Chapters (Powered by ChapterMe) - 00:00 - Coming Up 00:17 - Why Business Folks Need Great Technical Co-Founders 00:32 - Technical Founders 01:52 - The Intersection: Great Business Founders and Hiring Amazing Technical Co-Founders 03:32 - Making The Point Explicit 04:44 - Advice From Personal Experience At Twitch 05:06 - Great Software Companies Are Built By Great Software Engineers 06:54 - Equivalent In NBA 09:18 - Where Do I Find Technical Co-Founders? 10:31 - Thought Experiment: Ask The Best Person You Know 11:28 - How Not to Pitch: Come Up with the Idea Together 12:18 - Being An Amazing Recruiter 13:26 - Offering An Adventure: Building A Company Together 14:17 - Pattern: Successful Non-Technical Founders Are Great Recruiters 14:59 - Outro
My 2 cents if you're a non tech founder looking for a tech founder - learn to code. Even if you just get a surface level understanding, it'll be easier to evaluate potential cofounders, discuss technical challenges, and tech people will respect you more when you can truly appreciate their trials and tribulations mastering the craft.
+1 I taught myself to code a year ago and have shipped a product solo to some legitimate customers at this point. It’s hard but doable. I highly recommend learning to code.
That is wise, but doesn't come without its pitfalls. Other than the fact that it is time consuming, another pitfall I could think of is that if you need someone with a particular specialisation, it'll be difficult to assess them vertically. There is easier criteria to assess by: how fast can they learn and figure things out from conceptualisation to working prototype?
While that might be true, most technical founders who pick up a technical cofounder get it wrong at the rate of 9 out of 10. There is a reason a small percentage of tech companies survive their first three years and the main reason isnt a bad idea, it's bad attitude, grit, and expectation. If you cant build a product you dont have anything to sell and if you cant sell a product then building it is a waste of time. I disagree that a business person should learn coding since there is little to no value to know basic coding. Its like telling a coder to learn basic accounting, basic sales, basic marketing like its going to add any value instead of telling them to be the best at whatever they do since a company is a diverse environment of specialties.
When people say learn to code like what specifically? Not all software is built on the same language/llm/ algorithm (forgive me if I'm wrong I'm mostly non software technical)
I started my tech company as a single mom, with hardly any money and no backround in business or in tech, but I had a vision. Finally after six years of perseverance and learning much along the way in both business and tech, we were discovered by one of the biggest names in Technology. Trust me, if I can do it starting from less than nothing... it can happen for anyone who puts their heart and action into it.
Am also a single mom with hardly any money and no background in tech. It has been harrrd getting a tech person to do what needs to be done but am determined to execute my vision. I took more time looking for a tech co-founder to commit than actually working on my startup. So i finally decided to move forward without one. Thanks for your comment. You give me hope.
Keen to hear what type of company you created and what made you want to create it? What was that WHY behind it? And which industry did you come from Before founding this one?
Bootstrapped! However, in the early 2000's I made investments in physical gold and silver while I was in my former career but eventually left it to persue this full time. Trust me, I remember there was a time when I had $1.13 in my checking account but I still knew/ believed in God and my technology. This is a creating Universe not a created one. We are all selected to complete this picture (we are are actors in this universe), if you get an idea in a timeless flash, you know that this was your calling, your mission and your roll. No matter how crazy, how broke or how hard it is... persevere!!! When YOU are GREAT, GREAT MEN WANT TO KNOW YOU.@@exmachina767
I was making $110 hourly as a software engineer and I dropped my full time job when my co-founder proposed 50/50 equity in our partnership building the product from his idea. 2 years later we are making 1M in ARR (bootstrapping) and it’s was worth it the entire sacrifice in this journey
My co-founder was our first customer. He used our competitor for three years and had a list of 20+ items to make that product better. So we just started copying this competitor model and enhancing. @@stefan-bayer
I was a non-technical founder. Learned how to code, it's been the biggest asset. It unlocks agility + opportunities to explore more things. I would always recommend knowing how to bake the cake if you're starting a cake shop. But if you're funded well, know someone close, it's always of course better to let someone else do it - regardless, knowing how tech works will still go a long way.
