Do Technical Founders Need Business Co-Founders?

oh yeah well Michael I could go do sales that's not hard I can definitely reply to emails yes you know I could well doter are you going to do [Laughter] that welcome to Dalton plus Michael today we're going to talk about do you need a business co-founder so many of you have seen our video do you need a tech co-founder I think we can summarize that as yes yes yes now a far more complicated question do you need a business co-founder it would seem like these are you know yeah okay one-on-one why are we making

this video why why do why is this interesting question I think the short answer is yes asterisk and I think this comes down to definitions what does it mean to be a non-technical founder and so if we Define this as does every startup need one person who can't Code full stop the answer is of of course no that is what why would you even ask that question no but like I think people think like I think we think that but we'll explain we'll break this down and so let's talk about the as so basically every

company has stuff that needs to happen yes right and so to enumerate some of the tasks that need to happen that are not related to to writing code y let enies of these incorporation yes Bank payroll like yes you know bureaucratic filling out forms paying taxes every year back office back whatever you want to call it someone's got to do that if not you are breaking the law yep problem so someone has to do that yes talking to customers someone has to talk to a customer you don't need to know how to write code to

talk to a customer right do not no so someone needs to do that yes hiring people that's not writing code but you have to interview people whatever right people won't just show up yeah sales is a really important one we talk about this a lot if no one on the team considers it their job to do sales we have a problem no sales will happen right and someone that doesn't know how to code could do sales yep fundraising is another one do you need to know how to code to fundraise no negative customer support as

well totally like replying to yeah amen yes and so the point is as we're enumerating all these anyone that is a Founder could be doing these and is qualified to do it yes but a technical co-founder is just as qualified to do these tasks as a non technical co-founder these are smart human tasks yeah smart generalist tasks and so we have seen lots of cases where everyone on the team may have a technical degree yes but there's still a clear someone knows they have to do this stuff right man yes well I think that this

is what's so interesting is that it's much easier for a technical person to do things that just require general intelligence than it is for a business person to learn how to a code indeed as a business person I can attest to this fact but I think that you know you've brought up a really good point um having the ability to do these tasks is different from having the appetite to do these tasks and to do them well and let's triple underline that word appetite yes it's not oh yeah well Michael I can go you know

yeah do sales that's not hard I can definitely reply to emails yes you know I could well doter are you going to do that long pause long pause I think maybe I think you should look into that I think this is extremely important right and I think that when we're looking into this question we have to ask ourselves like who is going to adopt these tasks and responsibilities it could be a technical person it can be a non-technical person you need someone on your founding team who's willing to adopt these tasks and do them well

yeah with Vigor with excitement with like want to be the best in the world at those tasks and not be grudgingly full of excuses why they don't want to do it or that work is beneath them or whatever right bringing toxicity into the company like no not that I also think what's interesting is that if you are a technical person and you happen to be solving your own problem the idea that you would need a business co-founder is not only um confusing because you know let's say You're Building A Dev tool like your business co-founder

probably is not the right person to sell or fundraise or hire or talk to customers yeah um so literally the idea that you couldn't do those tasks is actually silly like a technical person should be doing those tasks yes and if you're solving your own problem it's technical problem like it's kind of a no-brainer that you don't need a business co-founder maybe you need another Co I mean this is an example you know we'll talk about examples a little bit later but like if you look at something like Nvidia yeah all the found were technical

all of them were electrical engineers with you know master's degrees or something in electrical engineering when you think about it how could a business person with no technical background even come up with the idea for NVIDIA or been in a position to execute on it versus an electrical engineer yeah and so the CEO of Nvidia I don't think he spends a lot of time coding to be honest with you but the fact that he was a trained electrical engineer with a history of doing electrical engineering helped with a specific vision of how to build a

new yes CPU company excuse me GPU company um that seems important right seems important I don't know if a a non-tech Founder would have helped in video way back in the day no um and certainly if they would have helped it's not obvious they would have been essential correct and so I think that um this idea oh the business person the MBA is essential that's not like it's possible that the technical person is essential and the business person's not essential I think the other thing that we think about about a lot is let's say you

don't want to believe our Theory right talking about Theory let's say Theory right I don't like this because this is not flattering to me Michael I'm I don't like what you guys are saying because it exactly doesn't help me um you could just look at big companies and ask yourself do there exist big companies that have only technical Founders what would you say to that question yeah I mean let's look at the most valuable companies on on the stock market Google is obviously two technical Founders yes in video we just talked about is all technical

Founders yes Microsoft was two technical Founders when they started pretty valuable company pretty valuable company so wait that's of the most valuable companies in the world that's three of them so far yeah you know Facebook is complicated about who's countered as a co-founder or not but like you know Zuckerberg was a technical founder in movitz and all that and then if you look in the YC portfolio you know strip yep Dropbox yep there's a theme Here so sometimes I like to say like hey even if you don't want to believe these theories you know you

could just look it up right if this is your question do I need a business co-founder you could just look it up and be like well if Google didn't need one yeah but people will be able to point to other examples and that's fair we're not we're not saying that you shouldn't have one we're just saying you don't need it yes this is we're not arguing this is the exhaustive truth yeah we're just saying it is not absolutely necessary and we are providing proof of said argument and furthermore if you're using this as an excuse

to not make forward progress that's kind of and here's a here's a Cory to this is sometimes we see when you're selling into an industry where a non-technical Founder has does have industry expertise and knows the language of their customer that can be very helpful again I'm not arguing necessary smart people can learn anything in my opinion okay but imagine you wanted to sell uh legal software sure if you had one of the founders who instead of learning how to code in college they went to law school and they were practicing attorney and they knew

how to sell to attorneys that could help that sounds pretty legit that could help right let's say that you're selling software to doctors in hospitals it might help that there's someone who's a doctor or yeah maybe you're making a prescription drug or maybe you're making a drug Distribution Company like yep might help what I will say though is that like don't let yourself be held back by these fake limitations yeah these are fake I think that's such a great way to like close off this thinking I think the reason we got a lot of requests

to this video I think it was from technical Founders yeah that had been told by like investors orb you need you need a business founder yes and are kind of looking for Our advice about that or like they're not really sure yeah and I think a lot of times when investors give a Founder that feedback which is you need a business co-founder yeah they're actually giving you direct feedback on what they see as a deficiency in your appetite to do the work yes yes in a polite way or or or the quality that you did

the work the quality of your Petra the quality of how you set up your your your company um but that doesn't mean you don't have the skills to do it yeah like if you meet with someone like I don't want to do sales I hate doing sales sales is bad yeah a lot of advice would be yeah maybe you should get an on- Tech founder right well by the way that's why I hate that advice because that advice is suggesting the solution versus telling you the problem which is like hey it you might have to

talk to your customer like you don't seem like you like that that's going to screw you there are many ways of solving that you you could learn to like it you could hire someone who does you could hire an engineer who does you can hire um but I do think that don't believe this idea that there's some magic with like one business person Plus One tech person equals startup win no no and I think along these lines sometimes people have a lot of push back of our advice on why you need a co-founder full stop

but our argument is not you need a business co-founder to teach you business because they went to business school no it's just that this is so hard you need another person to go through this experience with it's not that there's any one particular bit of experience that is necessary right like 100% you need someone to offer emotional support CU this thing is going to be hard yeah yes yes all right good shot sounds good thanks [Music] man [Music]