Blog (entrepreneur) - Fred Wu's Tech

On Hiring: How To Be a Non-Technical Co-Founder

2012-01-28T06:16:00.000000Z

If you are looking at hiring developers, check out my article on this subject.

The goal or the dream of working on your own startup is always full of excitement. And apart from some rare cases such as Dropbox, you probably need one or more co-founders to work with you on The Next Big Thing ™.

Problem is, how do you (as a non-technical co-founder) find us? Or more specifically, how do you talk us into working with you instead of some other billion-dollar ideas?

To answer this question, we need to first ask, is there a billion-dollar idea? The short answer is: NO.

Idea is worthless.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I believe - idea, by itself, is worthless.

You will be surprised by the number of people contacting us and wanting to build a better Paypal or a better Amazon, without a concrete plan.

A more worthwhile idea should contain not only the end goal of the project, but also a plan to reach the goal. What should we ship in the Minimal Viable Product? What are our marketing channels? What metrics should we look at? How do we use social media to our advantage? etc, etc.

We Are Not Just Wozniak, Are You Like Steve Jobs?

Apple is pretty much started by Wozniak as the technical co-founder and Steve Jobs as the idea/business co-founder.

Let’s think about this for a second.

Steve Jobs did not just have ideas. Very early on, he persuaded Wozniak to produce and sell Apple I so they have some capital. Jobs was building the foundation. Without the foundation, there will be no failure or success to come.

On the other hand, Wozniak had no intention to become an entrepreneur, he was happy to stay as an engineer even after the early Apple success. Nowadays though, most of us techies are much more ambitious than that.

Ideally, as the technical co-founder, I would be doing most of Wozniak’s work, and both you and I would be doing Steve Job’s work.

Drawing from my personal experience, as a technical person, there are a few key attributes I look for in a co-founder (technical or otherwise).

Technical Ability

“Excuse me? Aren’t you the technical co-founder? Why are you looking for my technical ability?” You ask.

That is right. Even if you are not a developer by trade, having a certain degree of understanding of technologies is still crucial to most modern, web-based projects.

There has never been a better time to start learning to code. Why not give CodeYear and Khan Academy a try?

We all learnt physics and chemistry in high school even though most of us don’t require the knowledge in our day to day life. Let’s treat coding the same. Learn how to code will not only give you insights to how we solve problems, but will also close the communication gap between you and your technical co-founder.

Obsession

Wozniak is obsessed with electrical engineering and gadgets, Steve Jobs was obsessed with computer typefaces, good user experience and beautiful hardware.

What are you obsessed with?

Only when you are obsessed with something, can you answer questions like “what annoys you so much?”

As I wrote in an ealier article:

Inventions and innovations aren’t born out of happiness, they are born out of frustration, anger and sometimes, curiosity.

Curiosity

In web-based projects, it is surprisingly easy to have “what if …?” scenarios. Not sure which sign up form will have a higher conversion rate? Easy, just make two or more of them and run A/B tests.

Sometimes, as developers, we are so in the zone that we would keep on building stuff the way we envisioned. You will need to step in, pull us out, and say “hey, have you thought about …? What if …?”

Flickr as it is today would never have existed if the founders didn’t raise the question of “hey, how about doing just the photo uploading and sharing features?”

High Expectation

“This is shit!” “We can’t ship this!” If the product stinks, say so, and find ways to improve it. An MVP should always be half-polished, not half-arsed.

The original iPhone was shipped without 3rd party native apps support, or multi-tasking - it wasn’t ideal, but they didn’t effect the core user experience. Now look at PlayBook, it has the features most Android devices have, but the core user experience is so bad that the product never took off. If someone at RIM’s top management had the same obsession on user experience as Steve Job’s, PlayBook would never have shipped in such a bad shape.

Passion

Are you in this for the money? Or for something else? Wealth is rarely a good motivation for creating great products.

“It can potentially generate massive revenue and profit” is a big red flag to me when someone pitches their projects.

These are the key attributes I look for. Things like people connections and experience are also important but not essential. What about you? Do you look for any particular attributes in your potential co-founder(s)?

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Open-sourcing A 200+ Hour Project - The Story Behind It

2011-08-17T11:55:00.000000Z

Update: I have blogged about the things I have learnt from this.

Last night, after some long overdue frustration, I have open sourced Angel Nest - an online platform for connecting entrepreneurs and investors, similar to AngelList.

