How To Be A True ‘Hustler Co-Founder’
If You Must Start A Tech Startup And You Can’t Code There Are So Many Other Ways To Be Valuable
Since I started coding in 2008, I have witnessed three time periods with huge spikes in requests from idea people looking for technical co-founders.
- Release of the social network movie ==> Late 2010/Early 2011
- Facebook IPO + Instagram acquisition ==> Mid 2012
- The Whatsapp acquisition ==> Early 2014 (AKA right now)
Although a vast majority of idea people are self-proclaimed visionaries trying to secure a spot for themselves in the tech gold rush, I am certain that there are still some real ‘hustler co-founders’ out there who can add tremendous value at different points during a startup’s lifetime.
Unfortunately, less that 1% of the idea people out there are actually ready and willing to do the work that technical co-founders need them to do, most just want to find a code monkey to build out their vision while they sit back and wait for the imaginary dollars to roll in … this is why many good engineers have become increasingly skeptical of working with idea people. Many will disagree, but I think good hustler co-founders are rarer and harder to find than good technical co-founders.
The hustler co-founder should ideally be the difference between a well engineered product and a full blown operational tech company with real users/customers. A prime example would be how Woz was completely satisfied with giving out the schematics for the Apple I to the tinkerers at the Homebrew computer club until Jobs (Woz’s hustler co-founder) took over the steering wheel and built Apple Computers into the colossus we know today.
There is a lot of talk in the tech startup world that a non-technical co-founder has to learn how to code to be useful, but I don’t necessarily subscribe to this school of thought. I think a non-technical co-founder should ideally be able to understand enough about how technology works to have a well reasoned conversation about requirements and feature implementation with developers, but should not necessarily need to jump into the codebase. There is plenty non-technical work at an early stage startup to keep the hustler co-founder fully occupied.
Two key things I expect from a true hustler co-founder:
DO some basic research before pitching to potential technical co-founders
Whenever an idea person pitches a startup idea to me on the phone, I am usually literally typing out different query combinations into Google search so that I can more clearly understand the space that the startup idea is in and begin to form my opinions. For in person meetings I try to dig up information that I have already cached in my head from the thousands of tech startup articles I have read in the past.
All this information gathering usually occurs within the first 5 minutes, while the idea person is describing the idea. I also try to answer the following basic questions independently and to the best of my ability:
- What basic problem does this product solve?
- Who is the ideal customer?
- How big is the addressable market?
- Are there any directly competing products out there? If there are direct competitors, what is being done differently and what would be the ideal customer’s incentive to deviate from the competitor’s platform be?
- Are there companies that have tried this idea out in the past unsuccessfully? Why did they fail?
- If no direct competitor has ever existed, why has no one ever tried this out? Is there a really hard technical blocker (e.g. online movie streaming in 1997 when super low bandwidth would have made this impossible)? Is there a specific financial requirement that makes it too expensive to start/run today(e.g. commercial flights to space)? Or is this simply a product that no one wants?
- What would ideally be the quickest and cheapest way to test out this idea? i.e. what does the MVP (minimum viable product) look like?
After answering these questions independently, I try to extract the answers to these questions from the idea person. It is usually very surprising to me that a vast majority of idea people haven’t thought through any of these questions, this is typically a red flag for me, most times I use this as a hard filter. If I find 20 applications doing the exact same thing you proposed while multi-tasking in a 5 minute timespan and you tell me that no one does anything remotely similar, I immediately become extremely skeptical of your utility as a hustler co-founder. Note that my skepticism is not aroused because there are competitors, competitors in my opinion help validate need if one can clearly explain how one can better address the market that the competitors are trying to or have tried to address.
I think this is a good early filter, an idea person who couldn’t invest 5 minutes into basic research using Google might probably not be able to perform the thousands of tasks that would be required of a hustler co-founder in future.
Be prepared to handle most (if not all) of the early grunt work
Most developers hate paperwork, and would automatically fall in love with anyone who makes all the paperwork go away.
You might also hate paperwork, but unlike the technical co-founder who is busy dealing with the codebase, a hustler co-founder doesn’t really have any other options. Give the technical co-founder all the time he/she needs to hammer out quality code.
This is not to say that a technical co-founder should not help out with anything outside the codebase, they can and definitely should if they want to or need to … I personally ideally like to do a lot more than write code, and if I was working on a startup with a team of only technical people I would generally do most of the field work and handle some code related pieces, hence my choice of product management as a career path.
Generally, in an environment where one co-founder is explicitly labelled ‘technical co-founder’ and another is labeled ‘hustler co-founder’, the technical co-founder should not be expected to own and figure out things like how to form a Delaware c-corp, the hustler co-founder should.
The true hustler co-founder should own all the legal, regulatory, sales, marketing, press, taxes, accounting, most of the fundraising process (i.e. creating slide decks and business plans, getting connections to VC firms, setting up meetings and pitching to investors), and should be out in the field everyday interacting with real customers and converting the feedback to actionable requirements that a developer can work with + mapping such requirements to a prioritized product backlog.
And most importantly, the hustler co-founder should always be closing. Sorry, I couldn’t resist posting this clip from Glengarry Glen Ross…
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