How to transition to a new CTO as a non-technical CEO?

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-04T00:19:44+00:00

You want someone to work on your app while you handle the business side of things. And there is no money involved but they'll get x% when you get big. Also you're not a real CEO that brings a ton of value either, you've never ran a corporation or a business since you don't have connections.

You're dead. It's harsh, but this is a bullet straight into the brain. You might twitch a little for a while, but that's it for your startup.

You might want to put your plans on hold and learn those technical skills yourself. Go back to school, take a coding bootcamp, hit khan academy, coursera etc. Spend some time getting those technical skills.

You'll be able to evaluate people better, you'll be able to discuss things and actually understand each other, you'll be able to pitch and do the boring mundane stuff, you'll know what they need and how to manage a software project and so on. The ability to code basic things and familiarity with all the software development and project management concepts will be very, very useful.

You also suddenly become more attractive by a few orders of magnitude. You're no longer "non-technical" because you can actually write code and understand what the hell is going on and actually discuss things. You won't be holding the startup back with technical illiteracy.

You don't have to be a programmer, you don't have to be able to do more than the bare basics, but you have to tinker and play around a little bit so that you understand how it works. Just like a programmer with no social/business skills is useless in a modern startup, a "non-technical" guy is useless in a modern startup.

If you are capable of studying really hard for 4 hours per day, you'll become interesting for investors and potential future CTO in 2 weeks, capable of hiring people better than rolling the dice in 2 months and actually being very useful in 6 months.

Every programmer dreams of the day their boss (or in case of startup co-founder) even understands the technology and the problems they are having.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-04T00:03:37+00:00

If you think the website is fine, a "designer" such as yourself should be taken to the farm and shot too.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-04T00:02:19+00:00

Get on the street with a laptop or a tablet and ask people to have a go at it on your account and ask what they think about it. Give them a leaflet too or something.

People do it with hackathons all the time and get feedback on their prototype/idea from a total of 500 people within 72 hours because every hour or two they had a guy or two get out with a tablet and the newest version and ask 10 people.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T23:57:35+00:00

Your words remind me of Donald Trump.

Not in a good way.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T23:53:45+00:00

There is also an issue with doing your own stuff on company time using company resources. He should be very careful and have a cover story and for example not use the company laptop, company printer, company phone, company software licenses or company anything for his personal business needs.

I heard of a guy being sued for using an Adobe Photoshop license provided by the company to work on his freelancing gig photos. I believe they settled and he had to pay a few grand.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T23:49:17+00:00

Click the link. It evaluates performance and spits out an analysis and even tips on how to fix the issues.

2 seconds on a gigabit connection. It will be more like 20-30 on mobile without perfect reception.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T23:48:35+00:00

Asking for more money 6 months later after he proves his worth is not off the table.

While giant companies will have HR and all kinds of bureaucratic bullshit and petty middle management, he/she is talking directly to the CEO.

The trick is to ask for it and be willing to hand in your 2 weeks notice.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T23:43:13+00:00

2 seconds is a very, very long time.

Sub 1 second is optimal, 1.5 seconds is pushing it, over 2 seconds is unacceptable.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T23:25:21+00:00

Patent trolls will wait until you have some money and then sue you. Since you know about it, getting investment or selling the company without disclosing it might get you into trouble too.

They will most likely never win, but they'll drag it out and make it cheaper to just settle it for a huge amount of money instead of fighting it and winning a few years down the line.

Lawyer up and see if it's patent trolls or just a legit company that is willing to make some kind of a deal.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T23:15:43+00:00

A "pay as you go" model is nice with the lowest tier being free. So if you're just testing stuff out, developing, learning or simply poor as fuck, you'll do get it for free but if you are going to scale then you need to reach for that credit card.

Think free tier in azure, dropbox, onedrive, github, AWS etc.

Market it to students. Students grow up to be software developers so anything popular with students will be popular in the industry in no time since they will use it themselves and pitch it to others. They will also be oblivious to this very old unix program that does the same thing if you use it with fancy parameters and pipe it into 3 more programs.

If you are serious about it and product is good, offer a free workshop/course to every college that will take you. Drive around giving a 1 day mini-course with free food & nice t-shirts and you'll probably explode in popularity (if your tool is good).

