#technical co-founder

You Might Not Need a Technical Co-Founder to Launch Your Start-up

As a Founder of a tech start-up, who will be offering a product, the ability to write code is, not a necessity, as you could hire someone, who has the knowledge base, to carry out the coding job.

Do you, even, need a Co-Founder at all, for your start-up to be successful?

Start-ups that have been built to a point of success sometimes, eventually, fail, due to conflicts of interest.

Do not be…

For all the non-technical MBA type business guys out there who are looking for the technical co-founders who will all of a sudden magically realize what you’ve been ideating for years. Most developers have ideas of their own if you think the idea is 100% of the value you bring to the table. Why should they scratch your itch?

I'll leave you with the quote from Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley:

How to find a technical co-founder for your digital health startup via @WhiteCityNews

  I’m not a tech guy, but even before I knew what a startup was I wanted to make one. Finding tech co-founders has been the biggest challenge for me in building one. Over the course of three years, I’ve made countless mistakes and wasted a lot of time.

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Finding a technical co-founder for Chattoo was a mission that lasted several months. We have always known that we need our own tech team, and most of a body of experienced people in technology companies (and mobile apps in particular), will tell you that in-house tech is preferable to outsourcing. The reasons for this are obvious at first glance (quick iteration, expense and efficiency), but what is more important in many ways is how much more investable you are with a tech co-founder overseeing the product output.

In the early weeks of Chattoo, finding a tech co-founder came second to product discovery. However, once we began to feel comfortable with the product direction and grew confidence in its viability, we allocated greater energy to the search for an engineer. The process of finding a suitable co-founder – in the knowledge that you can’t get just anyone to be part of your team, no matter how desperate you may be – is incredibly time consuming and there is no magic formula.

How to find your Technical Co-Founder

Trawling the internet yields many stories of others’ success in this area, and advice is available from countless developers who are sick and tired of being offered sweat equity in exchange for the ‘next Facebook’. As a starting point, I would suggest that those of you looking for a tech co-founder save yourselves some time and read an article by Jason Freedman, the co-founder of FlightCaster. Jason argues that you don’t find a tech co-founder, you earn one. In my experience, which I am about to synopsize for you here, that description is completely accurate.

Our Search Process

The first couple of months of our search for a CTO were a trial and error program. Here is a short synopsis of the avenues we pursued, and the results yielded in each case: 

Searches on Elance and Guru - We didn’t want our co-founding developer to be working remotely out of another country, so this was not necessarily the best resource (most developers who responded to our ad placements on Elance and Guru  were based in Eastern Europe or Asia), but we did secure a meeting with a recent Computer Science graduate who lived locally to us in Reading. This guy met with us for around 45 minutes the first time, seemed incredibly keen, then failed to show for the second meeting, refusing to answer emails to boot. Never mind.

Joined CoFoundersLab (CFL) - CFL is where people interested in partnering with other entrepreneurs or start-up enthusiasts can set up profiles and match with other co-founders of appropriate skills and expertise. We had some success making contact with developers who were interested in sweat equity opportunities, but in the UK, the pool of talent on CFL is small. The few profiled engineers based near us were often slow to reply to messages, and no one we made contact with quite met our needs. However, there is a great deal of US-based talent on CoFoundersLab, and I would suggest that those seeking a partner of any kind (whether that be for business development or engineering), set up a profile and start networking on the platform.

Joined selected groups on Meetup – We joined several Meetup groups around London, including this Developers and Entrepreneurs Group, which has over 1,500 members at the time of writing. Among the several meeting groups run by Robert Fenton and his team, a Co-Founder Speed Dating group is available for those minded to take advantage. This is also worth attending for general localized networking. If you are not based in London, there will no doubt be other groups on the Meetups platform that will meet your needs, so the website provides co-founders with a wide (and valuable) networking resource. Nonetheless, we did not personally meet anybody through these groups who we chose to partner with.

Advertised on Work In Startups - Still in Beta phase, Work In Startups is actually a very useful resource. For free, a founder can advertise his or her work opportunity to potential co-founders, including engineers. For our first try at advertising on this site, we had no responses, despite having more than a hundred views. We felt that perhaps the job description was too long-winded, so we posted a much shorter ad, of no more than 2 paragraphs. This approach yielded us more success – we received around 30 applications, though none were suitable in the end.

Joined groups on LinkedIn – We joined several tech, entrepreneur, iPhone and development groups on LinkedIn and searched frequently for people with the requisite experience. We contacted a few of these. To be honest, initiating contact through LinkedIn must be one of the most intrusive ways to contact developers and would-be co-founders – I don’t know how many such messages they receive, but my guess would be quite a lot, so differentiating your opportunity in as few words as possible is difficult. If this is an option you want to try and utilize, make sure that your messages are short and punchy – no waffle.

