Searching for a technical cofounder

When engineers aren’t searching for you

In my role at Matter., I speak to a lot of people who have an amazing idea and a lot of institutional knowledge — they just need a technical lead to make it real. Can I help them find somebody to do that?

The myth of the “friendly nerd”

Once upon a time, I was an engineer. My mom taught me programming fundamentals when I was a kid, and then I cut my teeth by making MS-DOS games as a teenager. My first job, at 15, was creating one of the first local classified ads sites. In college, I built a web community that drew millions of visitors a day.

The very last thing I wanted to do — or ever would have done — was build someone’s project for free.

In the early aughts, when the internet had become mainstream and everybody and their dog was figuring out how to bring their businesses online, there was a meme that all you had to do was “find a friendly nerd”, who would help you build what you needed.

The companion meme was that people with technical skills were inherently uncreative: they didn’t have any projects or strategic ideas of their own. All they wanted to do was figure out engineering problems.

As time has gone on, this myth hasn’t died. For example, I’ve heard plenty of designers wish they had a developer to make their projects real. They would provide the creativity; the developer would provide the code.

Yuck.

Search for a collaborator

There’s nothing wrong with hiring someone to build your project for you according to your specs if you’re paying market rate. It’s a living, and these jobs need to be done.

However, if you’re building a startup, you probably can’t pay market rate. A common solution to this is to partially pay using equity (although, I’ve got to tell you, as an investor I hate this). Equity compensation is fine, but it’s a kind of lottery ticket: even if you’ve de-risked your business as far as you can and you’re building a bona-fide rocketship, it’s probably going to be years before you can trade in those shares for something you can spend on food and rent.

Only certain kinds of developers can accept a lower cash payout — and they are predominantly affluent, white men. If you care about diversity in the industry, or the health of your own company culture, try and pay fairly.

Moreover, by just hiring a warm body that codes, you’re missing out on a wealth of experience and perspective. What you should really be looking for is a collaborator: a cofounder in the truest sense.

To me, to you

As an early-stage founder, if you’re looking for talented engineers to join your cause, you’re having to compete with companies like Facebook and Google, as well as a host of VC-funded, comfortable jobs that pay well over six figures. Like-for-like, those are hard positions to compete with. And the truth is, if you’re struggling to find someone with technical skills to join your company, you’re probably missing more than coding skills.

You need a collaborator. Not a technical collaborator, who only weighs in on technical issues, but a real, honest-to-god partner in crime. Someone who can help you navigate your startup challenges, and happens to have a complementary set of skills. Your technical lead is your product lead; put in that light, you need to be looking for much more than just an ability to code.

Inviting someone to be a collaborator means giving up some control over what your venture is going to be. You need to agree on your non-negotiables — for example, the problem you’re trying to solve, or the real people you’re trying to help — but giving up some agency over the how is a requirement.

Nobody has a clean path to success: the plan you establish at the beginning is rarely the plan you’re following two weeks later, let alone at the other end of your startup journey. There are challenges at every step. Having someone who can help you overcome them, who provides perspective that you’re missing, can be a force multiplier. Even if they joined much later than you, if you’re at an early stage, they’re a cofounder.

The way you find a technical cofounder, then, is the way you’d find any collaborator: find people you respect in the field, saying real, human things that make sense to you. Be open with your ideas. Be open to their knowledge and expertise. And see if, as people, you find yourselves building on each other’s energy. There’s no quick fix for this. You’re getting married; treat it that way.

And conversely:

If you’re someone with technical skills thinking about joining a startup, you need to evaluate your potential cofounder carefully. What are they bringing to the table?

There’s a danger, with people who just have an idea, that they don’t have any skills or experience to back it up. While you’re building product and weighing in on strategic decisions, they need to be hustling. If they’re the kind of person who struggles with adapting to new information, or doesn’t want your feedback to in any way deviate them from their plan, you should walk away. The single biggest negative signal: if they ignore or argue negative feedback instead of facing it head-on.

If, on the other hand, they’re open to collaboration, have domain expertise, and have demonstrated that they have both the skills and the energy to lead the business side, then it could be an opportunity. More than any other kind of job as an engineer, early-stage startups provide the opportunity to accelerate your career trajectory, exercise your creative muscles, and work on something with much more agency than you would anywhere else. In a mission-driven startup, you can also do something that materially helps the world. (Yes, a startup can also provide a big check, but that’s not why you should join one.)

My own startup journey transformed my career. I might still be working as a university web developer if I hadn’t co-founded Elgg in 2003; if I hadn’t co-founded Known in 2014, I wouldn’t have worked at Medium and I wouldn’t be an investor now. My career experience would be nowhere near as rich, and I would have missed out on meeting so many incredible people along the way.

This is a personal blog post, but I need to point out: I’m looking for mission-driven startups helping to build a more informed, inclusive and empathetic society. Applications close on October 27th; here’s what we’re looking for.