Stop Looking for a Technical Co-Founder, Learn to Code Yourself

As a "non-technical" person who has had success finding "technical" people to work with, instead of trying to learn to code:<p>1. Become a domain expert - know the problem you are trying to solve inside and out. Know the market size, sales cycles, etc. Make connections in the industry.<p>2. Find Customers - Bring an idea, along with a 14,000 name mailing list that you generated via blogging on the subject.<p>3. Bring a design - Actually mock up a set of flows for an MVP. Show it to 20 people, and iterate on their feedback. Find out what is important so when you do start building you build traction right away.<p>All of these are things that a good "Business Guy" should be able to do and will ultimately be responsible for when they do find a cofounder. Sure, pick up a little RoR or JS, but you aren't going to become a startup quality dev in 6-12 months (or likely more). However, in that same time you could do all of the above many times over.

If you have a startup idea and you don't know how to code, learning how to code enough to implement the idea all on your own is probably not cost-effective from a time standpoint and you're more likely to end up with a mess of non-functioning code than anything else.<p>That being said, at least to me, knowing even a layman's amount about programming will gain <i>major</i> points with the potential technical co-founders you do meet.<p>I get approached by friends/acquaintances on a weekly basis with some startup idea. And I mostly think, "So basically you're suggesting I spend 10 hours a week of my free time for six months to build Facebook For Cats, while you make some half-assed attempt to do some marketing or whatever, and if there are any technical issues I can't even discuss them with you because it'll go over your head, and if there are any tedious technical issues you can't even help with those." It's pretty much a non-starter right there.<p>But knowing even a little bit about programming could go a long way. It means your idea is probably a little bit better than "Facebook For Cats," because maybe in programming you learned about some company's API and how to leverage it. It means I can split up work and give you some of the easier programming tasks and feel like we're putting in close to the same effort. And it means I can tell you things like, "the service doesn't always return well-formed XML so we should find a validator and then run it on the response before we insert it into the database," and you'll know what I'm talking about.<p>It all starts with the product, and the product usually means code, and having one and a half heads coding will usually be more productive than just one. Learn enough to be that half a head and you'll go far.

Stop looking for a qualified medical professional to treat your illness, just pick up a couple of books!<p>Really, I don't want to discourage anyone from learning, but suggesting that you can learn enough to launch a startup is kind of like deciding that you can do web design because you've used Word. Some people will be able to pick it up in a month, and some will never learn to write decent code.<p>There's a reason people pay me to sit and stab buttons on a keyboard.

LEARN IT YOURSELF. IT'S NOT HARD.<p>I am a developer that hangs out in startup circles and I get approached several times a week by "idea / business people" if I'm interested in joining a venture as a technical co-founder. My answer so far has always been no.<p>It's very hard to convince someone that your idea is golden. Even if you do find a co-founder, it's even harder to instill your ideology and passion into them. You should be founding projects with people you know already, not strangers. You don't want an employee -- you want a missionary.<p>Many non-technical people seem to think that developers lack creativity and need their guidance. What gave them this illusion? The majority of great web products came from people who could write a prototype. Do that and you'll attract attention from developers who will want to join your project.<p>Writing a prototype is not rocket science, and if you'll try it, you'll also see that programming is very fun and rewarding. Kate Ray hits the nail on the head -- all you need is regular old hard work. I started programming when I was 12 and it's not because I'm Doogie Howser. I just wanted to learn it, so I did.

There is a larger issue lurking here. Becoming an excellent developer isn't an over-night process. Tutorials will only hold your hand for so long before you get into the woods with concepts that are over your head (unless you have a math, systems, or compsci/engineering education); learning to <i>program</i> and not just <i>code</i> is a lifelong endeavor - you gotta love it for it, not just because you gotta do it to try building a startup.<p>The larger issue? The technical illiteracy of the general population. Knowing how to point and click (and nothing else) has brought user's expectations down to a point where they think some piece of functionality that takes them three seconds to interact with is a one hour unit of "coding" when in fact, it's more like days worth of thinking, typing, writing unit tests, and debugging.<p>My cofounder ATM <i>is</i> handling all of the business, marketing, and customer interaction. She only won my allegiance though because she is <i>technically literate</i> - not to the point of my expertise (otherwise she would be doing it herself) but she <i>does</i> understand that those 40 hours I just spent last week on writing unit tests is worth it instead of breathing down my neck about "let's launch it in a week, this has gotta be ready to make money once it launches, users are expecting it in a week, you just spent a whole week coding and I don't see any changes or updates...".<p>Kudos to KateRay for taking the reigns; I sincerely hope she/he finds as much joy in programming as I have and do. I also know that in the future, she/he will be more technically literate for a <i>serious</i> programmer to actually be interested in working with her/him.<p>My only con about this post, as hinted at above, is that it makes out what we [programmers] do to be: "yay I've read the RoR book now I can program!"

