I've got a problem with mixing 'co-founder' and 'hiring' terms: to me they look mutually exclusive. If you're searching for someone for 'co-founding' your startup, then you're asking for a partner. If you're trying to 'hire' someone, then you're asking for an employee. Partners are not to be interviewed, at least not with a 'coding test'.<p>Think of the reversed situation: you're a 'business guy' (whatever that means), and a 'technical co-founder' is asking you to join the founding team on the business side, but first he's asking you to prove your business skills by tossing an Excel sheets and saying 'please find the formula errors'? What will you think of him?
I agree with all of this (caveat, downplay the "interviewing" angle a bit), and let me add some more things I found helpful in my recent cofounder search:<p>- the most important thing for an early stage startup is that they can validate. That means building incomplete and imperfect prototypes quickly and repeatedly. "Getting the architecture right", "clean code", etc, are usually the wrong skills for a super-early-stage startup, and your CTO shouldn't prioritize them.<p>- more important is that you get on well with the cofounder. You're going to be working together for a long time. Make sure your personalities mesh, that you can spend a large amount of time together, and that you can discuss/argue constructively.<p>- Having the same values and goals for the company are paramount. When finding a cofounder recently, I wrote a questionnaire with 40 open-ended "values" questions for cofounders to answer (and then I sent them my answers). It was very apparent when I met someone with values overlap and when I didn't.<p>Ended up with a great cofounder, have been working together for 6 months now: <a href="http://ellenandpaulsnewstartup.com" rel="nofollow">http://ellenandpaulsnewstartup.com</a>
As an experienced developer, who spent the summer exploring options after my last company was sold, I had many approaches from non-technical founders. Most of them completely skipped vetting me, and just were hungry for someone who could code. One I worked with part-time for a few months, with the explicit agreement that it was a test run on small projects to decide if we wanted to move forward together. The last one did interview me, and ended up being my #1 choice to work with because, aside from agreement on the product and how we'd build it, she was clearly thinking about the bigger picture, not just trying to find a coder. (Although the market drove me to take a different full-time job instead, anyway.)<p>All that to say, another criteria is that if your potential co-founder is too easy to convince to join you, that is a red flag - a good potential founder will have many options on the table. If you are their only option, there is a reason for it, and you should walk away.
I guess this is a terminology question: If you already have founded a company, how can you be looking for a co-founder? Isn't it already founded?<p>As a technical person and potential co-founder, I would be very wary of the "Company with non-technical founders looking to get their product built" scenario. First, it looks like they're looking for an employee, not a founder (see above) and second, I would want to vet that product idea front-to-back in terms of technical feasibility and schedule.
The opinion of your trusted friend or acquaintance is often just as illusory as your ability to judge for yourself. After all, you aren't subjecting your buddy to the same rigor you would a candidate, and you are just as incapable of judging their actual ability as the candidate's. You may trust your friend to give you good feedback, but if your friend is inexperienced or in a completely different technical domain (therefore lacking context), their opinion can even be counterproductive.<p>And how are you selecting your friend? How many tech people do you really know? Surely not that many if you're non-technical and interviewing for the position instead of partnering with one of them.<p>Time and again I see founders choose poor technical cofounders. Often it's enough to get the business off the ground, but then as the company grows they fail to grow with it. Now they're a CTO without the ability to handle strategy or manage people.<p>The sub-optimal recourse in these cases is often to hire a VPE to manage people while the CTO acts like the principal engineer. Now the VP reports to a CTO who is incapable of doing that job and (privately) insecure about it.<p>Basically I'm saying a non-technical founder selecting a technical cofounder is a crapshoot and people don't answer enough uncomfortable questions up front. Management skills (or at least aptitude) should be part of the selection criteria. There should be a discussion up front about how the position will evolve over time, and what the success criteria are at each stage, and what happens if those aren't met (mentoring, career counseling, step into new role with reduced title)? And the same conversation should happen in reverse, from the CTO to the CEO.
My advice: Ignore all points except the last one. I've seen a lot of startups trying to hire a technical co-founder on their own, even following advice similar to point 1-5, but still ending up with a co-founder that was a bad technical fit ~80% of the time. With the involvement of a technical person in the interview process, usually either referring the candidate or having an additional technical interview with them, that figure drops down to ~20%.
Looking for anyone who is an expert in a domain your not familiar with is difficult. Especially a co-founder, as your success together will depend maybe more on dedication & your relationship VS technical ability.<p>At a minimum, look for someone who:<p>- Has the ability to explain something complex from their area in terms you understand.<p>- Is not afraid to question or disagree with you, but does so in a way that doesn't make you feel bad.<p>- Is looking for a challenge and is genuinely interested in what your doing<p>- Displays a history of non-conformity, thick-headedness in some way.<p>- Really thinks/codes in terms of minimal viable product<p>- Who you get along well with!
