Great summary of how to find a technical co-founder. Nice job!!

Will, glad to hear your tech co-founder is working out for you. Hearing you talk about the idea during the last couple of months really makes me believe you are going to hit the nail right on the head. Good luck!

Great story, Will, and great result.  I hope you’ll continue sharing your startup story as you progress. 

Yeah, the business guys get bagged on too much but many of them don’t have your appreciation for the value that a good tech co-founder brings.  Too often, biz guys are enamored with their idea and think that all they need is a code monkey to work for peanuts so that they can realize the genius of their idea.  In the end, the beginning idea is worth very little and, if successful, the end result is likely to be a greatly-transformed idea that may or may not resemble it’s progenitor.  You seemed to “get” that pretty early on and so you deserve a good tech co-founder… which it looks like you got!

thanks Bob.  Its only the beginning, many more stories to come.

Technology people can be nice too .

Excellent post Will. Very impressive that you first chose to get some shit done and write some code. Congrats and great catch with Deepak! 

Will, great writeup. A big reason I said YES is because of the initiative you demonstrated by learning rails & building a proof of concept. That showed a great commitment to the idea, commitment that got me excited in the vision & roadmap. 

Onward and upward!

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Perfect description on how to find a co-founder.

It won’t happen without: 1. work 2. time

Most coders are autodidacts. The ones without a DIY ethos drop out pretty quickly. Frankly, the reason the tech side feels free to give the business side a lot of crap — other than the fact that you guys make more than we do, in mysterious ways unimaginable to us — is that the business heads tend to lack that DIY drive to figure it out for themselves. Basically, wasting our time with things they could google, or learn to do, if they were as diligent as we are being (and we, being paid less to do more, feel a right to gripe). But you don’t sound like that; actually, you sound like you took the hacker mentality and applied it to business, which is what we’d all like to do. SO, bravo. The fact that you did that is great. Don’t rest on your laurels (or your co-founder); keep improving yourself.
We all run into trouble sometimes, and find ourselves out of our depth. For instance: When you’re a kid, and your hard drive breaks down, spending three days on mounting your own DIY data recovery might be a great learning experience. When that drive is on an enterprise machine with a lot of users freaking out, it’s not a good time to test your ability to learn-on-the-fly. What separates the hacker ethos from the business ethos, in that particular situation, is that the hacker is (a) actually tempted to try and fix it himself, and (b) in case he doesn’t, wants to know exactly what happened and how the team recovered the data after the fact.
The most important thing to remember if you’re going to delegate — whether it’s hammering nails, making pizza dough or writing code — is that the guy with his hands in the pie has the power to demolish you if you don’t understand what he’s doing. And lives by the sweat of his balls. So buy him a beer…and never consider anything to be magic. If you do, you’ve just put yourself in the dangerous position of not being able to fix it when it breaks down.

(edit) just to add one thing…I used to be a waiter. Had a lot of terrible managers. It’s not a very different situation. The best managers are the ones who can step into the kitchen and cook if they have to; bus the dishes if they have to; work the bar or wait tables; they know every aspect of the business inside and out, and could be doing any employee’s job better than that employee is. By that, they command respect, and keep the daily operations flowing smoothly. People who buy restaurants because they have money, but have no idea what happens in the kitchen, usually wind up in trouble. And running a successful IT/web enterprise isn’t very different.

Will, fanastic post. Excellent idea, inspiring path.  I am on a similar path as well, and it is refreshing to hear about other “business-types” showing the passion and ambition to get to a prototype themselves.  I think I’ll work on a similar post to share my story as well. Best of luck to you and Deepak with flexmint.

Will, fanastic post. Excellent idea, inspiring path.  I am on a similar path as well, and it is refreshing to hear about other “business-types” showing the passion and ambition to get to a prototype themselves.  I think I’ll work on a similar post to share my story as well. Best of luck to you and Deepak with flexmint.