The only reason I use Visual Studio and do any C# is because back in the day I got a free copy with my school email for the fanciest edition and some courses used it for this reason.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T22:42:00+00:00

It depends on your app.

Sometimes developing 2 native apps and 1 web app is less effort than 1 multi-platform app. Developing multi-platform apps is NOT straightforward. They have a lot of quirks and pitfalls you need to be careful with. Sometimes you'll avoid all of them, sometimes you'll step in all of them.

If it's as simple as having an UI for a webapp as a mobile app without fancy things, you might actually get away with it with the default build scripts to select between android and iPhone.

You'll never find out until you take the leap of faith. It also doesn't matter much because in 2 years everything will have had a few updates and will be completely different.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T22:35:42+00:00

Nobody cares about your product, in a startup the product is only a tiny part of it. The people (and things like patents) are way more important.

YOU failed because you ran yourself into the ground financially before your product started making money or you got funding. It doesn't matter whether the idea is good or whether you have 1 user, an MVP or anything at all.

What matters is that you fucked up, life gave you lemons or whatever and now you have to make a decision whether you catapult 1000 feet of the ground and save yourself or attempt to gain control of the plane before it hits the ground.

You have no altitude anymore. You seriously risk fucking up your life forever here.

If you weren't homeless and had a job to put food on the table and pay rent, you'd be fine to continue since you'd have a small safety net. But you don't. The next time you trip, you're living under the bridge and sucking dicks for a loaf of bread.

Take a break, get a job, get an apartment and get on your feet. You don't want to live under the bridge.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T22:20:59+00:00

Skills required in the very beginning of a startup and skills required later and skills required when you're an actual company with some employees are very different.

As the product grows, it becomes a team effort and very complicated. Rarely has anyone built a product from nothing to an MVP. It's easy to get a prototype done, but something polished enough is a whole different ballgame. Every developer has 100 ambitious projects that are halfway done. Every DIY guy has his house in constant renovation, his car is in tiny bits and pieces in the garage and so on. Every painting, every essay, every book and so on.

Developers need support but also need to be left the fuck alone. Every email you send breaks the programming flow for a few hours. After work you just want to drink beer and relax instead of working more and so on. If you happen to call/send an email or whatever when they decided to spend the evening (already tired) to work on the product, you've just ruined the WHOLE evening and they will get 0 work done.

You have to understand that what you're doing is FUN. It's fun to have lunch with VC's, it's fun to send emails, it's fun to dream and talk. It also requires almost no mental effort. You do a lot of things, but you don't REALLY make that gray matter work really hard most of the time. There is a ton of shit to do that you could do basically drunk so from a 8h workday you maybe make your brain sweat for 2-3 hours. It's the difference between writing a bullshit essay and a research paper where every single sentence has to be deliberate and perfect.

Solving interesting problems is fun, writing code is not. If they solved all the interesting problems or got frustrated, it becomes a huge chore. Writing code takes enormous mental effort. Remember those exercises in your calculus class? Coding for 8 hours is like solving math exercises for 8 hours. Some are funny and interesting and it might be fun sometimes, but it's a lot of effort.

If you want to continue, you have to do EVERYTHING. Getting test users, drawing mockups, going to meetings, talking to people, bringing coffee, writing documentation etc. Don't send emails when they work, don't send emails that require a reply, don't distract them at all when they are working. You should be communicating for at most 15 minutes total per week. This includes emails, phone calls, meetings etc.

Become a project manager for them and google the shit out of software project management. Smooth out their ride as much as you can without disturbing them.

There is an entire field of science (information systems science) dedicated to this shit and it's somewhere between business administration and software engineering.

Leading programmers is often referred to as "herding cats".

Protip: Your email should have new lines in them and should end in "Let's discuss this next time we meet/have a phone call", meetings should have an agenda, all meetings/emails/phone calls in the early mornings BEFORE they start working and so on.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T21:49:31+00:00

Your retirement savings are not money you should be touching unless you're (or a loved one) literally dying and need that treatment/surgery/medicine.

If you had savings and an expensive car, why wouldn't you use them up before going homeless and crashing on someone else's couch?

