These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the Spedeal.com team, formed by Stuart Thomas and German Del Zotto.
5 reasons to have a technical co-founder:
- Save money on external consultants in the first stages. Also this lets you evaluate and hire the right programmers (avoid the 6th reason to fail of Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html)
- To be able to liaise with technical communities, partners, resources, and information. The company will know a lot more about tech issues than other companies who only go to conferences, and receive advice from software vendors and other commercial channels
- It is not a great idea to externalize decisions about your core business
- A technical founder could be a source of innovation to differentiate the company from competitors and could bring to the company some ideas that are impossible to buy- It is easier for a technical person to get management skills than for managers to learn about programming, system operations, network management and other topics
5 problems when you have a technical co-founder
- Biased decisions based in the technical background, could get trapped in their knowledge comfort area
- Many technical people fear finances, management stuff and other startup tasks
- They usually get enthusiastic with technology and forget the business and the big picture
- If you let to the techie to do a public presentation, 95% of the public will get lost and bored with the incredibly precise and detailed information about tech issues. (Alex Barrera dixit!)
- It doesn’t matter how many MBAs and management courses they attend, a techie always will be a techie. (http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/bill-gates-1986/)
To conclude, it is essential to have both a high level of programming experience combined with business acumen within the skillset of the startup founders. This can successfully work where the startup’s skillset is divided into a techie and a business founder or alternatively where both founders have both technical and business skills
Disclaimer: I am a techie, and I choose this lazy format (a 5 points list) because I am not a good writer (http://www.paulgraham.com/nthings.html)
Xavi@blackboard by http://www.flickr.com/photos/tracx/
Geek Tatto by Massimo Valiani (http://www.flickr.com/photos/leader_maximo/2974206217/)
