Gustaf Alströmer: recommendation

Transcript context

…It's cool how often it just comes back to, "Just go do the thing. Do things that don't scale." Classic YC advice. I want to come back to something you mentioned that I want to pull a thread on as the technical co-founder, being technical early on, just to cover that. So I know YC looks to... Having a technical founder is an important variable in you're deciding to accept a company. Say someone doesn't have a technical co-founder, do you have any advice for what they could do, like what often can work? Gustaf Alströmer Yeah, I think the first thing is to understand the value of technical co-founder. So some people who are in this situation where they have an idea of something they want to build and they don't have anyone to help build them in building it, I had a friend Paul who gave this incredible quote, he said, "I have an idea for a song, I just need a musician to help me make it," right? That's kind of similar to how it is with engineering. If you view output of engineering as like, "I just have an idea for a song, I just need someone to actually make it for me" and then you're not valuing software engineering or mechanical engineering or any engineering skill set deep enough, right? The truth is that the engineering part is the really hard part. The first thing I would say is you need to learn how to value the engineering piece. Let me give you an example of how you don't do that. You applied to YC and you have 90% for yourself and 10% for the engineer. You're basically saying that like, "Oh, the engineering part of this company is only worth 1/10th of me. I'm the non-technical person." So that to me is a signal that you're not really valuing engineering. Okay, so how do you go out about and find someone? Well, the truth is that there are a lot of technical co-founders. The technical people, they also want to find business co-founders. They don't want to do other part. They don't want to do sales and they actually don't really care that much about fundraising. They just want to solve the problem. And that's fine. We built something called co-founder matching where those funders can meet, but if you don't participate in that, you can just start by asking the best technical people that you know. "Are you interested in starting a company with me?" Same thing with rejection. Many of them will just say, "No, I have a great job, I'm really happy." But some of them will have thought about starting a company for a while and was hoping that someone would come and ask them to do that. So you have to remove your fears and go and ask the best people. The reason you want to have a technical co-founder and not a hired engineer or not a hired contracting team is because so many of the decisions you're going to make are technical and so many of the iterations you're going to make relies on engineering. And if you don't understand that, you won't actually make the right decisions anyway. It's not like service. You have an idea for a product, you build a product and you're done. There's infinite number of iterations in that process. And then finally, I would say a lot of people learn how to code themselves, right? So there are a lot of places online that you can learn the skillset that takes to build a prototype. You might not be the best engineers. So there are many successful startup founders who are not the best engineers because they stop coding when they hire three or four engineers, that's fine. ototype. You might not be the best engineers. So there are many successful startup founders who are not the best engineers because they stop coding when they hire three or four engineers, that's fine. But you need to be sufficiently good that you understand the value of engineering and that you understand that the best way to solve most of the problem is with software. There are a lot of founders who just, for whatever reason, study something else that doesn't have to be a conscious or very precise reason that you had when you were 18 or 19 and then you're 25, you're like, "Oh, I wish I know how to code" and then just learn to code and they learn how to code. It's not that more difficult than that.…

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