"You Need a Co-Founder, Not an Engineering Bitch..."

Caveat on the "hire college students":<p>You need at least <i>someone</i> on the engineering team that's experienced and has seen all the ways that large systems can go terribly, horribly wrong. Ideally that'll be one of the founders, because you'll have a tough time convincing someone experienced to join otherwise. But occasionally someone loves the product idea enough to commit.<p>Otherwise, a team of inexperienced college students is very likely to build a large system that goes terribly, horribly wrong. They know enough to write code, but not enough to <i>avoid writing code</i>, and certainly not enough to know when to trade off the quick hack for the elegant system.<p>I know because I was once that undergrad making a mess of things. I'm lucky; I've been able to work with some people who are very, very accomplished. But the time I spent floundering around on my own in college could probably have been easily avoided had I been working with someone who's been there and done that.

I like the juxtaposition of "You need a Co-Founder, not an Engineering Bitch" and "Recruit college kids. They're young, hungry and don't need of a living wage."

I hope people find this useful.

It's a disservice to the article to retitle the post from the author's original. This is the best advice: "Tenacity is impressive."<p>Just keep at it and keep doing stuff and eventually, you'll be on your own with money coming in and that's what matters. Creating work is hard. Doing work is easy. Your job as an entrepreneur is to create enough work that you can pay yourself and others.<p>If you've never started a company and you're earning $60k a year, it's not hard to forget that someone is taking $60k out of their pocket and giving it to you which means someone else is too and as an individual on your own, it's hard to convince people to give you $60k a year for stuff you do.

Interesting comp structure ("iPhone Payment Plan").

Hmm. Why didn't this make it into the HN Twitter feed??

YC sounds alot like the c-founder type you describe. it doesn't look that way with all the hype but think about it... ( like a good engineer) would google founders have fallen for YC's offer?

seems like you just merged the apocalypse startup posts into 1 big one.

I was a co-founder for a major ISP in the 90's, but got treated like the Engineering-Bitch instead of as an equal, so I left .. within a year, the guy I started the company with was worth millions, and I was still churning through startup after startup .. okay, I escaped with my own integrity intact (avoided having to deal with a later Federal investigation into the investors of the company) but there is a lesson to be learned: If you're a tech guy, always get the ducks in a row when you have to do business with an entrepreneur whose primary purpose is to make themselves rich at the expense of others ..