@@fgboii4687 python is the easiest, but it's backend. Node js is frontend. So decide what's priority at this point and you can start. Would recommend looking up full stack nextjs projects to learn node js.
@@fgboii4687 depends on what you want to build. Sites use a lot of javascript, so a tech stack that includes that. Maybe mern or mean stack. PHP is also an alternative language to js. If Ai/machine learning stuff, then you want python.
There are tech founders who are looking for business/operations co-founders. I was in this position personally and I am sure many startups out there are in a similar situation. Would be cool if you guys can dedicate an episode for this topic. Thanks
Building a tech startup without technical skills definitely presents its challenges, but it's not impossible. This video offers some valuable insights for non-technical founders like myself. One crucial aspect emphasized here is the importance of taking initiative and learning as much as you can about the technical aspects of your startup. However, it's equally essential to recognize when you've reached your limit and need to bring in experts. You have to have both sides of the coin. You have to be willing to do it yourself and then not be afraid to hire those smarter than yourself. Surrounding yourself with a talented team can elevate your startup to new heights, filling in the gaps in your knowledge and expertise. It's all about finding the right balance between self-reliance and collaboration."
Gentlemen, this conversation was timely and needed. In addition, your channel is one of the avenues that made me improve my tech. obsession. Respect to Y-Combinator.
Started out as a non-technical founder. I made the decision to become technical a couple years back. I have learned an incredible amount and feel fully comfortable developing our product, outsourcing pieces when I get stuck. GPT has been an incredible learning tool, which has accelerated my learning immensely. Waiting for the magical technical co-founder to appear that shares your vision/passion will likely not happen. The best advice I can give to a non-technical founder is to make the mental switch and become technical. The sooner you do it, the better off you’ll be.
I completely agree. I was also non technical, I spent many years doing cofounder trials, and trying to get a product built by other people. In the end, I taught myself to be technical, shipped v1 solo, and have not looked back. I cannot recommend it enough. It sounds hard, but it is incredibly freeing to be able to build anything you want yourself.
That's awesome, I definitely commend you for it. But the only thing I would say, if you take that approach, you skip two of the most important steps in your entrepreneurial journey, the ability to sell and recruit. If you can't get a couple tech people excited enough about your idea to commit a couple of hours per week to your project , how will you get users excited about using your product or someone investing in your product? That "If I build it, they will come" mantra has been proven not to work time and time again.
What did you study to become a technical founder? When I think technical founder I think computer science, computer engineering and information technology.
Yet another good episode from YC! I have two thoughts listening to this: (1) as a non-technical founder, it would be useful to have deep domain knowledge and network in certain area where you want to tap into with your startup - this is what makes you non-fungible as a business developer. (2) technical co-founder needs to also be a good leader. So many great software engineers out there struggle when it comes to hiring a technical team and managing people... Programming skills are simply not enough.
Spoken to lots of engineers over the last few years and have also gotten a few to offer to work on what I’m working on right now. I think a lot of non-technical cofounders overweigh the importance of knowing how to code as the factor for getting a technical cofounder to work with you. Technical cofounders tend to already be very good at coding and building software solutions - what they need from you, the non-technical cofounder, is a problem to solve and traction around solutions to the chosen problem. They want to know that you’re not just going to be thinking of ways to do things without actually talking to users who have the problem you’re trying to solve. They also want to see traction from a no-code solution if possible, which can be done with tools like Carrd for a landing page and a bunch of other tools you can use to build a community of users before you even write a single line of code.
@@dmytrodance yeah, and they also tend to have more choice than most (there seems to always be more non-technical cofounders than technical cofounders looking for a cofounder).
@@jasoncheung8407 yes. The biggest problem - they don't want to iterate with you searching for market fit. They want you to give them a project that start bringing returns rightaway. It wears me out and makes me try to either hire a freelancer or to try to code it with a help of AI co-pilot.
