Advice for Non-Technical Founders
Introduction
It’s been a few months since I’ve started working part-time for ATDC as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Not surprisingly, this has been one of the more enjoyable times in my career. Getting back to basics has been inspiring, fulfilling, and a constant learning experience.
While I know a little bit about building and managing a business, I know a lot more about building and managing products. As a result, I function less as an entrepreneur-in-residence and more as the CTO-in-residence.
You might expect that every startup at ATDC (the Advanced Technology Development Center) would have a lot of advanced technology founders. Well, you’d be wrong, some do, some don’t, probably 50/50. The companies that don’t have strong technical founders are typically the batch I get to work with. This is the area where I can have the biggest impact and I’ve really come to love it. I’m hopeful that some small bit of advice I can offer will make a difference in the long-term success of these ventures.
It sounds counterintuitive, but I actually don’t give a lot of advice on technology. Here’s the thing: The companies with strong technical leads don’t need technical advice because they have people in this role. And the companies without technical leads also don’t need technical advice because they have far larger problems than dealing with server configurations, deployment, application stacks, and scalability.
The companies with non-technical founders are faced with much more fundamental technology questions, precursors to specific technical problems, that they must overcome to take their businesses to the next level. This is where I hope I’ve been the most helpful.
Some companies I work with are painfully aware that their lack of technical expertise is holding them back, while others may not understand the looming pitfalls they are rapidly approaching. What they have in common is that the same questions come up over and over, so I thought this would be an opportune time to start writing the questions down. I have found that the questions most often asked by non-technical founders fall into 4 main buckets:
- Should I raise money?
- How do I hire a technical lead?
- Should I hire a CTO?
- When to outsource development?
I will share my thoughts on these topics over the next couple of weeks. I hope these posts can provide a forum for discussion and a way to log my experiences here. Please share your comments and feedback.
Cheers,
Mike
@msengbusch1
