Finding a technical Co-Founder / CTO
An early stage technical co-founder is an unusual role. If your business does well, it is the role that changes at the greatest rate over the first couple of years.
Breaking down the question, to solve this problem, we need to solve:
- Who do we want to meet?
- How do we meet them?
The CTO archetypes
There are a few common archetypes I’ve seen for an early stage CTO
- The Builder
- The Product Visionary
- The Technical Leader
The Builder
The Builder archetype is someone with a strong software engineering background. They can produce a product fast. They’re obsessive over details. The best ones care about the look & feel of a product.
Speed is important. Communication skills are important. They should be able to translate from technical to English. You should see feedback incorporated.
The Product Visionary
Sometimes they come with domain expertise in an area. Sometimes from a product management or design background. They can’t build the product. They can spec what they’re looking for to developers. They’re used to dealing with engineers.
The Technical Leader
Sometimes come from an engineering management track. Sometimes from a project management type track. Best case, they used to be a developer. Now they’re managing or working with developers / engineers. The roles they come from aren’t early in career roles. As a result, they have a network of software engineers.
In most cases (but not all), they are not hands-on.
Look for the right profile for your stage of business
Pre-Seed/Seed stage CTOs
At a pre-product market fit stage, your company is tiny. At the very beginning, it is just the founders. Speed is your biggest advantage. For that reason, having a builder in the founding team is my best suggestion
Builders shorten the iteration cycle for your product getting built. They obsess over product detail. They stay up until 1am fixing something a customer complained about. When you hire, they lead from the front.
Series A+ CTOs
At later stages, a CTO runs the engineering organisation. This could be from 20 to a few 100 people. Those hands-on builder skills are no longer enough. You need to manage and lead. You need to build an organisation. You need to run security & infrastructure. You also need to hire leaders for those teams.
If you’re hiring at this stage, you want an engineering leader who has built teams & technology. Someone who knows how to operate at a larger scale than a handful of people in a room. Someone who knows how to get work done through others. Who can set a vision for the organisation and get people to buy in to it.
The dichotomy
There is some delicious irony here. The person you want in years 3–10 is not the same profile of person as years 1–3.
For Builder CTOs, it’s important to recognise the growth required. Or it’s important to plan on hiring leadership to help solve for this.
Your network is your asset
I regularly talk to non-technical founders about finding a technical co-founder. It’s true I come from a technical background. It’s also true I have worked with many engineers over that time. I have realised that does not make me a CTO vending machine.
The biggest problem founders articulate is that they don’t know any developers. Someone told me I do know lots of developers. Can I think of any who might want to join them.
That’s not how recruiting works.
There are developers in your network. They are just more than one degree from you.
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon shows us that our networks are more intertwined than we think.
Social Currency & Trust
The same opportunity presented by two different people to the same person can elicit a very different response.
The messenger matters. They can vouch for you and provide much needed colour to the target individual.
The best place to start in your network are not necessarily the nodes with the highest number of developers. The best place to start is the people you have the highest trust with professionally. Quality over quantity. Why? Because those people are more likely to stand over your ability and reputation and make the other party more interested.
Start having coffees
“Ask for money, get advice. Ask for advice, get money… twice”
The most successful way I’ve found to go deep in your network is to:
- Say you’re trying to find a technical cofounder
- Ask for the names of the three best developers they can think of
- Remove the burden of them introducing you. Ask if they’re ok with you dropping their name in the intro. If you can, just take their name and reach out on LinkedIn.
- Your goal is not to recruit the individual. Your goal is to ask for specific advice on how to successfully recruit one. Ask for advice on
- where to look
- what meetups it might be interesting to go to
- what kind of profile of person might be interested
- what would they think of as a fair equity split
- what is important to technical cofounders in a potential business partner
From each of those three names, ask for three more names of developers they would suggest you talk to. Make it clear, you’re not interested in recruiting them directly.
You don’t need to directly recruit anyone you talk to. If you do try to directly recruit them, you likely won’t be able to go any deeper in their network.
If they want in, they’ll say so.
