic rituals.
Humanity as a whole makes progress, individual humans just partecipate in a giant lottery for monetary and recognition allocation. The latter has nothing to do with the former, much like winning a car race on a racetrack has nothing to do with building the track nor the car.
Max Verstappen won the Las Vegas GP. The GP , the cars, the track itself are the byproduct of billions of humans at work and every minute of work towards that has approximately the same value, if there's a positive outlier is very minimal and perhaps that person has never been to the track at all or doesn't even care about car racing.
This is what happens when there's 8bn of us right now with a total number who ever lived standing at 10-12bn
Let's make a practical example in order not to keep talking past each other:
If you owned a resturant and they were still alive would you offer them a steak or cancel another reservation to make room for them?
I wouldn't , don't care if you are Jesus H. Christ, you gotta pay me.
Apple has numerous very talented people who do all the rest of the required work to get products created and built.
That he defrauded his buddy Woz on one of their first ventures when Woz was the one doing all the tech work is really the ironic part. When it came to running Apple, Steve was very good. But he hired good people and those people are doing well (if not as good as Steve) now.
I'm simply pointing out he's not the same category of non-technical founders being discussed in this post
We know a lot more about hardware and software development than we did even 10 years ago let alone 50.
Those of us who came into tech in the last 20 years through today did not have as many unknown unknowns to stumble through. It’s all so much more streamlined. There inherently cannot be another Jobs or Gates in IT land same as there will never be another Christopher Columbus
Idolizing the prior generation is a fools errand. The discovery phase is over. We get the maintenance phase
(Without a doubt, something you think is OK, and everyone else does, will be seen as a horrible monstrosity by your descendants. It won't be something you can think of, and yet you'll be judged for it as a monster by some.)
There are a mandated number of unassigned, non-employee dedicated handicapped parking spaces per overall building size/parking spaces. And that in some cases, there are far too many for the building/business's use case.
An example? A shopping mall needs lots of handicapped parking spaces. Yet an office will assign close spots to employees with special needs, as the generic spots aren't for-use by employees. Thus there can be an excess of generic handicapped spots.
There are only so many spots available close to the building, and Jobs would obviously take one. So by using one of the many never-to-be-used generic handicapped parking spaces, Jobs was saving a high value parking space with prime location. And also allowing others to have use of a close to door space, all without depriving any handicapped person of a place to park.
It was a social hack, one he may have been quite proud of.
Clearly the handicapped are taking too many resources and we need the billionaires to have some.
His terrible attitude is also entirely orthogonal to his product management sensibility. The fact that he was a jerk does not mean he must be generally canceled and his unique product development theory and insight ignored. The two are not directly related, and it is possible to appreciate one while condemning the other.
Very much not the case.
I was on the iPod software team 15 years ago, and let me tell you, we got plenty of detailed feedback from periodic "SJ reviews". My manager (a line manager of a small team) went to those meetings and came back with lots of very specific things we needed to change.
One year (fall 2008) Steve was going on vacation to Italy for a week or two, and asked for a development version of the iPod shuffle we were working on to take with him on the trip. (We were terrified, because it wasn't really ready for that level of scrutiny.) That was at a time when the iPhone 3G and the original iPad were also under development, and yet we got a bunch of feedback on the humble little iPod shuffle when he returned.
He really was in the details, to an astonishing degree, and not just for the headline products, either.
I've yet to hear a story where Jobs was the one who discovered the fix, only stories that he pointed out the things that needed to be fixed.
He's lauded as a visionary, not as an engineer. And all the stories about him are about him pushing others to realize his vision.
Edit: Lots of people seem to disagree with me, but then pointing out how he was an extremely skilled ideas man. Perhaps that term has too much negative connotation for Jobs' visions (ideas) to be associated with?
You can easily identify the wrong thing as the problem then end up trying to hide a symptom instead of fixing the problem. Medicine is notorious for treating symptoms when the underlying problem is usually related to something else like diet or (lack of) exercise.
You can also completely fail to identify an obvious problem such as the games where you end up stuck and having to Google how to progress because the game is poorly designed. This poor design isn't going to be obvious to anybody working on the game every day because they designed and already know the solution but it would come up if somebody else played the game and got stuck.