My background is Hardware Development and Robotics, 2 months ago I decided to transition into Software Development and started learning JavaScript. I don't have the "best" ideas, but i have some interesting products in mind. My objective is to be able to code a MVP to test it at a small scale, then if I like it and see opportunities, start scaling it up. Great stuff YC thanks for sharing
Hey YC.. why don't you start a small online meetup kind of a thing where non tech founders can pitch their ideas (small presentation with a pitch deck) in front of tech people for better matching.. this could be on a regular basis and has potential to make lots of meaningful connections..
This is the closest thing to an impossible task. It is literally easier to learn SOME tech skills than try to manage getting by without having any. It helps in your business decisions, your strategic process, picking better employees, and making a better product. Business skills are very necessary. But the skillsets are Yin Yang: you need balance.
Isn't there another option by now for a non-technical founder: Learning a no-code tool such as bubble, building the first version of the software yourself, onboarding a technical co-founder once the idea has been validated and the first users are onboarded?
If you are able to hire a technical consultant and a good developer. It is a start. You don't always need a technical co founder. It's just finding the initial capital for your prototype or mvp. But it is going to be a lot of work and you will have to dedicate so much of your life to it. And however difficult you think it's going to be, times it by 50, atleast.
I think customer discovery (i.e., validating a problem exists and is a significant one for a group of people) can definitely be done without a technical partner. However, building an actual solution, unless the core of the business is not technological, will be much harder. Granted, these days with the help of ChatGPT and other tools, it won’t be as hard as it used to be. But you will still be in a hell of fight if you decide to go solo without technical skills as you need to iterate on more features and fix tech problems your first users run into.
Of course it is! This is just pure bullshit and will stop a lot of good entrepenurs. Very bad video. And they embarrasingly enough did this AFTER ChatGPT was out that can now basically code a MVP by itself. These guys know nothing.
@goranpersson473 Every app is different. But we're talking about building a "tech startup" here. And if you have absolutely no experience in building an app or are not technical at all. It will look like an alien world and you might not know where to start. Hiring a consultant if you're able to is worth it. It will save you a lot of time and money and you will learn how to proceed correctly when you first start. Our app was a bit more technical than most and involves augmented reality. So far it has cost us $100k + and that is on the really cheap end, because we found a good developer that would and could do what we needed for that price. When we first put out the contract some developers were quoting $150k+. And we have added so much more along the way in building than the initial contract brief. So it really should have cost atleast $250k by now. This is from my experience. Everyones won't be the same.
This was excellent and exactly the path im on. I went to school for ancient history (BA Classics), then education and religion (MA, MEd). When i realized i wanted a different career, i found the next logical path - marketing. Once in marketing, i started learning "technical marketing" (seo, analytics, etc.) Now im in product marketing, impacting roadmaps, up close with customers, and getting a "seat at the table" with technical teams - helping turn their ideas into language and launches people love. Its taken me 4 years to get here, and itll likely take me several more to find a solid cofounder and launch our own product - but im on the path and thats what matters. TLDR take the first step. 10 years from now youll either be doing the thing or wishing you tried.
Tech founder seems to default to software in YC. I'm in biotech, i watch a lot of your videos, and im not sure what i should dismiss or take with a grain of salt? Can you do a video on biotech / industrial biotech / chemistry / engineering type startups specifically? What are some typical key differences in these type of startups ? Founder dynamics ? Funding? Product market fit? Dev time? Common businees models? Etc? Would be great to hear YC's perspective on this area 😊
I'm an artist, a designer, an account executive, a consultant, and developing my technical skills. Actively, looking for someone to go on an adventure with me! It's so hard however... but I'll keep searching
The problem I have is not knowing how much technical a technical cofounder has to be. I know how to read code especially now with ChatGPT, I can write basic c#, basic JavaScript, can do a little bit of game dev, 3d viz, I know how to do basic Arduino and fix 3d printer and could potentially build one with open source software. But I still think I need a technical co founder for a saas.
I'm a technical co-founder who had to learn how to be a non-technical co-founder. Now I can kill a presentation but my coding skills are a bit rusty. I want someone who is even more technical than me and wants a co-founder like me, since I have a deep understanding of coding and can actually write half-decent code and build a cool UX myself. On paper, I have all the skills I need. But it'd make it a whole lot easier to get help. Reply to this comment if you'd consider.
