But the one thing I continue to struggle with is finding someone else who wants to form a startup. I work with some very smart people, but the problem is, their whole game plan is built around climbing the corporate ladder, whereas mine couldn't be more opposite. So what is the best strategy for someone like myself to find a trustworthy, hard working partner to form a startup? I fully respect what programmers/engineers/hackers bring to the table and I feel that I would compliment those skills very well. I also have a pretty good understanding of the web and wouldn't consider myself one of those "pie-in-the-sky" business types that are responsible for that stereotype. I'm just a guy looking to build something cool, solve some problems, and maybe make enough to quit my day-job. Sorry for the long post, but what are your thoughts?
We have very different styles: I am improvisational, creative, always willing to try an idea, in love with writing beautiful code, mostly driven by aesthetics and idealism. He is organized, managerial, skeptical, oriented toward business and negotiation and the world of money, good at researching and finding out how other people have solved a problem, though he still enjoys code.
We have disagreements sometimes, but it's working well. The disagreements have turned out fruitful. That's probably how it should be.
The ad I placed was not for a co-founder, but for someone to pair-program with me. At my cube-farm day job at the time, I hadn't found anyone willing to try pair-programming. I missed pairing, and I knew from past experience that I'm way more productive when pairing. I figured that with a pair, I would likely get one of my personal projects done. So I placed an ad looking for a student to pair-program with me on my projects. I offered to pay $15/hour, since the main compensation for a student would be the technical know-how he'd pick up from someone with more experience (I've been coding for roughly 20 years).
After about one session or so, though, $15/hour seemed stupid. It made more sense that we would each have a stake in a product. It's been way better to have someone who takes initiative than a student who waits to be told what to do.
I'd second the "find the watering hole where your prey is" comment.
'Just because you've become a young man now (Man, now) There's still some things that you don't understand now (Son, now) Before you ask some girl for her hand now (My son) Keep your freedom for as long as you can now'
My mama told me...'you better shop around' (Shop, shop around) a-whoa-yeah You better (uh-huh) shop around! (Shop, shop around) Uh-uh-uh
It cracked me up, LOL
Right out of school and six months in to my job I knew I wasn't really cut out for finance and preferred to not work for someone else. I started a business on the side and learned more in 3 months than I did all through college. Fast forward a year. A childhood friend of mine and I began collaborating on an idea I had whenever we had spare time. However, we were eventually faced with a Catch22 situation: we needed more time to work on our startup, but we also needed money to live on (my other side business was making decent money, but not enough to live off of). We were OK with this and planned on doing the startup on the side until it was making money, or at least launched.
On a whim we applied to YC as we figured "why the hell not?" YC accepted us even though I was a non-technical. I'm not exactly sure why as I've never actually asked them, but I will offer some speculation: my partner is a genius and I was extremely familiar with the market we were trying to get in to.
Looking back, if we would have been rejected, I would have learned to code. Even now I plan on doing so (and have already done some) once things are a little less hectic. Obviously, YC has sped up the creation process considerably and we've gotten more done in ~1.5 months than all the previous time combined.
So I guess my advice to you is this: 1. Start a business on the side if you can 2. Learn to hack 3. Follow aaronblohowiak's advice 4. Forget the mock business plans - I've run/ran 3 small to micro sized businesses and the closest thing I've done to completing a business plan is a YC Summer 08 application. At some point, you have to stop planning and start doing.
Good luck and feel free to email me anytime.
I'm a marketing / biz dev / product dev guy and I can spec a project, help lead a project, manage a team, compose great copy for the site / service / collateral, get the word out through a fair network I've built and market the out of it, make use of some contacts to pitch for funding, etc etc. These are the things I've been doing for the past nine years. What I can't do is build the product myself.
It's a tough game, and it's all about networking. I'm talking to friends of friends of friends but little has come of it to this point. So I'll keep at it and be persistent in the hopes that one day soon I'll have a conversation with a skilled engineer looking to lead instead of follow and we'll see eye to eye.