Realizing that the iPod had to be thinner was a visionary idea. Making the iPod thinner was a technical feat.
One had the idea, the other had the technical ability (even if they had given up before Jobs pushed them harder).
I think "ideas guy" doesn't capture this. He had big ideas but also was super particular about details.
(Which doesn't justify being a prick, to be certain)
Not to say ideas guys aren’t prevalent, but for all his faults I would argue that Jobs wasn’t one of them.
From everything I’ve read, Jobs was deep in the weeds with all that stuff. In terms of asking all the relevant questions, finding the right experts, the suppliers to provide the right inputs at the right price, finding alternative solutions to problems, etc.
I doubt very many people knew more about bringing a new product idea to fruition from beginning to end than him.
Makes you wonder why they are so popular if this is the average user experience right?
Because people in general don't do risk analysis. Like in the 80s when everyone still smoked despite the risk of death being well known. Oh it won't happen to me!
Then when you have to throw away that perfectly functional $1000 apple device because apple decided you can't use it anymore, only then you realize you've been had.
Because 90% of the people are irrational buyers. They buy to impress their annoying cousin, or prove that they're more worthy than his wife's sister's husband. Because Apple's products are pricey and iPad case costs more than a iPad's competitor itself.
Same reason why my friend business owner in Dubai says his employees from India buy the most expensive phone with their first salary. Just because you buy the most expensive product, doesn't mean you get the best quality. And good marketers know it.
* Apple products are status symbols
* Induced demand through marketing
* Ecosystem lock-in, once you go Apple it's hard to switch back out
Also, it’s not bricked. Just needs to be wiped:
They'll brick both. But they'll complain more about the non-standard solution.
The problem here is that apple, in their infinite arrogance, feel that they continue to be the owner of the device you bought. The owner is who gets to set the policy. Apple here is setting and enforcing this bricking policy thus they are effectively the owner. But they still want you to pay for the device as if you were purchasing it!
The job of a vendor is to provide mechanisms to implement any kind of policy the buyer wants; the job of a buyer is to establish the policy that is best for them.
Apple wants to sell a device but continue being both the vendor and the owner of it. That is wrong.
These stories are semi-ridiculous. I don't doubt this person is in the predicament you describe. But why can't he just go to an Apple Store and have them unlock it? Does this person not own an ID?
The older macos devices (pre-t2 chip) are always usable. You can usually get old data off them, or they can be re-initialized.
But old ios devices? Had an old ipad, it glitched and it needs an apple id password. but it hadn't been hooked up for years and you can't connect it to wifi without it. old ipod touch? same mess.
It seems if older ios devices get out of sync of current os, it becomes hard to recover them unless you have a mac with macos that matches ios by year.
“Mr. [Founder] is new to the business of having ideas, and so when he has one, he becomes proud of himself for having it. He has not yet had enough ideas to unflinchingly discard those that are beautiful in some aspects and impractical in others; he has not yet acquired confidence in his own ability to think of better ideas as he requires them. What we are seeing here is not Mr. [Founder]'s best idea, I fear, but rather his only idea.” --https://hpmor.com/chapter/78
The person had never run a business, never been a product manager, never built a product, could not code. I almost choked on my coffee but tried to be cordial.
Confidence is a hell of a drug.
My stuff tends to be pretty good. Sometimes, I give exactly what was asked for, which might not be so good, but what I make, works; even if rather ugly.
If I'm allowed to work iteratively, with a good creative, we can make something very good.
I don't usually come up with uniquely original ideas, myself, but I'm really good at turning vague ideas into reality. I Make Stuff Happen. I've been doing that, since I was in my early 20s.
What I have encountered, is that folks put no value, whatsoever on that ability. Like, to the point of being downright insulting. They don't like the cold wash of reality, bringing their lofty ideals into the world of the achievable. I've been told that I'm a "negative naysayer," but nothing could be farther from the truth. I want the thing to happen, and recognize the hurdles that need to be vaulted.
When I was younger, and part of much larger organizations, I had to eat the disrespect poo.