I think the opposite question is more interesting and difficult... how do I build a tech start-up when the *only* thing I have is tech skills and no business or legal experience?
I don’t see why it’s more interesting or difficult. It’s just the reverse question, so its natural answer is: if the domain of your idea (future startup) is complex, find a business cofounder who can help you navigate the waters. If the domain is not that complex, maybe you can do extensive self study and do it yourself, but don’t underestimate the effort that will go into it. Recently I had a somewhat difficult situation dealing with tax payments in my country. I asked for quotes from several accountants and they all seemed too expensive to me, so I decided to learn the ropes and see if I could get the job done on my own. Eventually I did, but I realized why the accountants charge so much: there’s a lot of details to get right, which requires extensive knowledge that cannot be found in a single place. Having learned that, I would never start an accounting startup without someone with deep expertise (since I’m not really that fond of tax laws myself)
Okay, let me tell you, I really like spending my hours on RU-vid here on this channel. Seems like so much value coming out from here than mind numbing shorts or reels.
Just make sure you are truly great at whatever it is you do. If it's sales, be a phenomenal enterprise sales person who can close the big deals before end of quarter. If it's marketing be a fantastic story teller. If it's leadership, be the type of person people would follow to the gates of hell. If it's networking, help the company raise money from the biggest names in the industry. Just make sure you are great at SOMETHING and bring your part, don't be the "generalist", that has zero differentiation from 80% of America and no added value. If the technical cofounder has specific skills you should as well.
The general consensus from the comments is that even if you are a non-technical founder, it is good to form some base level of coding competence. What language would you suggest learning?
It is a no-brainer. You need a great tech co-founder. You need countless iterations and the velocity to get to product-market fit. Only a great tech co-founder can deliver it.
If I am a non technical founder, why would the technical talent stay, i.e. other than my idea and undying enthusiasm, why would they stay with my company when they can just take the idea and do it themselves?
My initial thoughts: Inspire a technical prodigy to join, offer equity and the potential for a lucrative salary once you're off the ground. As they are working learn from them, show interest in the work they are doing for you. Stay up with them, keep working after they leave, lead by example. No 10 year expert will give up their 100k salary to join your start up
Can you make the video full screen and not have the sidebar there the whole time? It’s super annoying. Don’t even mind having the respective titles changing on a small corner of the screen. But need to see the whole video please.
Great technical cofounders are very important. Even if the other person is also a technical cofounder. The point that they mentioned which is big is if you believe what’s your building is something big then you’ll do the necessary stuff to make it happen. If that means it’s time to get a great technical cofounder to part of the journey then that will be done. Just like a million of other critical things that’s needed to be done throughout the journey of the company. In my opinion if it’s a worthwhile problem to solve then getting a cofounder, learning to code or understanding a new technology will be among a long list of important things that must be done and will get done. If not then the issue is not even wether or not someone is a technical founder but rather they’re not committed in their own company. However there are stories of non-technical founders finding great technical founders which is difficult.It’s still important to understand the coding part of it. Basically the people with no technical skills that managed to get great technical founders have a big advantage (even over a single technical founder) and it’s the biggest way to validate the company early on.
I am a bushy bearded former imam based in Toronto, originally from India. I am a subject matter expert in the Islamic world space which is acutely underserved in many areas. I have identified many problems that can be solved with tech. My problem. For the past fifteen years I haven’t been able to convince any VCs or techies to co-found a company with me. I haven’t given up. I keep seeing more and more problems that can be solved and yet haven’t been.
@@tahmid1897 I have three Quran problems that I’ve had for decades. Can be solved. Not solved yet. One can be solved with a website and an app. Market size 500m and rapidly growing? This one could have a low start up development and marketing cost. I need a website or an app developer for this. Once it’s built, even if clunky, investors or copycats will come in fast. The other is an electronic device and app set. Market size? 10,000 institutions? I have a zikar related problem. Solve with device. Market size? 100m users. Mark up on latter two products can be high to satisfy investors and fund future production. Someone in Shenzhen will easily produce the devices. There is more. Even for the non special interest world. I have a problem. Current state robotics can solve. This one has a high cap ex for entry. Perhaps a few $Ms.
