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- How & Why to Get a Technical Co-Founder + Fundraising Fieldnotes 5.28.24
How & Why to Get a Technical Co-Founder + Fundraising Fieldnotes 5.28.24
What are VCs looking for from your team?
Jason Yeh
May 28, 2024
The Importance of a Technical Co-Founder
Why do VCs generally prefer teams that have both a technical co-founder and a non-technical co-founder? The primary reason might be obvious, but critical nonetheless: it’s not often that a single person can capably handle all of the tasks a company needs to do in order to be successful, especially early on. It's rare that you would have a builder / technical person in the same shell as a salesperson, a marketer, a networker, and a fundraiser.
I'm not saying that that's not possible, but we don't see that happen very often. And because of that, it's nice to have a multi-headed beast that can cover most of the skillsets that an early-stage team needs in order to successfully build. A VC wants to back a team that they believe can keep going without additional capital.
If you're a non-technical founder and you need to raise money in order to pay for outsourced engineering, you can only be agile and build and iterate as far as your money allows you. Whereas if I invest in a co-founding team with a non-technical and a technical founder who can build, you may be running out of money but the team itself could still cut headcount, cut burn, and continue to build and iterate towards product-market fit and future scaling.
Now that's an ideal and attractive team for VCs to back.
How to Find a Technical Co-founder
So that's why technical co-founders are so valuable. What about the 'how'?
Yes, it can be a little bit eye-rolly to hear me say, "Hey, you need to go find a technical co-founder so that you can build," but a lot of founders who come from business backgrounds and have great ideas and industry expertise don’t know where to begin finding and attracting technical co-founders. What I always push non-technical founders to do is to keep making progress. It can be too easy of an excuse to say, "Well, I can't do anything unless I have a product first"— that’s a huge cop-out!
You can do so much without a technical product being built. And with all the no-code tools and AI products that can now supercharge a non-technical founder's ability to ship, there is no excuse for you to not make progress, create traction, and build momentum on your own before you bring on a technical co-founder.
The way to attract great talent is to actually have momentum and actually create value without them. You will not get the best talent just by raising your hand and saying, "I need a technical co-founder." What will get you the best talent is to be able to say, "Look at all the validation I've done in the market. Look at the MVP I built on this no-code tool. Look at this contract that I already got signed without having the final product built."
These are all things that a non-technical co-founder should be capable of doing. I encourage all of you to make as much progress as you can before you go out and recruit technical co-founders. Not only will that help you in your negotiation, it'll also help you attract way better talent.
I hope this gave you a framework for finding your next technical co-founder and start you on the path to product-market fit and eventually huge success.
Be chased,
Jason
Yes - publish and become discoverable. Awareness is so important to cultivate
HIRE CREATORS, NOT PUBLIC RELATORS
Sriram is right, but one can go further. PR is useless in a world of social media. You want creators, not public relators.
1) First, tech founders should themselves be creators or have them on the founding team. In fact, if you aren’t making… x.com/i/web/status/1…
— Balaji (@balajis)
6:55 PM • Mar 10, 2024
Put your ego aside and find the best
First-time managers often focus on getting junior hires in that will work for them, and whose comp fits in a careful, tiered schema
Then later you learn you just want hire the best possible people
Especially people that are better and more experienced than you
— Jason ✨🇬🇧SaaStr LDN June 4-5✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk)
2:37 PM • Mar 12, 2024
Is this a real thing? If so… 🥲
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