Nowadays, not so much. I guess folks think I'm a cranky old prima donna, but I won't accept being treated like crap. I'm quite aware of the sheer value of what I can do.
I typically try to encourage my potential future clients to shop around and maybe ask a famous consultancy for a quote. After they recover from the shock, they are then much nicer to work with.
3. UPFRONT RISK: If you are doing this with sweat equity (no salary) then the Technical Co-Founder is taking almost all the risk. They are putting in all the time upfront, before the Business Co-Founder does. Smart Business Co-Founder would sell the idea to potential customers also, or get POs, or raise funding to pay for the technical effort, or invest their own $ to pay for the technical effort. However, a situation where one co founder (technical) puts in all the effort while the other gets a free option to put in effort later, is a very bad setup.
4. LEVERAGE: The Business Co-Founder essentially gets more leverage the more work the Technical Co-Founder does -- because now there is sunk-cost and a psychological shackle. The Technical Co-Founder just wants to be done with the build-out so the business can proceed and make money -- but the Business Co-Founder has every incentive to expand the MVP more and more since they are putting in no effort (possibly have not quit their job either) and wants more and more before the system can be sold.
ADVISE TO POTENTIAL TECHNICAL CO-FOUNDERS
- You be the "Business Co-Founder" also, no need for another person
- If there is a Business Co-Founder, equal out the contribution at every stage. A PRD is not enough to equal out a build-out. Some ways to equal out the contributions:
- Business Co-Founder has proven record that attracts success guaranteed (e.g., prior major exits, IPOs, huge online following, extreme case would be Elon -- i'll be a technical co-founder for him any day :-)
- Business Co-Founder sells concept to clients, gets Purchase Orders before build-out
- Business Co-Founder gets huge list of potential customers, ideally with pre-orders
- Business Co-Founder raises funding and pays technical co-founder for upfront effort
- Business Co-Founder puts down their own money (or takes a loan) to pay Technical Co-Founder for upfront build
Ideas are important. Building a product is important. Both achieve nothing unless you can actually sell what you have built.
>> Both achieve nothing unless you can actually sell what you have built.
I both agree with you and disagree. As a technologist, I agree sales are the only thing that matter. Most technical things are easy to me, and ultimately they are just code unless they can be monetized.
But I disagree on the value question -- they are only valuable if they are being done before the build-out. If there is just a promise of sales after free upfront effort from a technical co-founder, then the value is tenuous.
A good Business Co-Founder would be selling early, ideally at concept phase, such that there is no question of value becuase you already have pre-sales or purchase orders.
If the non-tech guy says "Here is my idea for a product. I've been working in this domain for 15 years and I know what the pain points are. I have XX customers that have expressed an interest and paid a deposit (or committed to pay once the company starts)." then that I think is worth something.
1. Discovering the real requirements to make the product succeed.
2. Being really really good at sales.
Technical people often lack those skills, and even if they build the best product in the world, it’s worthless without someone who can get it in front of the right people and convince them to pay for it.
A CEO who knows a bunch of stuff I don’t know about the domain, who talks to users more than me, and who sits her ass down and researches the hell out of stuff to bring me back useful knowledge—I’m glad to have.
Technical folks often dramatically underestimate sales for the same reason that sales dramatically underestimates technical folks - they require very different mindsets, and almost everyone is insecure about it on one side or the other.
To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until I see their execution."
Here is IMHO a more real world take on the question (can you find a technical co-founder?).
* There are three problems in business. They are 1) Distribution (sales), 2) Product/Service (the thing being sold), and 3) Operations (broad but lets say e.g. Legal, Accounting, HR).
* In very small business (e.g. startups) the Ops is not a ton of work yet, so in practice we talk about having potentially two founders, one needs to deliver a product, one needs to deliver the distribution.
* If you can provably bring the distribution on day one you will have zero problems finding a technical co-founder. In fact you'll have so many options you probably won't need a co-founder, you can just hire someone on a nice package.
* If you can't provably bring the distribution you are borderline worthless. That's the nature of sales, it is an uncomplicated discipline. In sales you produce or you're out.