Josh – you nailed it, in childhood and as adults, many people don’t try to figure things out.  RTFM comes to mind, I try not to ask these questions, though sometimes they slip out.  How do you teach people to figure stuff out?  Technical people are great and most important to success of a startup, though sometimes misunderstood and not fully appreciated.  As you noted, we still have a long way to go and won’t be resting till the revenues show up.
-Will

Josh – you nailed it, in childhood and as adults, many people don’t try to figure things out.  RTFM comes to mind, I try not to ask these questions, though sometimes they slip out.  How do you teach people to figure stuff out?  Technical people are great and most important to success of a startup, though sometimes misunderstood and not fully appreciated.  As you noted, we still have a long way to go and won’t be resting till the revenues show up.
-Will

Awesome.  Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help out.

Awesome.  Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help out.

I am a similar situation but have opted to freelance the prototype, get seed clients, and go it alone.

Additionally, while building a product, there can be weeks or months where a pure business person has much less to contribute. If you can’t design or build your product you can be left sitting around for much of the day waiting for features to be completed. I’ve seen it, and it’s not good for anyone.

Congratulations on your new found knowledge. I think the real name of the post should be “Learning to Code isn’t that Hard, and it’s Worth it”.

For my money, if you went out and researched which technology to use, taught yourself to use it and then built a prototype – you ARE a technical co-founder. Maybe not a seasoned node.js mongodb puppet mashup ninja, but you are technical.

I appreciate the vote of confidence.  Last week Deepak, my co-founder, told me to stop thinking about code and make us some money! (something like that)

good point on the name.  I’m just stretching out the marketing and branding wings…

This is an inspiring story. I agree with Strike that you deserve kudos for figuring out how to build your own prototype. That kind of tenacity is what inspires tech people to work with you. Finding the right co-founder is one of the hardest parts of doing a startup. My advice is to never lose track of what brought you together. In my experience, there has never been anything more demoralizing as a programmer than putting in long long hours over stretches of time to meet a demo or release deadline, only to watch the business guy punch-out at 5 everyday and sleep in the next morning. Co-founders have to be able to trust each other, especially when there is only one technical guy who can really get intimate with the code. Being able to bounce ideas off of your co-founder is incredibly valuable, and the more technical your co-founder is the better those interchanges can be.

This may be the single best comment I’ve ever read on this topic… well said!

This is awesome.  With the advent of the Google, I truly believe you can teach yourself anything.  ANYTHING.  Having great teachers, mentors, and peers can speed up that process, but ultimately it’s up to you.  

Another big thing I take away from the article was the achievement that Will created a product to talk about and get people interested in it – not just an idea on a piece of paper. Never mind that it won’t scale, be efficient or secure – those things can be fixed with expertise brought in. It would have been interesting to see how he got on if he hadn’t found a technical co-founder…

I had a similar experience last year coming from a business background – learned to make 3D games from scratch, released it, and now from the experience of learning and developing it, I am more credible when I talk to other developers. Keep up the good work!

That’s it, that is the trick.

Business people do not need to be better in tech that the technical people they hire(but if they do they will command respect as Josh said), but at least should know what they are talking about.

If you don’t know how to program you CAN NOT manage programmers:

First, you don’t know what is possible and what is not, what could you expect from the people you manage.

You can not communicate with them and they can not communicate with you.

They could fool you and your money as much as they want.

You could ask them much more work that is possible for them to do or much less.

You don’t know what is easy to do and what is hard.

Of course you should know things that your technical people don’t know or like like sales, understand markets bureaucracy and taxes, marketing, finances and so on but knowing nothing about what you do is really bad.

The best generals were those that fought the battle like Alexander the Great, they were leaders because they were first among equals, he never asked people to risk their lives if he himself did not risk his live, if he had to command to eat insects and worms or slugs, he ate it first.

Today we have leaders in software companies like Steve Ballmer, that does not know how to program but is there because he was Bill Gates buddy when he started the company.

We have also Steve Jobs that learn how to do signal generators and program computers as a boy. He did not liked it as Woz did, he just loved to discover how things work but he understand the process(and he understands sales and marketing and process very well too) .

