How to Hire a Technical Co-Founder

At TnT, we are big fans of people who understand their customer, and because Matt and I have both been on the technical side, we are more comfortable with execution risk on technology than the average pre-seed investor. We believe it’s not that hard to hire competent technologists if you have the kind of founders who good people want to work with and a business that’s worth building.

This leads us to get deeper into conversations with founders that don’t have anyone technical on the team yet, and we are willing to invest and help founders fill this role. This post was inspired by a recent investment we made in a phenomenal team (they are hiring!) and conversations with their CEO.

This post is for founders who need to “hire” a CTO. I put hire in quotes, because these folks always end up feeling like co-founders if you do it right. This post is for non-technical founders who do not know anyone who is available to co-found their startup. The best way to build a company is to work with someone you’ve collaborated with in the past (and is awesome), but sometimes this is not possible.

Order of Operations

The biggest mistake I see founders make is captured by the old joke, “I have a billion dollar idea and all I need is a code monkey.” Unless you have had extreme success in the past, in which case you probably don’t have this problem anway, you should not expect your ideas to sell the kinds of people you want to hire. Even mediocre engineers are constantly getting pitched for new jobs, most of which pay much more than you could. This is likely to be a lot of effort with no results.

The first step is to build something. This means investing your personal money in hiring mercenaries to build an MVP that validates the business for yourself, investors, and potential hires. It’s out of scope to get into the best strategy here, but accept that the first step is probably investing $20–100k in your idea. I’ve seen this done with WYSIWYG tools, hiring a college student, hiring an offshore team, local consultant, etc. This may even evolve into a technical co-founder relationship.

The goal shouldn’t be to build THE app, crappy code is a fine compromise, but rather to be able to say to potential employees that you already know that people want to pay for the thing you want them to build. That sounds basic, but is itself a good pitch.

At this point you can start talking to investors and potential hires, since raising capital will help with recruiting vice versa. Even if investors want to see a team in place, it’s positive to come back to them with that progress, and I think that same logic applies to hires. Startups don’t have much in absolute terms, but momentum counts for a lot.

Who Is And Isn’t a Good Fit

The bias of most non-technical founders is to focus on hiring someone that “looks” like a CTO today. I get it. I know very little about marketing, so if I were hiring a CMO I’d probably bias towards somebody who’s proven they can do that job. But startups need to accept their weaknesses and lean into their strengths.

Experience is overrated. You can talk to people who are currently managers, but their opportunity cost to join a startup is huge. They already have responsibility, they have higher salaries, and a lot less stress than you’re asking them to take on. Accept that you’re in the talent development business.

Further, even as you hire your first few engineers, it’s perfectly fine for them to report to the CEO if the CTO isn’t ready to handle that yet. You can do this better than you think.

EQ is underrated. As a non-technical founder, you want your early tech hires, and especially a CTO, to be someone who is firstly incredibly high EQ. You need this person to be able to work with you and other non-technical people, communicate effectively in English (vs codespeak), collaborate on things like tradeoffs and timelines, and they are a big part of what you’ll be selling to future engineering hires, and a big part of management potential. Find someone you can work with.

IQ is probably not underrated, but is worth mentioning because it’s a big part of how you close subsequent candidates. Working with smart people is disproportionately motivating for other early technical hires.

Extensive management experience is actively bad. Startups need doers, there’s no way around it. If someone has enough management experience that they don’t write much code, they’re likely to be a terrible fit. You need someone who can build a v1 that earns you the right (and potentially funding) to start hiring engineers.

The worst pitch we can receive as investors is that you’ve hired a manager and you just need some money to hire people to actually do things. Everybody in an early-stage startup is an individual contributor, and the goal is to get ones who contribute a LOT.

Potential is underrated. The best startup CTOs tend to be people who have little to no management experience, but would rather bet on themselves in a startup than wait it out wherever they are at for a promotion. Your job is to develop talent. Find talent that wants that too, and give it to them. Win-win.

Pedigree is overrated. Big company experience is usually actively bad because startups aren’t small versions of large companies. If a candidate only has big company experience, they very likely aren’t used to the uncertainty of a startup, which leads to frustration and stress with the necessary chaos as you’re learning. They also tend to have learned how to build applications for scale-at-launch, which can lead to poor technology choices, and less agile process than most startups need. I cannot tell you how many startups have died because they hired a Google engineer as CTO who designed an app to support a billion users rather than a web app that could make $10M/year with thousands.

