Non-technical founders seeking technical cofounders

If you’re a non-technical founder like me, think long and hard before seeking a technical cofounder to help you launch your vision. I’ve found that most people (whether they are developers, designers, salespeople, marketers, carpenters, masons, doctors, soldiers, or pugilists) simply aren’t cut out for owning the responsibilities of building a business.

While just about everyone harbors some dreamy notion of launching their own venture, when it comes down to it, few have the disposition to embark upon the entrepreneurial journey, and fewer still have the temperament to run a business. Programmers are no different. Great programmers are talented craftspeople. They have precious skills that they’ve invested years in cultivating. But, rare is the craftsperson who can build a business.

Perhaps just as important, there is essentially negative unemployment* among developers, which means there are huge opportunities for capable developers and lots of pressure for them to leave for greener pastures if/when things aren’t going so great.

Instead of convincing artisans to leave their gig to help you launch the next great thing, consider hiring them to work on it in their spare time. If your scope is too large for you to afford to hire them, then reduce your scope until you can afford to do it.

I hired an agency to build the first iteration of GuildQuality. At $40,000, I way overpaid them to execute an over-scoped vision. We could have come to market with half the functionality (the half that our first users actually valued) for half of that cost in half the time. Even so, $40,000 isn’t all that much. If you have a good idea and you’re compelling, you can raise that much money on good terms (or even better, you can save it up while getting paid by someone else).

Two years after we launched “GQ 1.0” (“GQ 0.1” would have been a better name), I paid $25,000 to a freelancer with a full-time gig to re-build the second iteration of GuildQuality.

Soon after, that freelancer joined our team, and we officially brought all development “in-house.”

* I don’t know if Negative Unemployment is a real economic term, but I define it as when there is so much demand for a particular type of worker that all the qualified people have work and many unqualified folks do as well. Of note, I think the big demand for programming talent is a major factor driving the disproportionate amount of workplace innovation that’s happening in the tech sector.

What have you learned in your career?

During a recent interview, a prospective hire asked me a great question:

What have you learned in your career?

Here are the first lessons that came to mind:

  1. Avoid complexity. Now that I have a business, a family, and two dogs, I try to steer clear of initiatives or commitments that will overly complicate my life, my family, or the lives of our team members.
  2. Customers are better than investors. I have found it easier and more profitable to sell a small product to a customer than to sell the idea of a large product to an investor.
  3. Surround yourself with kind people. Working with jerks, prima donnas, passive aggressives, bullies, or misanthropes is painful for everyone, even if they have fantastic skills, pedigrees, connections, or resources. For me, it always ends badly. Some folks say you should only hire talented people or people who have the capacity to develop talent. To me, that’s a given. Everyone appreciates talent; too few appreciate kindness. I have found it impossible to maintain a constructive working relationship with talented but unkind people. Unkind people, regardless of their great talents, alienate kind people, and that makes a lack of kindness an insidious and destructive force that prevents a healthy company culture from flourishing (this is only my experience; it clearly works just fine for some people).

I was shooting from the hip with those answers. What are the first life lessons that you think of when you reflect on your career?

Policy is like a cast

Policies and procedures, hierarchy, and bureaucracy are similar to a cast, a brace, or a splint. They’re incredibly useful to immobilize a broken bone so that it will heal. They remove judgment from the equation: If you want to move beyond the limits of your hobble, you can’t. That sort of limitation is something you need if your culture is broken and you’re trying to help it heal, but it’s something you definitely don’t want if you’re healthy.

Earlier this year, Marissa Mayer recognized this when she began restricting Yahoo employees’ freedom to work remotely. Remote employees were struggling to be productive, and their results clearly showed it. That represented systemic failures across the board in hiring, onboarding new folks, leadership, and communication, and those failures had injured the organization so severely that the first step in repairing the damage was to introduce restrictions that would allow Yahoo’s bones to heal. If Yahoo does well, that healing will come via the departure of people who aren’t committed to the company’s success, through improved communication, through better leadership, through more selective hiring, and through more diligent onboarding.

For a healthy limb, broad range of movement is critical to strength. Artificial restrictions on motion weaken muscles, and the lack of use eventually causes bone brittleness. So if you are relying on a cast, splint, or brace to prevent injury from happening, you’re making yourself more susceptible to injury.

Once Yahoo has healed its bones, Mayer can (and hopefully will) strip off the cast, and focus on strengthening muscles.