abeaclark

These are all great action items and I completely agree.

One topic I've heard a lot is the fact that impostor syndrome is often stronger for women. This is impacts their willingness to apply for jobs that list certain qualifications, for example.

I wonder if there are ways to be more outspoken about how little we know as founders and how much we learn long the journey.

Many of the prevailing narratives flex "This is how to do it" more than "I used to have no idea how to do this"

But I agree what you outline is likely most meaningful: 1) Increase women representation in VC 2) Proactively look for women VC cap table participants

Thanks for these links. Really helpful.

Curious if you're seeing technology businesses leverage Zapier? For some reason I've always assumed that's for places without a real dev team.

I have seen cryptography on some webhooks, but after doing about 30+ integrations at my old company, most were very basic / no auth.

Maybe it's a standards thing. Perhaps if there were a standard for webhook format / security and then a lib to easily create / ingest.

Great comic! There are definitely ppl out there like this.

I have a rubric of sorts I use to rank people and ideas. This makes it very easy to avoid the dilbert scenario.

Some of these people are very advanced (have contracts / LOIs, MVP, funding)

The catalyst for me was joining a couple of communities. The best for me was Cambrian (https://www.cambrianhq.com/) because I am generally interested in fintech.

Another option could be to sign up for YC Startup school (https://www.startupschool.org/) or apply for OnDeck (https://www.beondeck.com/)

Yes, as the previous responder mentioned, finding the right community is the first step.

But tbh, it's much harder than it feels like it should be.

I think places like Human Capital or OnDeck are taking a cool hands-on approach to this.

The thesis being, let's find the best people, help them find eachother, then invest.

I wish I did, but it's not my domain of focus.

I've heard good things about OnDeck, but I'm not sure how much biotech is there.

Yes, agreed completely.

If you are looking to be a cofounder, "founding engineer" is far from it.

Yes, this is an unfortunate truth.

This is why I limited the meetings to 30min and made sure to ask explicitly about what they are looking for.

If they phrase it as "early employee" or "head of eng" or anything other than cofounder, you're looking at a relationship where you are paid for your time, not respected as a cofounder

Yes, agreed with this sentiment. "Clearly a problem!" was vague and not the best wording.

My hope is to see that number increase. Not the right post to explore it, but I'd love to help!

Yes, I think this is very common.

I'm very opposed to the idea that founders need to eat ramen for 4+ years when raising venture money, and I think VCs are slowly warming up to that fact.

But, yes, you will take much less salary than at a normal engineering gig.

I think 100-150k is relatively palatable. 150-200 is possible. Above 200 almost unheard of at pre-seed / seed stage.

The irony is to hire your first engineer, you'll almost certainly need to shell out 200k+.

I also have a wife and 2 kids, so I am looking for a cofounder that can respect this and give the salary needed to live a decent life.

Thanks!

I definitely agree with this. I feel fortunate to have met a few people that seem like they could be a great fit, but we are still early.

It takes time and working together to really ensure a great cofounder pair.

The experiment will continue!

Yes, cofounder and first dev is a huge difference in equity. Strange that it works this way, but it does.

Like 40% down to 2%

Completely agree. Building tech is only half (maybe less than half?) of the equation.

Bringing on the right business partner is crucial.

Yeah - I considered this. There were probably 10% of people I could tell that wouldn't lead anywhere.

Some of it was trying to not allow my own biases to cloud things. Some of it was hoping to offer a hand up to others who may not get as much attention. Some of it was wanting to just run an experiment and see what happened.

I think the best method is finding a good community to start from. As I alluded to, YC matching has not done this for me.

The other thing is to pay attention to why you didn't like a given cofounder/idea. I identified a handful of industries that just were not for me (hadn't realized this consciously previously)

Yes 100%. By the end of the week especially.

Probably not the perfect setup. In retrospect, I should have baked in some breaks.

I didn't expect such a response and suddenly looked at my calendar and was like....ooooo dang. :)

It was super painful tbh. I am so glad I had 0 meetings the following week. It took a bit to rebound.

But honestly much nicer to just get it done and move on.

This is a common misconception. If someone says they want to bring you in as a cofounder, they almost always will think of you as a significant equity partner.

There are certainly advantages to both routes. I think there are a lot of business skills that are just as important, possibly even more important than the technical skills.

fwiw, my original plan was to be a solo founder. I ended up killing that idea a few months in because I missed some of the key red flags a business focused person likely would have caught.

Isn’t the proxy setup on ethereum a loophole in this tho? You just deploy a new contract and redirect the proxy