I brought proof of life to the table (as you call it) before wasting anyone’s time but still seem to struggle. Traction is not a magic bullet. Here’s my story of how I’m failing without a non-technical co founder. Thoughts would be sincerely appreciated given your experience. http://bit.ly/mLP74Z

The funny thing is, your need to do without a technical co-founder made you into a technical co-founder yourself!  Maybe technology isn’t going to be  where you focus on going forward, but by putting the effort into learning rails and ruby, you put yourself into the top %1 of “non-technical” cofounders, at least as far as this technologist is concerned.

And, I believe doing so is what made you more attractive to other technologists, probably including the one that became your cofounder.

I think the founding partner search is much like dating.  Certainly it has as much risk as any relationship.  But it is also the case that neediness and self-centeredness are not attractive.  You did what you needed to move things forward, and that made you less needy. 

It also appears that, after doing this you did bring on a technologist as a co-founder, and I presume their share of the business is well more than %10.  Hopefully in the ballpark of %50.  While the numbers are none of my business– by valuing your technical co-founder (despite the title of this post!) you also set yourself well apart from most of the non-technical people who think they “just need a geek to sling some code!”   In my experience, these guys, even if they are not so clueless as to think the idea is what is valuable, often over value their contribution, and think the “code” part is trivial, and thus offer absurdly low cuts for someone who, when they are the second person to join the team is taking %50 of the risk (unless you’ve already raised enough funds to pay them a salary.) 

Great article. I launched http://www.HireMeAspen.com last summer and immediately knew I made a mistake not knowing the tech side of things and relying solely on my developer.  I’m now convinced it would be incredibly hard, if not impossible, to succeed without being able to make changes on the fly on my own vs. having to go through someone else (which requires money and time). Thus, I’ve been learning all I can for my new site: http://www.ResortWorkers.com, which I’m building from scratch using wordpress this time around.  All I need now is someone to pull elements (ie. registration and profile pages) from first site and transfer into wordpress of 2nd site, using the already produced (and paid for) code via Ruby on Rails. I’m glad to see your ruby/rails learning suggestions and will be reading up on them this weekend. (I welcome any add’l feedback before I dig in!)

Who knew this salesperson would be so into all this stuff?  I’m really kind of enjoying putting this puzzle together. I may agonize for hours to figure something out, but once I do, it’s a big rush!  Regardless how Resort Workers turns out, I know this tech undertaking will only serve me well into the future.  Have to admit, though, that I’m nervous as hell every time I tinker with something since I don’t have the formal training.

consider forming a linked in group for non-tech founders to share their stories and brainstorm with one another.  (count me in!).  I would do it, but sine you have a tech co-founder now, I’m assuming you have more time!

dude, while I agree it’s possible, it took overall more than 15 years to become a GOOD coder who can write GOOD programs, including about 9 years of specific school.

I’ve always been a hacker, but never held a job as a developer.  I just found ways to solve business problems with technology.  I got laid off in 09 and went searching for someone to be a cofounder.  That didn’t materialize.  I too decided to learn Rails (2.3 at the time) and it was the best thing I ever did.  I have met many great people in the Rails community and now have a few open source commits which however minor I feel pretty proud of (1 in Compass and 2 in Rails 3.1).  I even participated in the RailsRumble last year.

Unfortunately, September of 09 I got a job at a fortune 500 company and through a series of other events I lost a lot of the motivation to finish my project.  By then I had made one prototype and re-factored a lot using BDD. 

Even though I am at a big company now I have done a few internal apps and deployed to a stealth server (as “prototypes”).  I’ve even convinced 2 other employees to start learning Rails.  Bringing Rails to the enterprise FTW

Maybe someday I will finish and deploy my app.  Regardless the journey has been well worth it.

With Deepak on board we’ve been able to move much faster since he actually knows the ins/outs of coding.  We’ll be able to find answers (business model, MVP, etc.) much faster with him focused on the technical vision, I on biz.

I’m new at this game myself, but will take a look.  Sorry for delayed response, was out of town for few days.

In my case I wouldn’t have been comfortable going live with my code base due to security needs.  Tech person is required in some instances.  You probably need to figure out if paying someone is faster or better ROI than you doing it.  Depends on the complexity.  It could also be fun and enjoyable to learn, if you have time and income isn’t a stressor .

