Looking for Co-Founder CTO

NaraKimMilano·Mar 22, 2021

Hi everyone, Excited to recently join the Elpha community. After 20+ year of corporate jobs, I have decided on a path of entrepreneurship and looking for a co-founder CTO with a strong background in engineering (preferably in AR) to complement my marketing/new business development/retail background. I am in the very early stages of my startup (literally notes scribbled on post its) so I hope to connect with someone who has the passion to bootstrap with me to create a startup that gives small business owners a digital voice so they can compete and survive in this new digital world.Look forward to connecting.Nara Kim

Monisha·Mar 31, 2021

Hi @NaraKimMilanoI work as a software engineer with one of the FAANG companies ;) and also I am a co-founder.Not sure If you are looking for a CTO or someone who can get the product developed for you because sharing the same mission and the level of excitement for doing the work is very necessary.As I work with a lot of early founders. Some have but many don’t have a CTO. I’m obviously biased...but I think it’s better to hire a freelancer or agency to help upfront since you don’t have to worry about equity splits, benefits, long-term contracts, finding/learning all the right skills, etc.You’ll eventually want to hire an in-house CTO. From what we’ve seen, though, it’s better to go slow when it comes to internal hiring. Avoid bringing on a full-time CTO or tech lead until you’ve found the perfect fit. One of the biggest issues we see in failed startups has to do with co-founder fallout.We often help clients hire and vet technical talent when the time is right because we know how important those first few hires are for startup culture and success.Hopefully, that helps? Happy to candidly chat about agency tradeoffs if you have more questions 😃Do drop me an email at [email protected] for a short call.

NaraKimMilano·Apr 01, 2021

Hi Monisha,Thanks for you feedback and insights. I was looking for a CTO co-founder because I needed to get a sense on how much it would cost and timeline to build the technical requirements etc but I actually found an agency that has the tech. experience that I need so to you point, I will "outsource" this and then bring someone in full time.Thanks for reaching out.

LindsayT·Apr 04, 2021

Hi Nara Kim, congrats on the big decision. Here is the response I share with anyone and everyone looking for a CTO;After wasting a lot of my own time, and seeing friends and clients do the same, looking for co-founders, I'm always hesitant to push people in that direction. For a few reasons:- Most nontechnical founders underestimate how much more they can still do without dropping everything to look for a tech founder (activities that involve research, design, validation, marketing, business development, and audience building)[Some quote, can't recall the author, that says something like, "given sparse startup resources, always focus on the customer not the product"]- Most technical people are inundated with founder requests, and your likeliness to grab their attention is predicated on your ability to do everything possible to build an audience, get traction and validate the business model.- Bringing on any cofounder, technical or not, comes with inherent risk so it's better to prove the business model, then hire for that role.- Time you take to look for a cofounder is time you're not spending focusing on your customer.THAT ALL BEING SAIDThe best advice I ever heard was to make a list of all your established competitors and then comb LinkedIn for current and previous software developers. Reach out directly to ask them if they're interested in building their own thing. Take the conversation from there.