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Getting a technical co-founder vs. hiring developers (alien.top)

submitted 10 months ago by Newfounder1@alien.top to c/entrepreneur@indiehackers.space

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I am wondering what others think... some podcast says "to want a cofounder so that you get a free software engineer is the wrong motivation". Ideally I would want funds to hire a senior developer to help with prototyping a solution. An alternative would be to hire a cofounder to do that... as a "free software engineer", which would actually be extremely expensive in terms of equity.

What do others think? Can a full time senior developer start and lead the development of an MVP?

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[–] amasterblaster@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

the general idea is that the CTO should help you manage dev resources not be the dev resources.

The reasons for this are extremely numerous, but two are:

- you want the CTO incentivized to keep costs down. you cant do this if they are rewarded for their individual time and effort

- your CTO will be 10x in their area of understanding, and terrible in most others. Thus they should be delegating and managing to the real 10x resources

Plus, dozens of more compelling reasons :)

[–] jzia93@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

No wait what. No no no no no.

At the start, coder code, businessman business.

Your 'CTO' is just heads down making whatever is needed. You don't need to be 10x when you're building out a prototype from duct tape and elastic bands.

[–] amasterblaster@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago

We can disagree on that. I've done 2 startups. One is past Series A, and I did the method above. The second, I tried to cody code, and for reasons above it failed.

In the early stages, the problem is, the CTO's job is extremely diverse, and the business job is focused. As time progresses, the trend reverses (Business becomes diverse, tech becomes focused.). Day one is a good example:

Choose the best tech stack. Even from there, in the failure example, I spent weeks on tech selection, getting it wrong. However, in the Series A company, we tossed 5K at a handful of experts.

So my advice to all tech people starting out, is to discover and leverage expert talent, not to be the expert.