@@ahsanmohammed1 If you are that protective of your ideas (that have zero implementation), then that's a huge red flag. Definitely not interested in stealing ideas, most are absolutely worthless anyway.
@@tahmid1897 When I was in the Masjid communities, I would freely tell people my ideas. Hoping someone would say, let’s do it, together. The opposite happened. They would sit and listen to me, electrified. Then two years later, the exact product I mentioned would appear in the market. Launched in Toronto, Canada, or close by. Too many of my ideas were stolen from me or just floated out there until they reached someone with resources, who implemented them at at global scale and even spawned new copycats even beyond that. Many got exorbitantly rich off of them. I just stood there silently watching it all happen. Now I feel like I’ll take my ideas to the grave.
Happy New Year! My name is Raph from Orlando and Sydney. What's your opinion on starting a meditation app company with using zero coding tools? I just graduated from University of Sydney, and I majored in Product Design. My plan is to hire some Chinese programmers on the side as well. I would love to receive a constructive feedback from both of you. Cheers! Much love.
My question now is what level of skill the technical co-founder needs to have. For instance I am a new mid level developer, Can I make it by with a non technical cofounder or would I need a sr engineer as a cofounder (which I know would be best)
In my experience, it's not necessarily how good you are right now, but your growth curve. If you are mid level and you've been mid level for like, 5 years.... maybe not. If you're mid level and you just started coding a year ago? Honestly, yeah probably. It also depends obviously on the technical domain you're operating in. For example, our startup is all about searching, data and matching. These types of problems tend to lend to a certain type of technical skills vs, perhaps your startup has more to do with streaming, logistics and networking. That's it's own technical domain that will trend towards it's own technical skills.
Would you kindly share your thoughts on responsibility and equity between “visionaries” who have some idea and require engineers to build the prototype, build the product, put everything into production, take responsibility for SLAs? What are the expected roles and responsibilities of each party that warrant sufficient “skin in the game” to determine a fair split of equity?
I agree with what Michael said: “ideas are a dime a dozen”; execution matters far more. I once worked in a startup where the guy who came up with the idea (just a vague one, not even a detailed one with any kind of execution plan) got ~1/3rd of the equity (there were 2 technical and 2 nontechnical cofounders, with 10%, 30%, 30%, 30% equity distribution). After a while, everyone realized how hard it was to go from a rough idea to a viable business model, and how much effort went into customer discovery, iterations, brainstorming, etc. The “idea guy” was absent in most of this. Eventually one of the tech cofounders figured the equity distribution wasn’t fair and tried to negotiate it. He failed to get more, so he quit. After a while, the other technical cofounder quit as well. The nontechnical cofounders tried to keep it alive by outsourcing the work to a dev shop but eventually the startup tanked.
What if I am a technical person, but I am looking for another technical cofounder? I am currently developing the MVP, but I know I need a technical cofounder.
I got the next ai bigidea and I believe it will change the world in a whole. I got no skills but however I am working on it it. Thank you for the advice, It will go in handy for me to get a technical cofounder
Do not learn to code. If you are a non technical founder, first you should be technical but that doesn't mean code, it means to understand how software works with one another and which is better for what situation. If your goal is to make a technical product as a non technical founder, learn what frameworks, languages, databases, cloud providers and all that are. At least then, you are able to form a better opinion about what it means to be a good software engineer. I think it's wrong to push away founders who aren't software engineers.
I will just acquire one of those software companies that they dont even know to run a business smoothly. I only need to learn all the the basics of coding and programming, you don't need to be full stack. Low coding etc. Artificial Intelligence are on their way. We can build a prototype then hire a programmer and developer to refine. Agile project management is also important. No need to fool yourself being a nerd scientist. Copycat is I think the good options. How chinese are doing it right now outpacing all of their competitors. It is not best ideas it is how you sell to users and consumers. Why are those genious hackers do as bill gates did and other successful software companies. They have the ability to recruit the best hacker to start the more advance or go beyond quantum.
