Who is a technical co-founder? A technical co-founder is one, not only skilled in programming and coding, who is deeply invested in a company. As a founder, you will find yourself spending hours upon hours with this person in order to succeed. Technical co-founders are saddled with the technical responsibilities of the business and setting the overall vision.
A technical co-founder is neither a senior programmer nor a Chief Technology Officer (CTO). In these other roles, individuals are hired but a technical co-founder is more of a partner than an employee; they share founder-level responsibility such as crafting the direction and vision of the business. Technical co-founders often accept more risk and equity than either of the two roles above.
At the early stage of a company, a technical co-founder should be willing to help out with sales, marketing, and other areas of the business. There are so many different tasks to be done in the early days that it’s not advisable to involve someone with a very specialized skill set, such as programming. As a company grows, a technical co-founder might begin to do lesser programming work. Instead, they would be more involved leading hiring of technical team, making high-level architecture decisions, and leading the product side of the company. Now you can see that while a technical co-founder should have the necessary technical skills, he or she would be more invested in other areas and serve as a partner rather than a staff member. Hence a good programmer might not make a good technical co-founder.
What Makes A Good Technical Co-Founder?
The qualities of a good technical co-founder are basically the same as any great co-founder. A technical co-founder should possess the following characteristics:
1. Communication skills
Communication is important in all aspects of live including business. A person with great communication skills knows how to make people listen.
2. Leadership Skills
As earlier mentioned, technical co-founders are not just developers, they are company owners. One of the technical co-founder’s responsibilities is building and nurturing a team of developers. This comes with fantastic leadership skills. Just because someone has all great technical skills doesn’t mean they are right for a leadership role. They must show that they are capable of leading before onboarding them.
3. Management Skills
A technical co-founder should be capable of assessing the time period it would take to deliver components of a product and how to manage the development team to meet deadlines. If a technical co-founder is unable to do these things it will lead to increased time to market, unexpected costs and might also affect funding in future.
4. Long term thinking
A technical co-founder must be committed to the company and should be able to think ahead. Check the future implications of current executions and so on.
5. Complementary qualities
Just like other business partners, your technical co-founder should complement you. If you’re more risk-averse, consider someone who’s risk-tolerant. Finding the right balance will help ensure that business opportunities are explored.
6. Time Management
It’s essential that your technical co-founder is able to manage time properly and keep up with deliverables.
When building a product, time is of the essence and your technical partner should know how to lead and work with the team to deliver on time.
7.Tech Expertise
Although your technical co-founder would have other responsibilities other than technical demands, it’s important to make sure that they have the skills and experience they claim to have. They would be leading a team of other developers and failing to verify the quality of their work could be detrimental to a company or startup.
Where to find your technical co-founder
Hackathons are among the numerous places where you can find your technical co-founder. These intensive events are attended by many intelligent developers who might already have pet projects or have created teams.
Another way to find a technical co-founder is to attend conferences especially those organised to target IT specialists and programmers.
These days, events are organised online or on social media. Chatrooms, live sessions and webinars present an opportunity to meet and listen to people’s stories, understand their source of motivation and see who fits into your company’s vision.
In order to attract the right technical co-founder, you must make yourself appealing enough for someone to work with.
One of the ways to make a potential co-founder show interest in being a partner is for you to be an expert in your niche. Make it your goal to understand your niche and problems better than anyone else out there.
Having a skill in raising capital, sales, and marketing is a plus. It proves to a potential co-founder that you have what it takes to make the business grow.
Another important point is salary or equity to offer your co-founder. An attractive pay will draw technical co-founders as well. All in all, to make your company a good choice for a technical co-founder, you must be able to show that you have customers; that there is product demand, revenue, and traction. Potential co-founders can be tagged investors since they are investing their skills, and time. They will be most interested in your idea if it’s already resonating with satisfying customers and you have an impressive track record.
In conclusion, put your business in order before sourcing for people to co-own it with you. And if you cannot find a good technical co-founder, move on with your company. It’s better to run a company on your own than to have a bad co-founding relationship that would eventually end your startup.