Domain experience is overrated. Founders often bias towards recruiting engineers from their industry. This is intuitive, but mostly wrong. If you are in the digital media industry, for example, you could try to hire engineers from Business Insider, but you’re going to get the kind of engineers that went to work at Business Insider because they couldn’t get a job at Airtable. If you are a non-technical founder and don’t have enough domain expertise for the time, quit now.

Hire from tech companies. The compliment to ignoring domain expertise is to focus on companies that are likely to be good at evaluating talent, and likely to have better engineering practices. There are tons of different ways to ship code, and many of them aren’t what I’d call excellent, but hiring somebody who has seen a functional team ship code every week goes a long way towards giving you a default set of practices that’s gonna get you through the early phases of building a product.

The mortgage problem. As you talk to candidates, you’ll necessarily have to address salary. Every candidate will be worth more than you can pay them, but some will be structurally incapable of working for less. The classic issue is a big mortgage. You can overcome the issue of underpaying someone (see below), but if a candidate has a lifestyle that requires more than the company can afford to responsibly pay, they will spend a lot of energy on salary in the hiring process, and even if they talk themselves into taking the job, this is likely to be a problem down the road. It’s unwise to talk somebody into something they will regret when the excitement wears off.

How to Pitch Candidates

The ideal candidate is likely to be someone who has at least a few years of experience in a high-quality technical environment, but is not particularly senior. Their current job most likely pays them $150k+ plus some equity, and maybe has some other perks, so it’s pretty decent. But it’s likely a place where the path to more responsibility is long.

Your comparative advantage as a startup is the opportunity you can provide candidates and you should, with apologies to Sheryl, lean in. The best way to close the right candidates while repelling the wrong ones is to say some version of, “Come here, and build a great product. If we can do that, I can sell it, and if we can do that, we can grow this company and you can take on as much responsibility as you want and can handle. I believe we can make the equity worth a lot of money together, but I know that this will at least be a place where you can level up as a technical leader, and I am committed to helping you if you are committed to that exercise.”

This is a good pitch because it’s true!

The other thing founders tend to get wrong is assuming candidates will know what a fair deal is, and fair is the operative word. Startups can’t compete on salary, but it’s more important that people understand that they’re being treated fairly. Spend time with them helping them understand why you can’t pay them mid-six figures, offer to go through your use of funds, share your salary (or lack of one), encourage them to research equity comps, and be explicit that your goal is to get the company to a place where it can pay market rates ASAP.

People who want to bet on themselves are usually willing to take a salary cut, but nobody wants to be treated unfairly and if you’re not fluent in startups it’s easy to see some of the constraints as unfair.

How and Where To Find Candidates

It’s not easy to find talent, but good startups are a great opportunity for the right candidate, so it’s easier than it might seem if you look in the right places and make the right pitch (above).

First, find a technical advisor of some sort that you trust. This person can help you do things like write good job ads, can interview candidates for technical skill, and can mentor your high-potential CTO when she does come on board. This is a great use of advisor equity, and often former colleagues will happily help you for free.

Next, recognize that posting a job to a bunch of boards isn’t good enough, though it’s a fine thing to do because it’s cheap and easy to talk to anybody who responds. Just make it appeal to the right candidates and repel the wrong ones.

But the main way to spend your time is reaching out to potential candidates directly. Don’t use a recruiter, don’t delegate. The right candidates will receive regular outreach from recruiters, but rarely from the CEO of a startup looking for a first engineering hire.

You can start by making a list of companies that are likely to have the right kind of talent. Early to mid-stage startups that have had some success are ideal. You can then use sites like LinkedIn or AngelList to find prospects. Send a few to your technical advisor and get their input on whether you’re on the right track. Figure out what you want to say as you reach out. And run a process.

At this point, it’s a matter of putting in the work and hopefully feels comfortable to people skilled in marketing, sales, etc.

Finally, founders often ask about titles. The common wisdom is that candidates focused on titles is a negative, and there’s logic to that. My feeling is that the title should be a function of the person. You may want to call someone CTO because they are relatively senior, ready to manage, and you believe this title will be valuable for them recruiting. Go for it. Alternatively, you may have someone more junior where you set a title as a goal they will grow into. There’s merit to this as well.

In my opinion though, you should be willing to grant someone a co-founder title either way. It is a fair representation of the role you wish them to take at this stage, and costs nothing. People should be much more liberal with who gets called a co-founder in the early days of a startup if it benefits the company.

p.s. If you’ve got a great founding team and some proven customer demand but are still working on the CTO part, we’d love to talk.

p.p.s. If you’re a strong technologist looking for a promising startup to join, get in touch. We are happy to talk to you about options and introduce you to companies at whatever stage is the right fit.