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A comment on Five Years as a Startup CTO: How, Why, and Was It Worth It?. Parent comment

Re:Five Years as a Startup CTO: How, Why, and Was It Worth It? by mikert89 on Saturday October 04, 2025 @03:26PM (#45475944)
ycombinator, the best very early stage investors of all time hold this opinion:

"If you are a technical founder, you do not need a non-technical cofounder."

https://x.com/snowmaker/status/1948160642399314188

Its really not up for debate, at this point it is a borderline scam to work for a CEO that isnt significantly better/bringing in capital. You are basically giving them free labor

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Re:Five Years as a Startup CTO: How, Why, and Was It Worth It? by mjr00 on Saturday October 04, 2025 @03:38PM (#45476042)
You don't need a non-technical cofounder, but you do need a founder willing and capable of handling non-technical things.

If nobody in your startup team wants to handle sales, marketing, finances, and business operations, you're going to end up with working software that nobody's paying for.

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Re:Five Years as a Startup CTO: How, Why, and Was It Worth It? by bix6 on Saturday October 04, 2025 @04:11PM (#45476306)
Jared has an (unfinished?) degree in CS and Econ so that’s a bit rich for him to say. Why’d he bother with Econ if it’s so UsELeSs?
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Re:Five Years as a Startup CTO: How, Why, and Was It Worth It? by CPLX on Saturday October 04, 2025 @05:01PM (#45476672)
What’s YC’s track record in the new LLMs-can-code era?

Or are we talking about Dropbox and Airbnb?

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Re:Five Years as a Startup CTO: How, Why, and Was It Worth It? by mikert89 on Saturday October 04, 2025 @05:12PM (#45476762)
most of the recent series A ai companies are YC companies, they are absolutely crushing it
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Re:Five Years as a Startup CTO: How, Why, and Was It Worth It? by CPLX on Saturday October 04, 2025 @06:35PM (#45477358)
What are their names?
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Re:Five Years as a Startup CTO: How, Why, and Was It Worth It? by lurk2 on Saturday October 04, 2025 @07:09PM (#45477561)
>at this point it is a borderline scam to work for a CEO that isnt significantly better/bringing in capital

I never contested that. My point is that there are plenty of devs who think they should found a startup based on the mistaken idea that they can learn the business side of things overnight.

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Re:Five Years as a Startup CTO: How, Why, and Was It Worth It? by mikert89 on Saturday October 04, 2025 @08:11PM (#45477873)
If you find mentors, or just pay people 200 an hour to meet once a week, a lot could be learned. I agree the gap is large, but it can be overcome
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