Contact university students – We contacted some of the most renowned Computer Science departments in the country, including Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh, to enquire about first contact with students and recent graduates. The interesting thing about this is that the universities are inundated with offers for their students, and in the case of those three institutions for instance, all the upcoming final year students had accepted jobs for the following year. Even if you are able to get in contact early enough, be aware that in the case of some universities (such as Cambridge), you will be required to provide a donation to the school in return for your introduction to the talent pool. For Cambridge, membership of the ‘Supporters Club’ is £300 for a small start up.

Network warm introductions – This is by far the best way to meet a potential co-founder, and whether by luck or by design, networking on any level can bring about a warm introduction. As it happens, this is how James and I managed to secure the services of Chattoo's new co-founder and CTO.

How we met our Tech Co-Founder and CTO

In our case, we were introduced to our co-founder, Glen Ashley Peterson (also known as GAP), by a mutual friend. At that time, GAP was one of the lead engineers for Zeebox, a well funded social television app. He was informed generally about Chattoo (and us) through our mutual contact, and we were asked to email him our 2-page summary.

GAP’s interest was piqued by the 2-pager, and our first meeting with him was over Skype – we then met in person twice before he committed to Chattoo, by which time we had also shown him the prototype that we had been testing with students (more on this later).  To incentivize such a talent, we offered an equity + payment package which represents a significant reduction in his current pay, but as he explained, there is an excitement about being involved in an early stage start-up that can be particularly attractive. As 'excitement' is a subjective emotion, I suppose one thing that we should have mentioned is that, like everything in business, an ability to sell yourself and your vision is another pre-requisite to obtaining your dream co-founding partner.

GAP begins working with us in January 2014, and it goes without saying that we are very excited to welcome him to the full-time team.

Other Points

There are two things that we did (which I also highly recommend) that are alluded to in the previous paragraph. They are the creation of: 

a 2-page summary that can be sent to your potential co-founder upon receiving a request for further information; and

a prototype, no matter how shoddy, which can adequately demonstrate your product vision. For our prototype, we used Proto.io. 

Our 2-page summary was put together in a very structured way using InDesign - InDesign is a piece of software available at vast expense (for a start-up), but we were fortunate that James has been using it for years by virtue of his graphic design background. If you do not have access to InDesign, this can be put together in Word relatively easily (though less decoratively).

An example of our 2-pager is attached below, for your reference as to structure.

When searching for your own tech co-founder or CTO, the best takeaway is the first one delivered by Jason Freedman at the top of this piece – you have to earn one. My advice is to leave no stone unturned. Work hard, stay patient, and network as much as you can. With hard work, the winning hand will fall your way eventually – a microcosm of entrepreneurialism in general.

Back when I was sourcing funding for MonkeyFind, I had a meeting with an investor and his business partner in London. At the time, inexperienced and slightly naïve, I had been trying to secure funding for MF without a tech team – in fact, much of the funding WAS for a tech team.

Looking back, I don’t think I have ever been so well prepared heading into an investor meeting. We had a detailed plan and analysis for everything; a solid product roadmap, pre-agreed strategic partnerships, a comprehensive revenue model with detailed projections, and a well prepared presentation. I was excited when I sat down in the corner of the investor's open plan office, waiting for him to arrive.

The Meeting

Shortly after being seated, I was told that this (where I was sitting) would be the location for the meeting. There was a couch and two arm chairs, and a fish tank if I recall – but there was nowhere to show my slides. Because the office was open plan, I was so close to other people that I could hold a whispered conversation with several engineers working to my left. It goes to show that in presenting your business, you must be prepared (mentally) to give your pitch anywhere.

The investor then arrives, but shortly after I engage them with the preliminaries, the meeting is cut short. So short, it lasts barely 5 minutes. In a flash, the investor is out of his chair and out of the room. It’s over. Despite all my impenetrable detail, the investor focused on just one thing before exploring any of it: our lack of a technical co-founder. We had partnered with a well-known third party development company, but in his view, that represented poor value for his investment. So out he went.

“A good entrepreneur finds a way"

I remember the business partner stayed around to show me out. I was a little taken aback but asked him why the in-house team (and the technical co-founder) is so important to this investor. After all, I had been told (and you will read in places) that outsourcing your tech is not a massive obstacle to obtaining investment. Given that we had no money, no real connections and no experience of having done this before, I was willing to try anything he might recommend. But the business partner said simply “A good entrepreneur finds a way.” I was then promptly (though politely) shown the door.

I recall this story because now, with Chattoo moving forward in Product Discovery, it is time to bring in a technical co-founder. But he needs to be excellent.