Vin (of Yipit) has a similar blog post (<a href="http://viniciusvacanti.com/2010/09/cant-find-a-technical-co-founder-do-it-yourself/" rel="nofollow">http://viniciusvacanti.com/2010/09/cant-find-a-technical-co-...</a>) but from the perspective of someone who actually just got down into it and wrote the entire site. While not uniquely a NYC problem, it was refreshing to be out in the Bay Area and not be at startup events hearing MBAs pitch "it's like Facebook, but for dogs!"<p>I tell everyone that asks me about finding a technical co-founder to just learn the basics of databases and a web language (PHP, Ruby + Rails, Python + Django). Either 1) you'll actually learn enough to make your MVP or 2) you'll learn enough to figure out what your product really is and what to look for in a technical co-founder. If you don't have any clue what your technology portion is going to look like, you aren't very attractive to technical co-founders and those that are interested probably aren't the best fit.

There is a good reason to find a talented technical co-founder. Just saying, "Learn to code yourself" is in some ways akin to saying, "Don't hire a lawyer, just go to law school."<p>Sure, a "can do" attitude is great, and coding is very learnable, however we are talking about Founders starting a business for profit here, where time is actually of the essence in many cases. A linguistic example is how one can learn survival French in a mere 3 months, but true fluency takes years.<p>I think it is important to realize there are people who are amazing at doing exactly the things you need done, and though you could learn to do it fairly well yourself in a short enough time, why re-invent the wheel? This holds especially true when a seasoned hacker has much more than just recently learned skills but also has a mental roadmap of pitfalls and work-arounds from their years of experience. No amount of study replaces years of "muscle memory" from projects that have both succeeded and failed.

I'm nuts about user experience. I wanted to create software from a UX perspective but I didn't have a job where I could bully people around to make things for me. I also didn't have any friends who were programmers. Basically, no one was going to do it for me and I didn't have cash to hire anyone.<p>So, about five years ago, I learned how to program.<p>And the really fun thing I discovered is that I enjoy programming about as much as I enjoy creating user experience. The passions become entwined in way that's meaningful and fun.<p>No matter how far you take it, understanding programming is going to pay off if you want work in the software business, startup or not. You'll often be able to participate in the problem solving process alongside your technical colleagues, understand when you're being bullshitted, and maybe even prototype things to prove your arguments.<p>And maybe you'll think it's fun. As long as you're comfortable taking a few years to get there, this is great advice.

If you have a technical company, certainly become as familiar with that technology as possible. However, recognize that it takes a lot of talent and experience to become a great developer, and if you don't have it already you are unlikely to be able to magic that up on your own just by doing a few tutorials. The best way to acquire that skillset is to buy it, with money or equity or both.<p>Edit: note that attaining a reasonable level of skill in technical matters will pay huge dividends, especially in hiring. There are currently no objective measures for determining developer skill. The better your technological chops are the better you will be at determining the skill of potential employees / co-founders. Making sure your startup is populated by the most skilled engineers can make all the difference between success and failure.

Why look for a technical co-founder? Why not just hire somebody to do the technical work? Is it the upfront salary which is the issue?

I think its great when the 'non-technical' co-founder even knows their way around coding a little bit. Otherwise I find you have to explain every single thing to them and they don't have a solid grasp of the problem.<p>Getting to know your way around a language like Ruby isn't all that hard.<p>As a technical person, I run into people all day long that have 'big ideas' which are often mashups of existing sites, "Its like Facebook for FOO", and will never find a technical co-founder because they don't have any idea what the scope of the real problem is, or how to distill it down to something small, useful and graceful. Lots of ideas, but having an idea of implementation is great too.

I don't want to discourage anyone, but you are practically distracting yourself from building a product by learning how to program. Getting really good at something takes many years of practice, and the program you write will likely be full of problems you are ill-equipped to fix.

I hate to be a naysayer, but this often-expressed sentiment (by pg himself no less, if memory serves) seems somewhat absurd. Perhaps I am a slow learner, but it took me roughly 6-10 years of writing software, learning programming languages, studying CS fundamentals, learning about libraries, APIs, network protocols, character encodings, security and too many other things to enumerate until I really felt comfortable in my ability as a programmer. The first programs I ever wrote were awful; I looked at them again for the first time in years a while back and was shocked at how bad they were. Even after picking up a programming language or two and learning just enough other stuff to be dangerous, my code was still crap, albeit better crap. It wasn't until years later that I was regularly producing what I now consider to be "good code."<p>The spirit of this post is admirable, but rather than producing more successful startups it will likely only spur the unqualified but ambitious to create nasty spaghetti-coded PHP monstrosities with gaping security holes, which will only serve to make the public at large less trusting of web apps and startups in general. Steve Huffman was a Real Programmer when he wrote the first version Reddit; heck, he even used Common Lisp! ... and he also stored user passwords in plain text. Imagine what those with even less knowledge and skill are capable of doing.<p>In closing, the people here are either: a) much smarter than I am and much faster learners; b) trying to falsely give others the impression of (a); c) too optimistic; d) or don't remember how bad a programmer they were when they first started.