Shortly after I open sourced my work, the news got picked up by Hacker News and went onto its front page. (Update: I was just informed that the story was picked up by Reddit as well.) The Github repository has since been followed by 250+ people and forked by 60+ times - it became one of the Github’s daily trending repositories.

Since then I have received many warm regards from fellow developers and entrepreneurs. Thank you so much guys! I will reply to each one of you as soon as I have a chance. :)

From the Hacker News comments as well as some of the comments received privately, there were a few questions raised, and I hope to address some of them in this blog post.

Why didn’t you charge upfront or by milestone?

Well, because it wasn’t a simple freelance or contract job. I was approached and asked to become the then to-be-set-up company’s first employee (yes, an employee, not a technical co-founder). At the time of our work agreement negotiation, the company was still to be formed and the investors were still to be signed on - no term sheets or contracts have been signed by any of the investors.

As a result, I agreed to put the invoices on hold for a while (i.e. a couple of weeks, according to him), then I will start invoicing the company fortnightly.

Oh, and many of you think I am a freelancer. Well, yes and no, I freelance, but my income is mostly from my full time job (as a web developer, of course). :)

Still, why did you trust him so easily?

Before I agreed to work on the project, I did some background-checking of this so-called entrepreneur - everything seemed legit - he was a developer himself a few years ago; he worked as a VP in a major corporation in the States before committing himself to this project; and from the few Skype conversations we had, he seemed to understand how to keep a developer happy. As a matter of fact, he had stressed many times that he would pay the developers a fair deal in order to keep them happy.

And how could you have agreed to work for him without any contracts?

Being a person with goodwill, I agreed to work for him on this project - essentially as the principal developer. My contribution was supposed to be compensated by a low hourly rate + equity in the company - the figures were agreed both verbally and via written Email.

Ordinarily I value equity very little. However, the way he described the investment situation - the company being valued at $2M, with investment from several top VCs and angels in China - got me believed that the company had a very strong lineup of investors and a reasonably large sum of first round investment.

To this day I still do not know what the actual investment situation is. It seems to be a sensitive topic whenever I brought it up during our conversations.

Why didn’t you stop working sooner?

I wanted to be professional - I cared more about building an awesome product than receiving a fat cheque (not that the cheque will be fat anyway, given the low hourly rate).

He stressed many times that the project is very time sensitive and we needed to launch as soon as possible.

And in order to speed up the development progress, I even took two weeks off work (with many unpaid leave days) and worked on this project. Looking back, I lost not only the compensation I am entitled to, but also a fraction of the salary that puts food on my table.

Are you upset?

Actually, not really. As I said before, I care more about building fine products than receiving more money - just the fact that I worked on a real Rails 3.1 project is very fulfilling in itself. And the fact that I received so many warm regards and comments - I am :) rather than :(.

As for the non-paying client, well, this isn’t my first time, and I usually just choose to forget about them and move on. I have too many more important things to worry about than chasing after payments.

Can I donate?

I sincerely thank you for your offer, but no I do not need donation.

What about the intellectual property? Any NDA?

We have no contracts or any paper signed whatsoever, despite I requesting them repeatedly - hence why I could release the source code at my will.

Why release the source code in MIT?

Because I am a big fan of total freedom in open source. I do not like the GPL family of licenses. Having said that, I respect the opinion of other peoples’, so I dual licensed the source code under GPL as well.

But open-sourcing the system gives them access?

They (the entrepreneur himself, and another account who I suspect is the new developer) already have access to the Github repository. Their access was revoked just before I open sourced the work.

To be honest, I could not care less what they do with the source code. Just the fact that he chose to shaft me is a strong enough indication that he will not succeed.

Again, why open source now?

I would have waited a little longer if it wasn’t for the fact that his new developers don’t seem to know what they were doing. A while ago I received a bunch of broken test emails sent to my inbox - indicating that he’s already hired someone else to continue the development work. Last night, a bunch of test emails came through again - so that was when I decided enough is enough.

Is it wise for you to do this?

I don’t know, you decide! :) Is gifting the source code to someone who might find it useful a good thing? I sure hope so.

Are you looking for freelance work?

Nope. Not because I just got burned, but because I have my own adventures to pursue.

What about other work and/or startup opportunities?

You may find out by dropping me a line, all my contact details can be found on this blog. :)

I am interested, but who are you?

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you will find my bio with a couple of links. :)

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