The Death of the Technical Co-Founder

The era of the “Technical Co-Founder” is coming to a close.

It was a good run, friends. There was a time, back in the days of yore, that every aspiring Founder began a perilous quest of finding that one willing technical mind to join them and make their product dreams come true.

They would give anything (usually half the company) to convince them to join their quest, and be grateful to do so.

It was a good time to be a technical person. You were in high demand, everyone was courting you, and you had incredible negotiating power at the most critical time in a startup’s lifecycle — the founding equity division.

But then, well, AI had to come in and ruin it all. What the hell, man?

Why was a Technical Co-Founder a Thing?

For a good 30+ years, if you wanted to build anything technical, you needed someone with a “very specific set of skills” who knew how to code. It was a pretty simple understanding — they understood code, you didn’t, and therefore, without them, nothing could get built.

On top of that, there was always the anticipation that as we scaled, our technical needs would explode and only someone with deep technical expertise could guide us through our rapid ascent.

Then came the investors. Some decried, very loudly, that if you wanted to get funding, you had to have a technical Co-Founder. So when Founders heard that, they immediately scrambled to find anyone to fill that role, whether they wanted to or not, in order to get access to funding.

It was a good time to be a technical Co-Founder. No one could build anything without you; investors wouldn’t provide funding without you; and there were basically zero alternatives. As talent goes, you pretty much owned the market — for a really long time.

Then that A-hole “Claude” Showed Up

All was well, and the party was rocking for Technical Co-Founders until that one A-hole “Claude” showed up to the party and brought all of his stupid AI friends.

Now, all of a sudden, a person with zero technical skill could build a prototype — in a weekend. And that’s where things went to hell.

You see, Founders needed a Technical Co-Founder most at exactly the moment they were founding the company. That’s when the difference between having zero product and having an early, buggy product absolutely meant having a developer on board. The timing here is more important than anything.

In nearly every call I’ve had with a Founder in the past few decades who was looking for a Technical Co-Founder, they all shared one issue — they didn’t have a product yet. The conversations were always about how much to give the Technical Co-Founder (30%, 50%??) in order to basically get access to a working prototype.

You know how many of those calls I’ve had in the past year? None. Zero. Zilch. Not a single Founder is asking me whether they should split their equity with a Technical Co-Founder, because any Founder worth their salt has already built their prototype themselves with AI.

That’s great news for “Product Founders,” not such great news for “Technical Founders.”

Technical Ability is an Asset, not an Access Card

This isn’t to say there isn’t value in having a Technical Co-Founder, or really any technical folks on staff. It’s saying that’s no longer an “Access Card.”

Up until now, developers held the access card for most Founders who wanted a product. Now they simply don’t. However, at the same time, the sheer quantity of technology is expanding geometrically, so having someone who understands how to leverage this technology and 10x the output of your startup has never had more ROI.
But that’s where we’re separating the wheat from the chaff in technical talent.

There was a huge group of folks that simply made money and commanded equity because they knew a magic trick the rest of the world didn’t, and got paid handsomely for it. But there’s, frankly, a smaller group of talent who not only knew the tech but were really, really good at turning it into incredible products.

The latter are going to be some badass Technical Co-Founders.

But that’s the difference between “hiring a technical person when we hit that milestone” and “requiring a technical person to even start the company.” We still need technical people; we just don’t need them to found a startup anymore.

So What’s a Technical Co-Founder to do?

This isn’t suggesting that technical talent is obsolete — far from it. It means that technical talent needs to re-imagine their role in the startup ecosystem.

The new “rockstars” (I hate that term) of technical talent are now architects, not builders. They realize that the future of building code is going away, and instead are moving up the chain to figuring out how to build incredibly powerful blueprints that leverage all of their new technology to do insanely powerful stuff.

It’s no longer “here’s how I’m building the stuff”; it’s “here’s how I’m building the plan.”
In a bizarre twist of fate, the best technical talent will be those who are the best product managers.

Who knows, maybe the next thing will be technical talent chasing after “Product-minded Founders” to build their startups. We’ve seen weirder things happen!

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