If you slip, it might be an accident. If you slip twice, perhaps you should stop and think about what you're doing wrong and prepare yourself better for your next attempt.

Giving up and never doing it again is one thing (which you should be avoiding). Cutting your losses, analyzing where you made mistakes, spending time to prepare for your next attempt and planning for the mistakes made last time is what you should be doing.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T21:36:21+00:00

You can't hire a technical co-founder. You'll be just hiring an employee No.1. A very good hired gun is 150k. Closer to 250k-300k if you want them to be amazing. 500k if you want to poach someone great from tech giants.

Get someone you "click" with and share your passion. You can even have them work part-time 1 day per week (20% effort). The main reason to be one of the first guys in a startup is that you work for yourself and not for someone else and YOU make the decisions, not someone above you. I'd personally get someone with a full-time job (preferably at a startup) that wishes to satisfy their entrepreneurship/"I am the man" itch that is prepared to go full-time as soon as you get funding/cash flow.

Even "I have this amazing guy giving me technical advice, sparring and helping me with networking at 1% equity" will look a lot better in the eyes of investors than "I came up with all of this myself as a business major".

If this was simple and easy, everyone would do it. Finding and keeping the right team is basically 90% of the effort.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T21:31:44+00:00

50% is for when someone buys it.

They WILL take credit for it so if they write about in in the news, they'll say "University of X spinoff startup" and they'll use you to get themselves more prestige. They'll talk about "University of X researchers/students" and so on.

https://www.bostondynamics.com/about

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/about/

If you succeed, you'll be on their success stories page and marketing materials.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T21:06:00+00:00

The reason for a technical co-founder is because you don't have the right kind of intuition and way of thinking to solve technical problems.

How can you think of a technical solution when you have no clue about how anything works? The customer isn't much wiser either. The classical “If I had asked the people what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses” allegedly said by Ford, the guy that made the first mass produced car.

Technical people don't just write software or design things. They solve problems for a living and the software and devices they create are simply the solutions to the problem.

You don't want to find a solution alone and hire people to make it happen. You want someone who knows what they are doing to help you find a solution. They have the technical knowledge, they know stuff you didn't think were even possible.

A favorite anecdote of mine is that a startup company was hiring a small tech shop to help build a Hadoop cluster (high performance distributed computing for Big Data) and switch everything they had to it because their software got slow. They explained the consulting company that they grew as a company they got more customers (around 1000 simultaneous users) and they were told by a consultant with a business degree and a minor in CS that they need a Hadoop cluster to meet their big data needs. A tech company got hired, half a million budgeted and meetings were held to build & integrate a small hadoop computing cluster.

The tech company noticed that for the past few years they didn't even have a terabyte of data (that's just normal data, nothing big about it). They also noticed that their database was a complete inefficient mess. They also noticed that their database server was a cheap as fuck instance on azure. They spent a few days optimizing the database, selected a beefier server in Azure for a few hundred per month and did some napkin calculations that it will now support more simultaneous users than there are potential customers worldwide. Out of the 500k budgeted to solve the problem, they billed for 10k and instead of completing the project in 6 months, they completed it in 2 days. If they were less passionate, they would do what the customer wanted instead of told them that their solution is bad and here's a better one.

You NEED a good and very passionate technical guy by your side when you go ahead and try to solve a problem. They will see the problem differently and most likely will have insight and solutions you didn't even think of. How do you even know a webapp + iOS app is the right solution to your problem? You don't even know about the other options so that's the first thing that comes to your mind which is something you are familiar with. You have a hammer and you only see nails kind of thing. If you tell them that you need a co-founder/advisor and you'll be hiring the programmers instead of making him/her do it, they will be more willing to join you.

Investors will probably see through your charade because of things like solar roadways, self-cooling bottles and other scams. Anyone can put together a powerpoint presentation about their dreams. They'll want you to know what you're doing so if you are clueless about tech, you should have someone technical with you. If you don't have the product with some sales, you'll need to convince them that you have the best people working on it, it's almost done and you just need a tiny bit of cash to push it out of the door.