So the author of the post kind of addresses this when he asks why you as the non-technical founder don't have the money to just hire. That part's more or less right. The "biz" founder with distribution already lined up is more valuable than the technical founder. Yeah the tech founder is more valuable than the biz guy who can't produce.
A successful business consists of customers and money, not unique ideas.
I would say that the idea behind a business is one of the least useful things of a business. It helps with marketing, recruitment, and sales, but really, the idea itself is irrelevant. Execution counts for much, much more.
In fact, the idea that ideas must be unique is the #1 problem with startups. There's plenty of space in the market for companies doing what other companies are doing, but just better.
Often the attitude is because 'execution is someone else's problem who doesn't matter much, I can just pay them peanuts'.
Which is why all the hate from the engineering side, because they aren't looking for a technical co-founder but someone to do all the actual work while being told they don't matter.
1. The founder being unaware that their ideas aren't unique is a feature not a bug. If Silicon Valley stopped reinventing the wheel, it would cease to exist. 2. The idea is what matters because ideas (and charisma) convince investors, and the goal is to make money, not a product.
Not all execution is technical. 99% of the time, you aren’t building something that technically impressive, so I’d say that most execution isn’t. You’re probably building some CRUD database app and are throwing your VC funded development team at solving your own flavour of the same old scaling issues that they all solved at their last startups.
To categorise 99%+ of serious^ nontechnical cofounders as just* contributing an idea and not meaningfully and positively contributing to some aspects of the actual execution very much paints you as having one of the typical shortcomings of a developer: you think that nothing else matters.
If a technical founder is sitting down and writing code until 2am on the weekends the non-technical founder better be making phone calls and sending emails, etc...
The inexperienced "idea guy" thinks by sharing "the idea" they have done their part and are just now going to sit and watch as the "the programmer" implements it.
Some problems I commonly see in people's analysis of situations:
- believing themselves to know things which are unknowable ("the ideas person doesn’t have the situational awareness to recognize that their ideas aren’t that unique", "value in a startup isn’t the idea but the ability to execute and build on that idea", etc).
- representing (and I suspect perceiving) subjective, heuristic based opinions ("aren’t that unique") as facts.
- using inadequate variable types when describing (and I suspect perceiving) the problem space ("the value", "wants credit/equity for having the idea").
- making up facts ("In 99% of cases")
This entire thread (as are most threads when the prompt is of a certain class of topic) is chock full of all of these, and many of the people in this subreddit are arguably genuine "The Experts" on this sort of thing...which is (or can be) kinda funny if you think about it for more than a few seconds.
And yes, I do realize that I "should" just "know what you meant"....except: how should I go about doing that?
And if these silly delusional founders should not believe silly delusional things, should that rule not extend to everyone?
The best startups have both.
You can execute, great. But if you have poor industry understanding and no idea what is going to work in that space. Let alone something that is going to revolutionize the space. It is, similarly, not going to work.
Your industry expert need to have 20-30 years in the space. Understand it from the ground up. That guy is actually valuable.
It's not one idea, it's comprehensive understanding of all the current struggles in the space.
Managing social media, meeting with prospective users, translating feedback into product requirements. They should be taking every little thing we work on, whether its a napkin sketch or a working MVP and putting it in front of people so we can steer the product as intelligently as possible. If they do all that they are more than lifting their weight. That would make me almost feel like a slouch just doing the coding.
>> 1. The founder sees themselves as the ideas person but ...
Ideas are like assholes ... everybody has one and they're usually full of shit.
1. The founder sees themselves as the ideas person but doesn’t have the situational awareness to recognize that their ideas aren’t that unique.
2. The founder doesn’t understand that the value in a startup isn’t the idea but the ability to execute and build on that idea. For every very successful startup in X space there were 10x more with the same general idea but that failed to execute. The founder wants someone to built it for them but wants credit/equity for having the idea. In 99% of cases the value is created by the builders (technical cofounder) which instantly creates awkwardness of the founder wanting far more equity, credit, and control than their contributions warrant
For the above reasons I’d avoid 99% of asks for a technical co-founder like the plague.