Why You May Not Need or Want a Technical Co-Founder

When I first moved to Silicon Valley, I was overwhelmed by the level of entrepreneurship culture that settled like a thick fog over the Bay Area. This entrepreneurial culture has mixed so heavily with the prevailing hacker culture that the two have become virtually inseparable. This is not surprising, as hacker culture promotes building technical products recreationally, which could be repurposed for entrepreneurial endeavors. Many of the oldest and most famous entrepreneurship success stories, such as those of Microsoft and Apple, come out of the movement that gave way both hacker culture and entrepreneurship culture. While their interrelatedness has had an overall positive impact on both movements, it has lead to one overwhelmingly negative- and for the most part incorrect- assumption that any entrepreneurial team destined for success requires a technical cofounder.

In truth, the vast majority of internet startups today do not require an engineer in their earliest stages of development. I am one of the co-founders of ArtCorgi, and like most founders at our stage, I spent the last few months feverishly pitching to every VC and angel investor I could get my hands on. One of my favorite experiences was watching their confusion when they tried to figure out how my co-founder and I had built our product.

• Angel: “Its very impressive how much early traction and press your team has been getting. Who on you team does the coding?”
• Me: “Neither of us do any coding.”
• Angel: “So you outsourced building of your core product?”
• Me: “No we didn't outsource anything for ArtCorgi we made everything in WordPress.”
• Angel: Opens up their computer again starts poking around the site with a look of confusion, as if there must be some hidden trick to how we we got it to work. “So you are raising money so you can hire an engineer?”
• Me: “Actually, the money we are raising in this round will go entirely to building traction. We don’t want to hire engineers until we can prove strong market traction.”

It is not surprising most are unaware of just how much can be accomplished without writing a single line of code these days- especially when one considers those who grew up in an era before tools like WordPress and related do-it-yourself web development platforms existed. But as understandable as this misconception is, it is still deeply damaging to the speed of innovation and the startup community in general. (If you would like to learn how to build a professional looking site without a technical background, check out this series of lessons my co-founder created.)

I have repeatedly run into cases in which entrepreneurs refuse to move ahead with an idea that could easily be executed because they are waiting for a technical cofounder. One of my friends literally spent years recruiting a technical co-founder for a simple marketplace website that had no intention of receiving significant traction for its first few years of existence. This trend isn't limited to online startups either. I ran into a friend about to give away a significant portion of equity in her company for a prototype she could construct herself with a one weekend trip to her local TechShop with a weekend of training.

This fetish Silicon Valley has for technical talent wouldn't be so damaging if it weren't for two confabulating factors. The first is how difficult it is to find a competent engineer in Silicon Valley that doesn't have a better opportunity available to them. If they are the entrepreneurial type, then why wouldn't they just start their own company? If they aren't the entrepreneurial type and they are good, then you are now competing for them against Google, Facebook, and Apple. How can you win?

The common sentiment one hears when they express this frustration is that they should just learn to code themselves. I find this sentiment ludicrous. You are asking someone to spend months learning how to become a really bad coder (being a great coder takes a lifetime of dedication). These are months that this person could have spent building a polished product without having to write a line of code themselves.

The second, and perhaps more significant factor, is that having an engineer become 50% or 33% of your company’s mindshare earlier on can be more damaging than helpful. As an early company, you realistically have only two goals: finding out whether or not customers will consume your product/service and determining whether or not you can get the customer acquisition cost below the lifetime value of a customer. Early companies must focus almost exclusively on these goals while building stats that they can use to prove they achieved said goals.

The early stages of a company’s life for all but the most technically focused offerings are decidedly not about building the perfect product. Your product is just a distraction from building traction and proving that customers will find your product valuable, because if they don’t, any time spent building and perfecting the product was wasted.

Even when you are perfecting your product, having engineers on a young team can slow you down. At one point, we wanted to create an affiliate program for ArtCorgi. A team with an engineer who built the product from scratch may have been tempted to ask her/him to do it. Because we had built our site in WordPress, we were able to find an affiliate program plugin that fit our needs and enabled us to bring an affiliate program life and immediately test its efficacy within a few hours (it was useless).

All that said, I do have tremendous respect for engineers and fully recognize there are many types of startups that require technical talent in their founding teams. My goal with this article has not been to denigrate the value of the technical-cofounder, but to encourage those who are using the lack of a technical co-founder as an excuse for not moving ahead.

At the end of the day, every founding team needs at least one “doer”- an individual who will figure out how to get something that needs to get done, done, in modern Silicon Valley the technical co-founder has become the default “doer” but, in truth, almost anyone can be a doer if they are willing to put themselves in the mindset that if they try hard enough there is a way to solve whatever problem they happen to be facing.

And if course if you liked the article do check out ArtCorgi.com