If I set up shop tomorrow, I'd be the solo founder of my first startup. Given the amount of work involved (and how much of it would be non-technical), I figure it would be better to have a business-minded cofounder with me.
But how do I find one? Or, more crucially, how do I assess how good they are? Given that I have zero experience of running a startup on my resume, it's quite likely a co-founder would be the same. Am I better off just teaming up with my less business minded friend, whom I know very well and trust?
Just flip the equation around... if we're always telling "business people" to "learn to code" then, as a coder, maybe you should make a conscious effort to learn more about the business side of things. Is that really any less reasonable than asking a marketing guy to sit down and learn to code from scratch?
For an entrepreneur, I'd suggest reading Steve Blank's The Four Steps to the Epiphany (at least until his new book comes out) since that's about as close to a "paint by the numbers" guide as I've ever seen, for founding a startup and dealing with the customer/market side of things.
Beyond that... read all the Jack Trout and Al Ries books on positioning, marketing and branding. Read Crossing the Chasm and The Art of the Start. Find out what textbook the nearest college/university uses for their "Business 101" class and "Marketing 101" class and "Business Law 101" class, and buy and read them. Even better, go to the nearest community college and take those 3 classes. That trio makes a pretty good foundation on some of the most basic stuff one needs to know about running a business.
And (talking out of my ass here, since I haven't done this part yet myself) read some of the top books on selling and negotiation. SPIN Selling always seems to be high recommended, so that's queued up on my personal reading list for this very reason (technologist with no business background, acting a founder).
Oh, absolutely. And I have been. But I know it's more work than one person can handle, so it simply seems like it ought to make sense to bring a business head on board. But a cofounder is no small deal, so I'm concerned about doing it right.
From the comments Jason Gordon says: I don't think the ability to code something is as important as the ability to communicate exactly what you want to someone who has that ability. It's very easy to find someone who can code, the challenge is communicating to them what it is they need their code to accomplish.
Me: You are inferring that coders are just a utility that you need to manage and instruct. Coders, Programmers and designers, are people with ideas and also can be very entrepreneurial. Speaking for myself, I only want a non technical person to drive sales, and networking, and getting me featured in blogs and news - in effect, I just want to communicate exactly what I want to someone who has that ability. Good coders are not a dime a dozen.
Sounds to me like Jason Gordon gets it.
There is far more to running a business than being able to code. And there is far more to the business world than software.
Good ideas generally come from people working at stuff they enjoy and/or do for a living. That's pretty obvious, which is why, generally, software ideas come from people who can write software.
But you can't do everything in your company. So being able to "write code" is no more or less important than being able to "do accounting", or being able to "operate a forklift", or being able to "perform arthroscopic surgery".
A true entrepreneur can look at any operation and determine how to assemble the parts to make the business model work.
Therefore, coders are useless. See how fun anecdotes are?
>"I left because I did not have faith in his management"
Weird, because all we had to do was replace the guy with someone more capable, and off we went.
Sounds like your technical founder didn't know how to manage human resources. And if he did, you wouldn't have left, and the business would have been better off, right? That's why knowing the intricacies of running a business is important.
And I'm saying this as someone who is very much a technical cofounder, working with two other technologists as cofounders... we'd love to have somebody on board who has experience with sales, marketing, dealing with distribution channels, business development, partner relations, etc. And there's no question we will need those skills eventually if we're going to succeed. The fact that we can all write code, and maybe even produce a great product, doesn't mean much if we build something nobody will buy, or if we can't figure out how to get it in front of the people that make the purchasing decisions, etc.
Of course we're a B2B enterprise software play, which is a bit different than, for example, a consumer facing web application. In that context, a "hardcore business person" maybe is actually less important. I don't know, because that's not the world I play in.
My feeling is that a non-technical founder in a technology company cannot be a complete Luddite who knows nothing about technology, but I don't think he/she necessarily needs to be a coder. Of course somebody who knows how to code and has the "business skills" is probably ideal, but how many of those people are there out there?