I thought you would say that the best non-technical founders would be people who have business experience in their specific domain, but I guess recruiting is more important.
I am a non-technical founder and I am looking for a full stack technical developer for a new social network idea, my idea can change the shape of relationships. I have a preference for a woman because my idea initially involves the female world. Is there anyone brave enough to go with me on this journey?
I’m sorry but the world is turning away from needing technical skill, there’s going to be a point where technical skill to engineer code will basically be void imo
Interesting, in another video someone said, don’t tell the investors that you just met with your cofounder. Now, I should just meet a total stranger and trust him and give him half of my business? Why can’t I just hire them to do the job?
What are the best ways that people who don’t have a tech background to learn technical skills? Many people recommend coding bootcamp but I want to know if that is truly the most effective option or should I try to teach myself?
I've been a brick and mortal business owner. I want to venture into tech, but for more than a year, I can't find a co-founder here in our province. I found some online, but they are not very committed. The path I'm trying to take is learning no code tools, then building an mvp, finding product market fit, and then looking for a tech co-founder. Any thoughts on this?
The crux of a startup is finding product market fit before you run out of money. You can do that starting with validation that there are enough customers with a problem who’d be excited to have a product to solve their problems. Many teams fail to even think this is necessary, they think that they can build a solution and customers will come, without even talking first to such customers. For many products, after you have some initial validation, you will need to build and iterate constantly, as no idea or product is perfect on inception. This is a crucial point where having a tech cofounder can make all the difference. Perhaps you can do it on your own, but that will depend on how core to the product is technology.
What this talk doesn't touch upon is the fact that good technical co-founders may be very scarce, unwilling to bootstrap next to their jobs and ventures etc. Is it about a good product or about a half baked product marketed as such. Even if you can build a perfect platform, it doesn't mean you build the best product. The reason I say this, is that tech products have strange business models, paying schemes etc compared to real touchable products. Why is that?
The premise is flawed. Most people can learn how to program at a basic level. If you are convinced you are not one of them. Your company will still use tech. But it's questionable why start a company where the main product is purely software.
Hold on, just to to understand after the whole video you are saying the a business founder isn't required? would love if anyone who sees this can answer me.
Does anyone knows how to become a tech founder as someone who is a devops/solution architect in current working position? Is coding necessary to become a technical founder/cofounder?
You guys are smart, but what you evangelize here is myopic(I won't say stupid). You laugh at business-background people who aspire to build a company without a technical founder, but you don't laugh at a team of engineers trying to build a business without any business background. You basically depreciate business skills and knowledge in building a BUSINESS. Even if the software in the core, you don't build a freaking software, you build a business. Most software is already there. Chat GPT will be able to do it in a couple of years. Understanding users, market, competition, industry, and macroeconomic trends, communicating value, recruiting the right people, getting funding, building the value chain is WAAAAY more important. Most people these days don't need to build a rocket, but the business model they need to succeed is a real rocket science. And you tell business people, go give up a half of your business for some generic knowledge(because otherwise you don't even consider them for funding). All these technical founder requirements you set up are not discouraging. It's just wrong. Stop! It is just outdated. You still live in the Twitch founding era. Nothing was built back then, so it was "wow, you can actually stream a video!" These days your advice would only apply to products that sell technology. If core differentiation/value proposition of the company is logistics, you need someone who knows logistics, not freaking technology. Having better engineering is as much of a gift, as having better sales, better design, better marketing, better fulfillment, better operations, better cooking or anything else, depending on what you build. I saw YC funding companies with founders having no idea about the industry but being great engineers. Result? They lost the market as soon more customer-oriented competitor appeared. Who needs the millions of features delivered fast, when the product & service suck?
Well, ask any engineer if they want to start a business but they will be like sorry, I'm busy grinding leetcode and prepping for swe job at some faang company. That's the majority of engineers dream. They wanna join the enemies not compete with them lol.
does this advice still apply if someone is good at coding (no tech job background, but does have a master in CS) in this times with chatGPT, claude, etc?
