You Don’t Need a Technical Co-founder For Your Startup.

Mahmoud Swehli
Aug 28, 2017 · 7 min read

You don’t need a technical co-founder for your startup, you need one to raise money. While i know many people will disagree, this is my opinion and below I explain why.

I start off by listing why the common misconception that every successful startup needs a “Genius Programmer”, and i follow that by listing why you would need a technical co-founder and the alternatives.

Full disclosure, my company Moodio specialises in outsourced CTO and development services.

The Myth of the Genius Programmer

This first section borrows some of the ideas of and shared a title with a youtube video from Google I/O 2009 that can be viewed in full here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ&t=2006s

In every industry and every job function there are myths that some people are better suited at carrying out certain tasks then others, or that people are just born with an ability to perform certain tasks well. And just like people seem to claim someone is a natural sales person, there is a common myth that someone is just born a great developer, the genius programmer, which simply isn’t true.

Truth is however, no one developer is that special. While i agree, there are good developers and bad developers just like there are good salespeople and bad sales people, no one left their mothers womb knowing anything anyone else didn’t and no one has been able to learn or understand anything no one else is able to.

When it comes to software development, there are two things that truly matter, and only two, these are:

  1. Learnt knowledge
  2. Experience

Learnt knowledge and staying up to date helps a developer know about the best practices, latest frameworks and best tools to more easily and efficently develop a solution, allowing the developer to make better use of their time in exploring possible solutions for their problem set.

Experience helps a developer drastically cut down the time it takes to develop that solution, avoiding past mistakes they may have made that will have to be fixed later and giving them a clearer course of action for tackling any problem.

While personal attributes such as intelligence and work ethics are obviously important, these only help a person in their ability to gain experience, and take in knowledge. With enough time and effort, utalising the right resources anyone can learn anything and become an expert in any topic. A developer of average intelligence who has put a lot of work and effort into understanding certain topics will be far better and more efficent than a developer who has put only the minimal amount of effort required. That is because understanding a framework, tool, language or technology stack is not something you can bruteforce using your intelligence nor something you can just figure out, they are instead developed by people and committees and not always based on logic nor is there always a logical reason for everything and so involves reading documentation, tutorials and experimenting.

This brings us to the next topic; being a genius is not rare.

Being a Genius Is Not Rare nor Is It Always an Advantage

The world is full of geniuses (genii?) and neither you are nor is anyone else uniquely smart. Considering that Mensa is said to accept the top 2% of the population, that means there’s easily another 100–150 million people out there who qualify. If everyone of those people lived together in a single country, it would have the 9th of 10th highest population in the world, making finding a genius about as difficult as finding a Russian or a Mexican.

Being a genius doesn’t guarentee you’ll become rich either. Don’t believe me? Google “billionaire mathematician” and see how long it takes you to find a reference to anyone who isn’t James Harris Simons, or find the last algorithm since Google’s pagerank to result in a billion dollar company.

Being highly intelligent or a genius can also put you at a disadvantage, the smarter you are the more you tend to doubt yourself as you are more aware of your short comings and the difficulties that you might encounter (in psychology it is called the Dunning–Kruger effect) and so tend to over complicate everything. Just look at the confidence someone like Donald Trump has, anyone intelligent would never say the things he says nor think they had any chance of becoming president, yet he does and he did to the confusion of everyone.

Your Technology is Easily Replicable

While you might think your technology is unique or state of the art, it’s not. The most advanced part of almost every application out there is in the phone’s circuitary and OS. The next most advanced parts are in the libraries you use. When you finally get to the layer that is what you have actually developed, chances are you’ve created nothing that no one else with enough time couldn’t easily replicate.