I'm a Rails coder, can lead project and define architecture. Getting ready for YC spring 2009. Looking for the business side partners who can sell and promote the hell out of a SaaS idea that will be big time for small and medium businesses. Hackers are welcomed too! Email address in my profile.
sigh
If you can recognise tallent, it's easy enough to pick up people who are on the rebound from bad jobs, or who haven't gotten much paid experience yet. I regularly hire friends of friends, but then I hang out with very technical people who have very technical friends. I've picked up a lot of really good technical people with little experience and paid 'em $15/hr to work for me... most of them leave for better pay after a year or so, but if I was compitent at business, I'd be able to pay them more by then.
My big problem is that if you are incompetent at something, you can't reconise compitence. I am an incompitent business person, so I can't recognise a good sales/businessperson. Even with a good solid technical team, you need business compitency to succeed, and there isn't much of that in my social circle, and even if there was, I wouldn't be able to tell the good from the pretenders.
It sounds like I need to get together with someone like you, but who? I mean, I alrealdy said, I can't tell if someone is a compitent businessperson, and having the wrong CEO is much worse, imo, than having no CEO at all.
i dont know if an iterative model can work in staffing.
this is why experience is so valued by companies -- if you've done stuff, then you are able to do stuff (though, maybe you're a big faker who got lucky.)
but I don't think it's difficult to judge a person if you have known them for a while, especially if you are the type to talk about technical things in social contexts.
I think the problem appears when you are judging things outside your field, or people you only see for an hour.
I don't think cofounders need be friends before starting - I think that like-minded people hang around each other so, if you're in an area like the Valley, there are more people of your mindset and you'll find it easier to co-found with a friend. I think co-founding is tough and there are no easy ways of doing it.
Our company started with having a local dev firm doing initial coding, then we got him to do some work on the site on nights. Then he decided he really wanted to give it a shot, and I welcomed him with open arms. He gets a ton of equity and is a co-founder in my mind: there are no secrets, no employer/employee relationship. Yes, I spent a ton of my own cash to get the business off the ground, but it only has a chance at success with a full-time partner. So he's a co-founder in my mind, and publicly.
There is no good short-term answer but here's the only way: asking in the right places (like here) and getting very lucky. Being specific will help:
Do you have actual ideas? Do you bring domain knowledge to the table? Are your ideas niche to that domain? Do you know what type of business you'd want to run (bootstrapped/VC)? How are you going to get funding?
As a programmer, I know several hackers who are looking to start a business in the next year or so. If you had good answers to the above questions, I'd consider putting you in touch with them. Regardless, though, you are going to want to be specific as possible when asking. It's the only way of even having a chance.
Bonus tip: Put your email address in your profile before asking questions like this. You never know who might email you out of the blue.
I have several ideas that I feel have potential, but I am open to working with someone elses dream idea just the same (in my opinion it's less about the idea and more about the execution). I boostrap my life and would expect to run a startup in much the same way. Depending on the type of startup, however, VC funding may very well be valuable. I have advanced Excel modeling skills and I build financial models everyday. I have experience working with numerous small to mid size companies and closed $10k-$20k web projects with my clients on a consistent basis while I was a junior/senior in college. I'm obviously not a programmer, but I learned enough to basically run the sales efforts for this company, make us a leader in working with alternative energy clients, and make clients comfortable with sending a $10k check to a small company they had never even heard of before.
I've been out of school for a little of 2 yrs and work in LA as a mgmt consultant. I've been developing sites for a number of years, and currently run a couple social networking sites and a search engine, among others. Send me an email if you're interested to meet up for coffee or something. My email is dtang4 [at] gmail [dot] com.
Thanks.
Getting ready for YC spring 2009.
Since I have not found people of like mind I have tried to learn enough to try to do something on my own. But not having built a web service in the past, it's not that easy. I would be happy finding a mentor who could point me in the right direction while I learn.
