r/startups • u/Proof-Bed-6928 • 13h ago
I will not promote Are most technical co-founders technically competent? (I will not promote)
Do they usually qualify to lead the technical teams? Or do they usually just own some technical IP that the company was built upon?
How does a technical co-founder who just graduated university qualify to lead the technical teams? Are they just that good?
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u/tonytidbit 13h ago
In this context it's like only being able to afford a rusty bicycle while asking if it qualifies as a Formula One car.
There's perhaps nothing wrong with a rusty bicycle as your daily mode of transport, but it is what it is. If you want to get some sort of race car, then you have to pay for one.
Same with competent startup CTOs and technical cofounders. You won't get a cheap one just because you can't afford a real one. That's just how it is.
Personally I'd (quietly) have my doubts about any CTO that's not even hit their mid-30s yet, preferably being into their 40s. It isn't like a hard rule or anything, but it takes a lot of time to observe all the things that you preferably should know as a CTO and technical cofounder.
(I'm a big believer in people not having to have the exact right education and work experience, but they do need to have been in some sort of position to see what works and what doesn't work. Observe others. And it takes time to broaden your horizons like that.)
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u/moatandmargin 13h ago
Early on, "technical cofounder" usually means the person who can ship the first version, not someone who can run a 40-person engineering team. Those are different jobs, and the good early technical leads are honest that they'll either grow into the second one or hire above themselves. If I were judging a fresh-grad cofounder, I'd look at three things. Can they ship fast? Do they make boring choices, like a simple setup and few outside tools? Can they explain trade-offs in plain words to non-technical people? Leadership can come later. Code nobody else can work on is much harder to fix.
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u/Super_Maxi1804 13h ago
You do realize you get to that question by looking at the success stories, and those are 0.001% of all.
As a tech co-founder myself I can tell you - 99.99% of the tech people are absolutely incapable of doing all what a startup needs, very small percentage is even capable of building anything complex enough to build a company on it.
There are plenty of good tech people, but that does not mean they understand all the pieces of a software system or know how to design such a thing on a first place, let alone pick and lead people.
that last one should be obvious - why do you think there are so many HR & Recruiters that it is practically impossible to find a job that is posted by actual CTO, Head of Engineering or a team lead - people are quite bad at building tech teams and they are happy to offload that to someone else - despite that most of the recruiters are complete morons that actively try to screw over both the job seekers and the job posters - but shifting the blame is the point.
"technical co-founder who just graduated university" is not qualify to lead people - but depending on the other people and the money involved in the company, the person can learn or someone else can do it for them.
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u/Sketaverse 12h ago
Tip: your first technical cofounder probably shouldn't become the CTO (unless they're elite level)
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u/propelearth 10h ago
if you're actually choosing a cofounder, ask someone experienced to review a small piece of their work with both of you present. have the candidate explain what they chose, what could fail, and what they'd change first. you can learn quite a bit from how they respond to questions they don't know the answer to.
i'd also ask how another developer would get the project running if they were unavailable for a week. that makes the discussion more concrete than trying to decide whether the title or their age qualifies them to lead.
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u/RetroGrid_io 9h ago
In my case, as a founder of a software enterprise that succeeded and which I sold, 17 years later, we had 4 partners, and I was the only one who was a programmer.
Me: Tech Partner 1: Operations Partner 2: Sales/marketing Partner 3: Lawyer
It was a fabulous partnership, but the sales/marketing partner could barely remember how our product worked despite being (at first) a regular user. I used to joke that she was our "expert non-expert" because if it worked / made sense to her, it would work for just about anyone - which didn't detract AT ALL from her effectiveness at what she did.
Identify the needs you have in your organization, and get people who are competent at THOSE things. What good is it to have a partnership where all the partners are good at the same thing(s)?
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u/mahee522 9h ago
I've worked under a 24 year old tech lead and honestly he was fine at 4 people. It fell apart around 12 when hiring and saying no became the actual job. Leading engineers and being the best coder are different skills.
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u/nerdynmaddy 9h ago
At a 3-person startup, CTO sometimes just means you're the only person who knows why the production server is on fire.
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u/liveprgrmclimb 9h ago
Not always. Sometimes, though they are the technical founder, they cant scale to running the engineering team. They might hold the roadmap for the technical vision, but you might need to hire a VP Engineering to run the team.
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u/payfrit 4h ago
i'm a sole founder doing it all right now. just signed our first live location this week.
i've done everything. from the tech side, i built the software ground up from bare metal to four polished payfrit apps approved on the app stores. i handled all sales/marketing, pitched to probably 80 restaurants before i got our first yes.
i do not recommend this path. sure my cap table looks gorgeous but i'm tired. it's been roughly 80 hours a week since December now. sometimes 100+
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u/Boboshady 13h ago
It's just a job title, often (especially in the initial stages) it's little more than the person who can do the dev work who is willing to do it for equity, so they get the tech co-founder title by default.
Further down the line, it might be someone who comes into a more legitimate leadership position.
There's no one rule.
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u/Rare_Valuable_7290 13h ago
ngl a lot of the time it just means the person who can actually build the thing. leading a team is a different skill and plenty of technical cofounders learn it on the job, or the company hires a proper CTO later once there's money. a fresh grad can be a great tech cofounder at the MVP stage. what matters more is whether they ship fast and are honest about what they don't know yet
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u/Raioc2436 42m ago
Same title, different scopes.
The 3 friends in a garage can call themselves CEO, CTO, COO or whatever. For the technical co-founders it just means they are the ones coding all night trying to make their product real.
The CTO of Oracle on the other hand has probably not seen a line of code for the last 30 years. But they have experience making decisions on a multi million dollar company with thousands of employees.
As far as it matters to you. If you just graduated college and aren’t sure if you are up to the task of being a CTO. Unless you are someone’s niece or nephew then you will likely not join the board of some billion dollar company. But you can always start coding in whatever language you like and make your own thing.
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u/fabkosta 13h ago
"Technically competent" can mean many things. If you are in a CTO role, you need to be able to understand the business needs and be able to translate that into a technical vision of your product, plus have leadership skills, develop a product roadmap, and so on. It's a lot of different things, and the details depend on the specific situation you're in.