Even if you can't fully learn to code, having a non-technical founder who understands the basics of programming is an amazing advantage.

How about try to code for yourself, but learn where your strengths lie. If you hate coding, and really can't stand it with tons of navigation through way too many odd details and abstractions, just draw the line. It is a classic case of weighing the pros and cons.<p>Being aware of the basics is a huge advantage, but after some serious time invested, don't ignore that coding really may not be for you. It is going to take you forever to get up to speed. You may waste a lot of time and it may become a big mess. It is more beneficial to find a technical co-founder, code less, search more. You also may find that you're a born coder, and it is an extremely valuable to continue going at it, keep coding.

I went to the same meetup, and also found it interesting how many questions about non-technical co-founders there were. I'll share my story about meeting my "technical co-founder".<p>I studied Engineering Mechanics for 6 and a half years, so I'm not exactly non-technical, but when I finished and was trying to start a company, it had been probably 6 years since I'd taken any serious programming (or taken a programming class), and I knew nothing about web technologies. When I originally met my now co-founder, he had an up-and-running website generating revenue that he had started building at 16, and developed entirely on his own, from scratch. (He stored all user data in a plaintext file until he learned about databases.)<p>When I first approached him about starting a company, he gave me the same line he still gives many others who ask him to join about being very busy with his own projects. So, I went home and started myself. I remember coming across a page on Wikipedia about "relational databases" and thinking "yes, this is what I'll need." So, I downloaded some MySQL software and put together some database architecture, then made some storyboards in PowerPoint, and came back to him a week later. He was a little impressed, but still said he didn't really have time to work on this.<p>So, I went home and bought a ROR tutorial book and built the Pragmatic Programmer Bookstore model, then changed some colors and page titles and went back a week later and met with the co-founder again. This time, a little more impressed, he agreed to help me put together a really basic MVP that I could use to pitch investors.<p>In the meantime, I had met with a local group of angel investors, and was accepted to pitch, at an "angel live-fire" session at an Entrepreneurship Summit in town. So, seeing as this thing was going to be presented to a group of potential investors, we both had a bit more motivation to work kinda hard on it.<p>Through this time, we became really good friends, and he finally became convinced that I'm not just some random non-technical person trying to start a company, that I'm really willing to do what it takes. So, a month later when we were accepted to a seed program and took investment, my co-founder deferred an internship at MS to the Fall in order to spend the summer on the startup with me, then turned it down completely when Fall came around and things were going really well. I've also learned a ton about development from him, and we've put together an MVP really fast that we're rolling out in a few days.<p>The point of this story is that if I had accepted his "no" and not tried to do it myself, he wouldn't have joined me, and if he hadn't joined me, we wouldn't have had a demo to show investors, and we probably wouldn't have a startup right now. So, "Learn to Code Yourself" doesn't mean just found a company yourself, it means that you do whatever you have to do to start a company, and if people see that you are that hell-bent on making progress every day, they'll be more likely to want to join you.

Jeeze, I'm doing my best here, C is hard!<p>I will say no single effort has been more enlightening to me regarding computer science than trying to understand C. I highly recommend it to anyone with any programming experience.

In the startup world, the biggest benefit to being able to do <i>some</i> level of technical work seems to be being able to more quickly attract a truly high quality technical co-founder. If you just have an idea and promise equity, you'll have a tough time attracting top talent. If you have an an idea, promise equity, and are willing to pay a ~market salary, you might do okay - but the idea better be really great since your money will run out.<p>If you have a prototype/demo and some level of traction, you can much more easily attract better technical talent.

People always bring up Jobs and Woz in these discussions. IRS a useful example, but not as an example of fate or extraordinary luck. It's a great example of one of the most common, reliable ways to find a technical cofounder. Jobs immersed himsel in his local tech scene, where he met Woz and started working on stuff with him. Rather than mythologized or fetishizes the pairing, is it so strange to think Jobs might have checked everyone out, ascertained that Woz was the best guy there, and then chose him as his guy? Sure they became friends and all, but I think it's important to realize Jobs made a deliberate choice when he started hanging out with Woz. He wasn't groaning about not being able to find a dev, he went and met them all, spotted the best guy, and started a company with him.<p>Jobs chose Woz. If you can't find good people and get them on board with your plan, no web app or meetup will save you. Go out. Meet people. Choose the best guy whose company you enjoy and make friends.