I agree

The “finding time” challenge is interesting.  When working another job the side projects, at least for me, were just a hobby.  When you take one of the projects on full time then your perspective and speed changes and forces you to be more efficient.

awesome…couldn’t agree more.  you really do need to understand all aspects of your business on at least some intermediate (if not expert) level.  i think there is a population of non-technical founders who tend to take the technical side for granted, thinking that they can get any code monkey to hack away some lines of code….

DO NOT BE THAT GUY, it is almost surely a recipe for disaster

I love the idea that big things happen in small spaces! Thanks for sharing this story with us, I’m sure it will inspire many!

google + mentors = a good start

But the ‘opportunity of a lifetime’ will come later. You’re just trying to get to the point where you can test some of your ideas, and have something to show so that you can recruit people who compliment your skills… you’re not going to walk into your first VC meeting with a prototype you created while learning Rails for 2 months. 

Exactly… my thought is: you want to have a co-founder who complements your own skills BUT has enough understanding of the opposite side to be able to have meaningful discussions. 

I am trying to follow your lead as someone with no development background trying to learn RoR. My question is now that you’ve gone through it – would you recommend diving right into Ruby on Rails, or would you go a different route like learning the principles of Ruby, HTML, CSS and Javascript first, and only after that jumping into rails?

It depends on your end goal.  Are you trying to build a prototype, become a ‘real’ developer as a profession, or just having fun coding?  If you have zero development background the zombies course is an easy introduction and the Michael Hartl’s labs are a good step by step.  I think it would be helpful to have a general understanding of HTML before jumping into Ruby on Rails.  I didn’t have any Ruby background, but picked up some as I went along.  If you want to become a hard core programmer, then learning a language like Ruby or an equivalent will be important.  I think the key skill to have in learning any of the languages is the ability and focus to troubleshoot issues that will come up.  For example, when doing Michael Hartl’s lab I had trouble installing Ruby on Rails on my mac.  It took some google searching and tinkering to make it work.

Thanks for the response Will. My end goal is similar to what yours was – except I don’t have a specific startup or project in mind, I just want to raise the overall value of what I bring to the table to any startup I might work with or found on my own. I think being competent in it will help me contribute to a startup businesses in general, and being able to make prototypes on my own will help explore ideas I come across.

I enjoyed your post, thanks again!

I read this post before I met you, and it took me far too long to make the connection. Kudos, Will. Good luck to you and Deepak this year!

Probably one of the best comments I have read on this topic. And you really have a point.
This is one of the things where I like to draw parallels between the military and running/starting a business. While I did not serve much time (4 months which is obligatory in Denmark), it gave me lots of experiences that I will never forget. (And might end up going “back” one day)

The mentality and culture in the army is exactly as you point out above; a great leader (be it sergeant, platoon leader or even your highest commanding officer) KNOWS how to do your job. He has been through the same training as you. The same experience. That is why you listen to him (besides his rang) – because he earned his ranking.
(Of course this is not always the case, but in most cases it is – you know it when your platoon leader jumps in and joins the group in a patrol in the woods; he is better than you, and he has to be, to gain and keep the respect of his soldiers)

Exactly the same parallel can be brought to managers, cofounders and leaders. If you work side-by-side with a person for the next many years of your life; would you rather work with the guy who tried to learn programming and gave his 100%, or the guy who just wrote down the idea and told you to make it? The guy who tries to understand why coding takes time, and is not as easy as writing down the idea – or the guy who just claim “but I will do sales and marketing”?

Have a great day everyone, and thanks for the great reading.
(Oh – and I’m not “Technical Co-founder” myself – but 50% technical, as I am a shitty coder – so I try to see the business from both sides )

great points…I wonder if the alternative works as well…ie: an engineer starting a business and doing the strategy and sales himself…I suppose its good to try to learn the challenges but, ultimately, its got to be more efficient for people to focus on their strengths…and, presumably, you’d avoid building a crappy prototype that might not even work (or at least be throwaway code…eg: built in ROR when your newly found CTO says it must be rewritten in Java).

Great post; thanks for writing it. 

I’m in a pretty similar postion as you were, and I’ve been teaching myself Ruby/Rails as well. Thanks for the link to the resources!