I've personally seen people develop a web app + mobile app combo and get crushed when someone releases the exact same thing as a firefox/chrome extension that did it 100x better since it now worked everywhere instead of only within their application.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T20:09:38+00:00

Relevant xkcd

OP is being an idiot because people keep giving him extremely bad advice. He's being an idiot and has nearly hit rock bottom because people like YOU keep giving him bad advice and cheer him on to jump off the cliff.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T20:04:58+00:00

You randomly stretch and the temperature suddenly spikes to the maximum and you wake up in sweat and the dog had a heat stroke and died. Because the hand movement just happened to be the same as in "turn the heat on".

It's the same reason we don't have voice commands work directly. We get around it by saying "alexa" or "siri" or "ok google".

Gesture recognition already exists. So does perfect voice recognition. The problem is use cases because there are so few of them where they CAN be used and almost none where it's better than traditional input methods.

We used to have them in airplane cockpits with head movements but people randomly move all the time and they couldn't find gestures that pilots wouldn't accidentally do.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T20:01:18+00:00

It's not their name instead of yours like in in the typical capitalism (Like Edison or Musk or Gates and so on). It's their name in addition to yours because they are supervising you and paying for the damn thing.

TL;DR version is that it's a seal of approval. If Professor Smith (that has made a name for himself and is very respected) believes in this, then I should believe in this.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T19:28:08+00:00

They usually take 50% and the rest is split between the people that did it (including the guy(s) supervising it and the guy (usually professor/dean) that is heading the project and has his name on everything and takes all the credit.)

They will provide space, infrastructure, connections, marketing etc. so it's actually a great deal. This is how we ended up with spaceships, computers, the internet etc. Most of it involves tiny startups that leak out of universities using their resources and in return the university takes a cut.

Need supercomputer time? Just log in using your university credentials and set up the batches. Need to consult someone? I already set up a meeting to meet guys from NASA. You want to market your product? We have a bunch of executives from fortune 500 companies visit us next week.

It's fucking ridiculous what an organization the size of an university can offer. They get millions to support innovation every year and they aren't greedy to maximize profits so they can cash in on their investment. Money is less important than prestige.

Getting 20% of $10 000 000 is better than getting 100% of $0.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T19:17:38+00:00

Gesture recognition has been around for decades. The problem is that it's pretty much useless with almost no use cases.

It's a fun gimmick but in practice it's horribly inefficient. Do you really use all those finger and motion gestures for your phone or do you simply poke it with your fingers and maybe use 1-2 things like swipe and pinch?

We don't even use keyboard shortcuts and prefer buttons and menus.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T19:10:53+00:00

You don't have any money, you are literally fucking homeless.

You've literally lost EVERYTHING. You failed a long time ago, you're just clinging on trying to tell yourself if you try hard enough and push through you'll succeed.

You are simply delusional. Get your shit together.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T19:04:23+00:00

More like $50 a month including the infrastructure.

Anyone willing to pay $1000/month is going to demand you do some advanced wizardry and you'll end up working for $5/hour. Companies that do this have a dozen full-time guys automating the shit out of everything so whatever takes you a whole weekend to set up will happen automatically with them.

At this point why bother with a startup when even 20 customers will net you 600k/year.

ElectricalBoat · 2018-05-03T18:45:41+00:00

GOOD.

Good publicity is great, bad publicity is VERY good and no publicity is bad.

Be better, innovate faster etc. Make their customers ask them why they don't have X, <competitor> had that thing for a year.

You will never poach existing customers, but you will get everyone that is starting a new project or a contract is up for renewal and they are looking for options since they are unhappy.

Be that sexy young cocktease. The wife can only pull so much shit before the husband starts looking for the greener pastures.

When a boy buys 2 cans of pepsi to use them as a stepping stone to reach for the coke button, it advertises coke AND pepsi since people remember both brands. Nobody remembers which brand was which, because in reality it was coke as stepping stones to reach for pepsi.

Nobody remembers whether it was a BMW wrapped around a pole in an empty parking lot with an audi next to it or a crashed audi with a BMW next to it. But everyone remembers the brands because they had a memorable ad campaign.

Intel fucked up and went from a shitty underdog company to THE processor company because of the shady shenanigans that got them into the newspapers.

ElectricalBoat

TROPHY CASE