How to look for a technical co-founder?

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4yr ago

Hi everyone! My name is Katrin - co-founder of Frich, which is a social finance app for Gen Z, and a Harvard Master's student. Being a non-technical person myself, what would be the best way to find a technical co-founder who could build an app? I'd really appreciate your feedback and help!

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Jim Zhou

Here's a contrarian view: Don't go straight for people in your cohort. Harvard and indeed all Ivies have great programs that produce great engineers, but to rephrase the old joke, "what do you call the guy who graduated last place at law school and scored just enough on the bar to pass? Lawyer." Institutions have, by their nature, and even when they try to encourage outside of the box thinking, have, as a matter of how institutions define themselves, certain ways of treating problems. That might be helpful for you in some cases, but no it's not at all clear that it would necessarily help you get ahead of the pack. This goes for even fields that are different than the one you're in. Someone coming out of George Mason will be influenced by the school's way of going about things than Amherst College even if they're studying the same thing. If you are comfortable with that, perhaps because of the risks involved and the everlasting problem of judging competency in the run long, then maybe sticking to what you know probably is a safer bet for you, but if you are looking for not just an engineering but a co-founder who presumably would have some decisionmaking role and equity and would be involved on a philosophical level as to how your startup runs, maybe look outside of the box. Having a college educated background or advanced degree at a non-Ivy isn't really necessarily mean someone is in your cohort nowadays, and there are many who are self-taught but have degrees in unrelated or tangentially relevant fields or even have came up with innovative solutions through their different perspective. I don't know your situation at all but it's not hard to imagine that you may want a co-founder who operates in a mode like that. It's a lot to gauge and no silver bullet, but it should all be considered. A personal example (note: not looking to cofound or get a job or anything, just a easy reference), I have BA in History and a JD and was working as a Public Defender when, prior to the 2016 elections (in 2012, actually), working a state 1st degree murder case where the evidence is ambiguous but partly caught on video - which was also ambiguous - and without programming knowledge beyond shell scripts at best and some DOS batch files from the 1990s, I wrote a rudimentary Python based scraper that imported data of every juror who received a summons in an all-nighter, tabulated, just to be able to weed out the most obvious jurors who are going to be unsympathetic in a blatant way towards our client, who's a minority in an overwhelmingly white small county with, many with family ties to the police in the case, and in an area of the country where white supremacist scandals were popping up long before the current bout. Excel is not a great platform for really doing this, but hell, my supervising attorney understood it, the paralegals understood it, and the prosecutor understood it. Using that we exercised peremptory challenges aggressively to ensure that a juror's social media posts and affiliations became integral parts of how we made the decision, while the prosecution went after race. We hung the jury (refusing to take a 2 year plea he was retried in my absence and convicted to 35 years a few years later). The point is: tech skills are easier learned than many people think, or at least can be helped by more junior or more specialized staffers, but a technical co-founder surely isn't just making a decision on what tech to use but how to leverage tech we have, fill in the gaps, and use unexpected ways to implement those to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve. I think what I did was a true hackathon-like thing that's not really indicative of my actual skillset (although I truly believe that amidst the hubhub social media can be leveraged to bring much greater freedom, justice, and individual agency to the people, particularly the marginalized, and so it's both a tightrope and a very narrow and incongruous skillset that I'd need to have anway). Look at the work, not just the talk. Look on github, look on unexpected places. Again, technical skills are important, but they can be learned and in relatively short timespans. Whether they are willing, able, and dedicated to go there to truly create end-products that can achieve what you want to achieve, that is way harder to find and may very well be found outside of the hallowed halls and in smaller places, state schools, even liberal arts schools, among freelancers, etc. Look broadly.