Lets look at the list of today’s unicorns, such as Uber, AirBnB, Lyft, Spotify, Netflix and Stripe, while all may have great products and have marketted them very well, none of them created anything that couldn’t be easily remade. Uber for instance started by outsourcing the development of their app to a company in Mexico before bringing in development inhouse, stripe created something in 2010 that had existed since the mid 90s, and that more and more companies have continued to offer since, and Netflix which may have one of the most complex microservice architectures in existance today has helped encourage many new entries into the online video on demand market who see the success that could be possible with the right product, with everyone from Amazon, Google, HBO and Vimeo now attempting to capitalize on it.

So Why Do You Need a Technical Co-Founder?

Money and Vision. A technical co-founder is often giving up a 5 or 6 figure salary to come work on your startup, working hours that no employer could every reasonably expect from their employee. in the pre-seed/seed stages, before a startup might receive any substantial funding, it would be very difficult to hire a good developer, let alone a small team. A technical co-founder allows you to create a great product while minimising your financial obligations as a young cashstrapped company, until you are able to show your product to a group of investors who will agree to fund your company and give you the much needed capital injection to expand.

A technical co-founder is often also far more committed to the success of the startup than your standard employee as it becomes directly tied to their own success. If it does well, they do well, if it flops then they just wasted a year or more of their life with nothing to show for it then high blood pressure and a receding hairline. A technical founder is also more willing to give up on short term benefits in order to achieve long term goals, as they are no longer doing it for just a paycheck, they are doing it to secure their future and create something great.

Finally, a technical co-founder should provide a single vision for the overall arhcitecture and design of your system. While they might not always, or even neccasarily ever provide the most efficent, stable or “best” solution, a single mediocre but unified vision is better than no vision at all, and definitely better than multiple conflicting visions.

What About the Other Job Functions Like Sales?

Well unlike sales, marketing, administration or other job functions, people who don’t program know they can’t program. Everyone thinks that given the chance and if they really needed to, they would be able to build up their network and sell their products or that they could easily put up a facebook ad and with some tweaking start bring in customers, but no one thinks they would just be able to develop an app.

The truth is often very far removed from these assumptions, sales and marketting skills are atleast just as important as technical ability. For a good sales person it is very easy to sell someone a vision and have them excited about it and ready to give you money without having written a single line of code, however try sending an investor or customer a link to your code repository or MVP and see if they have the same level of excitement (They won’t).

The only thing the software development job function has that other job functions don’t is this awareness that you can’t simply give it a go, however it doesn’t mean it is anymore difficult or important than any other role. On the contray, I would give up a great developer for a great sales person or marketer in a heartbeat. A technical co-founder might give the impression that your startup is atleast not standing still, the truth is it will be all for nothing without sales, and sales can help you grow to a point where you can hire more developers incrementally allowing you to make up for technical knowledge over time.

Alternatives to the Technical Co-Founder?

Again, it’s money. While many of the founders of todays largest companies did have computer science or software engineering degree, those who had enough funding in the company to hire developers or teams did not need technical co-founders or to take on that role. Uber is probably the best example of this, as a company who’s founders neither took on the role of CTO nor were they said to be heavily involved in the development, however other companies such as Netflix (which started as a mail order DVD rental company and had time to build up financing) and Amazon also functioned similiarly. In all of these companies it wasn’t the architecture that was somehow superior to everything that had been done since, it was often the operations and marketing. Uber grew because it was able to quickly recruit drivers and spread its userbase through word of mouth and promo-codes, Amazon grew because it offered great prices and excellent customer service while Netflix grew and continues to grow because it offers excellent content.

With enough money invested however, a good CEO could hire the right people (or those who are good enough) or outsource the development completely, allowing them to concentrate on the operations, sales and other areas that can ensure the long term health of the company regardless of whether or not outside funding is secured. Innovation isn’t what keeps a company alive, it’s cash flow, and even the greatest product wont bring in money if it isn’t presented to the right audience in the right way.

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Mahmoud Swehli

Written by

The infinite monkey theorem in practice and Software Engineer for hire at www.moodio.co.uk

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