How do technical founders choose non-technical partners?

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There are many articles and blogs that give advice to entrepreneurs on how to find a great technical partner, but in reality, it is not difficult to find a technical partner. From the topics discussed on Founder Dating, a very important but rarely mentioned (at least not reported in the media) question is how to find a non-technical partner to manage the company. The topic that has been discussed for the longest time in the Q&A section of FD in the past year is: What criteria does the technical partner use to evaluate the non-technical partner?

Why is this so difficult!

When you are engaged in technical work and plan to recruit a technical talent, you are usually accustomed to giving him an objective "test" question to check whether he has the corresponding ability. These questions include whiteboard tests, coding projects, pair programming, etc. Even if you are not a developer yourself, if you need to find a co-worker on a programming project, you can easily get professional advice from experts or friends who are engaged in technical work. Of course, just knowing a person's professional level is not enough for you to decide whether to work with him, especially when looking for a partner (of course you also need to know something about the person's personality), but this at least solves the very core problem of skill assessment.

Unfortunately, there is no whiteboard test designed to assess the capabilities of non-technical people (if anyone knows please share). When you select non-technical people, you can get a general idea of ​​how they will perform the work, but there is no specific way to determine if they are good at things like prospecting or recruiting.

The most common mistakes when selecting people

You don’t know how ignorant you are, which leads many technical partners to rely on some seemingly important but actually wrong characteristics to find non-technical partners. Some people who have the following top characteristics told me that they are looking for people who don’t have the same characteristics as themselves:

1. Experts in related fields : I guess you want to hire experts in a certain field because you think their ideas can change the status quo of the industry (which is almost never the case). But some very successful companies were founded by people who had no experience in their industry, which is why they were able to change the status quo of the industry. At the beginning of their business, Kevin Hartz had no relevant background in the ticketing industry, and Max Levchin had no experience in the field of online payments. Usually working in an industry for too long will make people lose the ability to reflect on and improve it.

2. Graduated from *** university or worked for *** company : These conditions are certainly good for bragging, but if you are the 4,000th employee to join Facebook, then the mere act of working for Facebook cannot prove whether you are good or bad.

3. Build a prototype: This is certainly helpful , at least it proves that they can not only speak, but also do things. However, you don't want to use the previous code in future work, or let him always repeat the same thinking routine.

How to find suitable non-technical partners?

As a non-technical partner, his job scope covers everything from product to recruiting, and even a lot of beautiful bullshit. I can’t provide specific whiteboard testing methods here, but there are some personal characteristics you can refer to when looking for non-technical founders:

1. Solve problems quickly - It's hard to know what you're going to encounter when you start a company or launch a project. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that you and your partners will face a lot of work that is far more than anything you have ever experienced. Can your non-technical partners quickly sort out various matters? Can they solve problems quickly? As long as they can do one of them, it will be a huge surprise for you, but in fact you can't have such optimistic expectations for non-technical partners. As a partner in a company, you usually need to be "good enough" in various aspects such as fundraising, products, and maintaining partnerships. Of course, you can hire suitable talents for these specific jobs later, but in the early stage of a startup, you need an all-round player who can perform different work tasks.

2. Ability to get things done - When you start a company, there is no end to the things you need to do. If you talk to VCs and give them a list of the top 20 things you need to do, they may not be able to prioritize and eliminate the things that are not necessary (especially if they have never done some of them). When your non-technical partner says he is going to do something and does it immediately, especially if he does it well, you should have full confidence in such a non-technical partner.

3. Unwavering determination - OK, I lied before. Actually, there are two things that are certain in the process of starting a company. In addition to the massive amount of work, the other is that you will be rejected again and again. Can your non-technical partners withstand these negative feedbacks? How long does it usually take them to recover from the frustration of being rejected? Whether they have experience as co-founders or have joined a company in its early stages is an important criterion for judging the determination of a partner candidate. Because these experiences mean that they have been involved in the big and small battles of the early stages of entrepreneurship, and they have been covered with scars but never backed down. It doesn't matter what field they have started a business in before, what matters is that they have gained psychological endurance in the process. Paul Graham has a famous article on entrepreneurial determination. In the Cliff notes version, it says: "We soon realized that the most important predictor of success is determination." You and your non-technical partners need to work together for a long time to clear various obstacles on the entrepreneurial road, and you can also see their determination from this.

4. Excellent communication skills - actually this includes two aspects :

1) Does he understand technical topics? You certainly can't expect your non-technical partner to know as much about technology as you do, but have they tried to understand the technical aspects of what you are involved in? Does he have experience working with engineers? Can he understand the questions asked by engineers? If you don't know the answers to these questions, try asking him to talk about colleagues in the technical department he has worked with in the past. It is an encouraging sign that a non-technical partner is trying to learn programming. Although doing so will not bring much contribution to the company's technical work, it largely shows that this person is full of curiosity and wants to understand the work of engineers.

2) Can they communicate effectively with others? “Others” here include investors, potential employees, and customers. If you develop a software service product, can they find the first customer for the product? If you have a consumer-oriented product, can they find the first batch of trial users to participate in the test and collect feedback to complete the work? Can they put themselves in the crowd and get these people excited about your product? These people may come from the weekend gathering of entrepreneurs or a group of students. You can't wait for your investors to solve the above problems.

As you may have noticed, you can’t tell if someone has these four traits just by meeting them a few times. The first thing you need to do is work together. It’s easy to tell if they meet these indicators when you work with them on projects. It doesn’t matter if you’ve already done this in your work. You’ll get more out of reading this than you would from drinking ten cups of coffee and racking your brains or building a virtual whiteboard test. You can’t find the right non-technical partner in just a few weeks, so you should keep thinking about this question during the process.

When looking for a non-technical partner, you can’t just consider the above questions. It is also very important to understand their work motivation, personality traits, etc. These aspects cannot be reflected in their resumes and can only be understood through face-to-face conversations.

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