Wow, I thought this one had just disappeared into the void. Glad to see I got people's attention and provoked debate, even if it seems much of it disagrees with my underlying assumptions.<p>For what it's worth, one thing I don't cover in the article is whether this is a good idea in the first place. It obviously isn't ideal, and as I say it is a difficult situation to be in. From my perspective, I think a non-technical founder is obviously better looking for a trusted former colleague or friend to join as CTO. Proven mutual history is the best thing you can lean on here.<p>But if this isn't possible, I would definitely espouse an interview process - however formal you prefer that to be. My post is therefore really intended as a how-to guide for someone in this awkward spot, looking to identify the skills and experience for technical leadership without the background to do so.<p>Of course other soft skills and fit are just as important. But any decent founder will need to identify those in all people joining the founding team. This is just intended as a step-by-step guide for those specific skills needed for a technical co-founder or CTO. I hope it is helpful for someone!
If you are going to build a company, not a team of 2, the core skill of CTO is to ability to hire talented technical people to the correct positions. This is hard. Most people can't do this well.<p>Most of the early stage teams are better off to avoid using C-titles and talk this through from the get-go. The founders and first employees might be great builders, but not necessarily great CTOs when you start to grow the team.
I think the reliance on open source work is too heavy. Plenty of amazing engineers have done work at organizations serving millions of customers but have not made contributions to open source. A portfolio is mentioned but is at the bottom of the list of importance, and even noted as such. The author mentions company blogs. At decent sized organizations these could be written by the marketing departments, little regard to the engineers.
Skipping over what others have pointed out - you don't interview a co-founder.<p>a) ensure this is someone you are going to get along with
b) get someone else to assess their technical competence - you can't assess it and the guidelines you provide won't work reliably.
I would suggest people double down on point 6, "Find someone to help". If you don't have anybody in your network, pay somebody.<p>Why? Well, there are two abilities that are only partly correlated: coding and talking about coding. A non-technical founder can only ever evaluate the talking part. My approach to interviewing involves both chatting and pair programming. A surprising number of people are pretty good talkers and pretty terrible doers. Indeed, some of the best talkers are the worst doers, because they've had to become extremely good at talking to keep getting hired.<p>(As an aside, some of the best coders are pretty bad talkers, but those are not the people you want for a tech cofounder.)<p>So please, non-tech founders, borrow or hire an expert. There are plenty of people who sell their time by the hour, including former tech leads and tech founders. Like accounting or lawyering, interviewing programmers is a skill not easily acquired. When you need it, it's worth paying for.
nice article, though:<p>> A non-technical founder interviewing a technical one is akin to a brain surgeon hiring a rocket scientist. Forgive the self-aggrandisement!<p>It's not <i>self-aggrandisement</i> but lacks acknowledgement that it's equally complex the other way around. As engineers we tend to think no aspect is more important than the product we build. Yet without the right person to understand financial growth (and the patience to carry us along despite our lack of understanding), it's going to be rough! (not just finance, but sales, marketing, even legal depending on the field).
It'd be interesting to find some successful CTOs (e.g. people who built up a company from the ground up to a successful exit) and ask them how they'd want to be interviewed for their job.
This is great advice. Any decent CTO will immediately be put off by this kind of interview for a “co-founder” and be spared working with someone who doesn’t know his circle of competence.
How things really work: Non-technical founder tells potential technical co-founder his great idea. Technical "co-founder" goes and creates Facebook/SnapChat on their own ;)
For finding a technical co-founder, I think this is more like it:<p>Imagine you are looking for someone to marry and to cook for you. You will have to get along with them for years. You will need to share intimate secrets with them. The main thing that is really different is that you will not be having sex with them (although from what I hear that is not actually very different from most marriages).<p>The other thing is that instead of cooking food, they are doing engineering research. Pretty much all software projects are complex research projects. Now, imagine if the woman you married were a bad cook. You could always go out for takeout after dinner lots of the time. But say your entire business was built on making sure that her eggplant soufflé or whatever was 100% on point. If it doesn't taste good, it just crashes and you can't make money. But this is not eggplant soufflé its a completely new dish you need her to invent as a master chef. Only its more complicated than that. It has a thousand moving parts. Its sort of like they are inventing a new type of space ship for you.<p>So anyway, I would try to do smaller test projects or subprojects with people first and be very careful making a selection of a partner. Ideally it would take several months or a few years, checking out multiple people.<p>Also be aware that about 50% of all marriages end in divorce.