Better than learning how to code, learn how to build your app. That is a bit different. If you learn how to code you will hit a wall once you start reading about encapsulation, recursion, trees, data structures etc (all of which I have yet to mess with).. Instead write down what your application needs to do at different levels and learn how to do each one.

Just did that!<p>Couldn't find a co-founder so I decided to learn. Took me some weeks but now, after a few months, I'm comfortably with coding and improving where I can. Still need to improve my javascript skills.<p>Still lots to learn but at least I can put out a decent app in a few weeks time.<p>Should have done it years ago but I guess it's not too late to learn...

I've said it before and I'll say it again. As a non-technical person trying to become technical (as an intellectual exercise as well as work on my own stuff), the simplest, yet hardest, thing to understand is "something easy" really isn't.<p>You think you got a minimal feature set for your project? Think again. Cut it in half.<p>I have a travel site as my personal project, and I still don't have the ability to select the dates for when you're traveling. Sounds crazy, but it's something that not many of my users have asked for... yet. It probably helps that the main focus isn't about selecting dates you want to travel, however.

I can see though how someone would think that finding a technical co-founder through sheer charisma is an easier route than learning to code. But usually that's probably mostly ego.

Stop looking for a Business Co-Founder, Learn to Sell Yourself.

I think it's important to learn how to hack, if only simply to be able to fundamentally "follow along." I'm a big "idea" guy; and, most of my ideas have often been internet based. Being a lawyer, it never occurred to me to learn how to hack. This last week I started teaching myself at Google Code University. If you're halfway intelligent, it comes pretty quickly, particularly if you work through the practice problems.

It seems that there's some kind of happy medium to be struck here. If you want to learn how to code, great, and it's something good to know if you want to work on a startup regardless.<p>Yet it's unlikely you're going to master a given language within a few months, so there may still be room to seek out someone who has had experience with it for a long time.<p>tl;dr Learn how to code, but there's still a time to work with longstanding hackers.

Disagree 100%.<p>While it's true there have been people that have been good on both sides of the fence: coding and selling (Bill Gates)<p>Some people are just not technical people, and are not meant to code because they're just more cut out to sell, market or pitch ideas to people.<p>One of my good friends is a person who is comfortable socializing with clients, and is a very persuasive salesman, but he is not a coder; never was and never will be.

puts 'What do you need to build your startup?' reply = gets.chomp while reply == 'a technical co-founder' puts 'learn to code yourself, bitch' end<p>That's kinda what I was hearing lurking around HN for the past 6 months. I've never written a line of code in my life but 3 weeks ago I stopped looking aimlessly for someone with skills, and I'm back to the drawing board learning Ruby. Of course, I'll almost surely still need a technical co-founder in 6-10 months. But I'll be in a better position to see if he's good and I'll understand what he's doing. Also, I'm meeting lots of programmers this way. If all I get out of these 2/3h per day is a great co-founder, it'll be very well worth it.<p>As a noob, I find the stuff suggested on the post a tad intimidating. It was good for me that my first contact with ruby was the very soft <a href="http://tryruby.org/" rel="nofollow">http://tryruby.org/</a> and the second one was Chris Pine's book <a href="http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/?Chapter=00" rel="nofollow">http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/?Chapter=00</a>

This totally depends on the person's situation. If you have an idea and can help the project financially, you are likely better off getting a technical cofounder. But if you just have a supposedly great idea and nothing else to bring to the table, either the idea has to be unbelievably good, or you need to start learning how to code yourself.

It's about empathy.<p>Works both ways, too. If you don't know enough finance to understand a cashflow model or enough about writing to appreciate how to craft a pitch (or put together an effective landing page - whichever matters for your business), then you aren't a founder, you're an employee with a fancy title.<p>This is a high bar, but foundin' ain't easy.

Would you tell a techie that they can teach themselves to be a business guru for a startup? Each person has their own skills and should use those as best as they can, and work with someone complimentary to assist with the stuff they just aren't good at doing.<p>Simon@LabSlice

I've been thinking about this for a long time too. One of the questions Im sure other people in a similar boat would ask is: which programming language?

stop looking for a non-technical co-founder, learn to sell yourself ;-)

Personally, I find no use in people with just ideas. Not even if they have drafted their site down to the T.<p>This is because I'm at an advantage. I can easily learn and do whatever it is they know and do. Things such as marketing, refining the UI, feature ideas, user interaction, etc. These are things that are MUCH easier to do and learn than programming.<p>I would not start a company with anyone who wasn't an EXCEPTIONAL programmer. No, a weekend programmer will not do. Honestly, you'd have either provide funds, or something of extremely high value for you to receive equal ownership of any company I spend my valuable time and work on.<p>The only time I would recommend you spend your time learning how to program is if your roadmap includes hiring programmers better than you to improve or redo the code. You'd have to build the prototype yourself, get funds, hire good programmers and take off from there.<p>Other than that, I wouldn't automatically join your project, even with a prototype.