281: Before You Bring On a Technical Co-Founder: Listen to This

People often think a technical partner will solve their product problems overnight.

Sadly, it rarely works that way.

Before you hand over equity to someone who can write code, you need to know what you’re actually giving up.

In this episode of Tech for Non-Techies, Sophia lays out the five risks that quietly derail teams when they rush into technical partnerships.

You’ll learn how to protect your ownership, lead product confidently without coding, and build enough traction to attract the right technical partner — on your terms.

In this episode, you will hear:

• The equity mistake that quietly sinks early-stage teams
• Why “someone who codes” is not the same as a true technical partner
• The traction-building moves that attract high-caliber tech talent
• The one skill non-technical leaders must build before sharing ownership

Resources from this Episode

Free AI Mini-Workshop for Non-Technical Founders

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Get free access here: techfornontechies.co/aiclass

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 TRANSCRIPT

Sophia Matveeva  00:00

A technical co founder can be the best strategic partner you ever have, or the fastest way to lose it all before you make a long term legal decision for short term fear, please listen to this episode.

Sophia Matveeva  00:21

Hello and welcome to the tech front and techie podcast. I'm your host, Sophia matveyeva, if you're a non technical founder, building a tech product or adding AI to your business, you're in the right place. Each week you'll get practical strategies, step by step, playbooks and real world case studies to help you launch and scale a tech business without learning to code. And this is not another startup show full of jargon venture capital theater or tech row bravado. Here we focus on building useful products that make money without hype and without code. I've written for the Harvard Business Review and lectured at Oxford, London Business School and Chicago Booth. So you are in safe hands. I've also helped hundreds of founders go from concept to scalable product, and now it's your turn, so let's dive in. Hello, smart people. How are you today? I hope that our listeners in the US had a fantastic Thanksgiving. You know, I've begun thinking about Christmas, but before we get to the holidays, there is still so much we can do. The year is not done yet, and we can still take action to end 2025 on a super high note that we can be really proud of. And in this episode, my aim is to help you to be super prepared if you actually decide that you want to have a technical co founder. So I don't believe that you need a technical co founder to build a successful business, but also having a partner on your side can be a really, really wonderful thing, because a great co founder relationship can help your business grow and be one of the most fulfilling and fruitful relationships in your life. But just because they're technical doesn't mean that you're going to have this wonderful, fruitful relationship. That is not a given. It does not happen automatically, and I've seen too many smart, non technical founders put off doing anything because they don't yet have a technical co founder. So essentially, they're just hunting for this person instead of actually creating a tech venture that attracts technical talent. So there are all sorts of issues with putting off what you're doing because you're looking for a technical co founder, and even when you find them, they might not be the answers to all of your problems, because sometimes these relationships are wonderful, a lot of the times they're not. So let's discuss the top five things that you need to know before you take on a technical co founder. So number one, and this is the most important I suggest you listen to all five. But if you don't have time, just listen to this one. The number one is the unfair split trap, and that's the most expensive mistake that founders make. So let me tell you a story. I know this really brilliant founder who was on her way to building a software as a service business. So she is the non technical founder. She had the insight, and at this point of the story, she already had a very basic early stage product, and she also had commitment for a pilot from a corporate customer. So essentially, this corporate customer said that if you build out this test thing that you showed us, if you make it into a real coded product, then we're going to have a pilot that I pay you for. So she basically needed to have her test thing coded properly by an experienced developer. And this is really, really good, like, this is actually quite a rare success to be at the point where a corporate is like, Yeah, I'm gonna pay you for a pilot before you even have a coded thing. And that's because she is really good at networking, she's really good at sales, she's really good at persuading people. But despite this incredible success, she fell into the trap of desperation and thinking that if I don't get somebody to code this thing properly, then I'm going to lose this pilot, and I'm going to lose the year of my life that I've spent building this you know thing, building this relationship, and all of that would have gone to waste. And so as she is feeling like this, she meets a developer who is willing to help her for half her company. And so, because she's feeling desperate, she agreed. And as they started working together, by the way, she didn't know him. She didn't I'm not sure if she knew him at all, but she certainly didn't know him well before they started working together, and very soon, tensions arose. Very soon. Became very clear that her commitment and her work ethic and what she was bringing to the table was entirely different from this new technical co founders. So basically, instead of having a solution to her problem, she got herself a new problem. She got a new business partner who wanted to coast off her labor, while constantly emphasizing to her that she can't build the product herself and that she really needs him. After a few months of this nightmare, she actually found an alternative. She found a development firm to build her product, and she very, very skillfully negotiated herself out of her agreement with this so called co founder, but it was really hard. It was really stressful. It ended up being expensive, and that's not what I want for you. This story has, I would say, an unusually happy ending, because the new development firm built her product, and she got the pilot, and she made, I think, about $100,000 in that first pilot contract. So really, really good, but she could have

Sophia Matveeva  06:07

had the happy ending without that awful detour with this technical co founder. And also, if you do find yourself in the situation when you're locked in a contract with somebody, it's not a given that you will be able to get yourself out of it. In fact, it's actually really, really hard to do, and I've heard some people say that it's more difficult to get rid of a co founder than to get divorced. Now I'm not a lawyer, so I can't tell you which one is more difficult, but they both sound pretty awful. Now, I've personally also had to get rid of people on my cap table in my last company, and it was horrendous. So please listen to this carefully non technical co founders routinely give away 30 to 50% of their company to somebody just because they can code as this brilliant founder did. This is catastrophic, and this really dismisses what the non technical found is bringing to the table. But let's just look at the maths. Let's look at the numbers. If an early stage startup is valued at, say, $7 million which is, you know, if you if you were to value a startup which is really just at idea stage, maybe has a tested prototype doesn't really have anything else going for it, maybe like some usability testing, but definitely not at the stage where this founder was that I was telling you about. So like, a really early stage startup, 7 million valuation, pretty normal. So if you're giving away half of that means you're giving somebody three and a half million dollars like that's quite a lot. Three and a half million dollars in equity, that's before you even know if they're the right technical partner. That's before you know whether they can actually build the right thing. And that's also before you found out about what their personality is like. So what's their work ethic? What's their commitment level? What are they like under pressure? I mean, are you just going to hand out three and a half million to people that you barely know what you shouldn't and remember that coding is a skill, and equity is ownership. Equity, it means that you're bound together. These are not the same thing, a skill, and being bound to somebody, these are not the same thing, and so giving away a large proportion of your company is the fastest way founders lose control of their own business and set themselves up for long term, expensive mistakes. So why is this kind of 5050, split unfair? If you actually think about the long term growth of a company, a 5050, split really doesn't reflect how value is created in that company. So as the business founder, the non technical founder, your skill set lies in commercialization. So you see the problem. You know who experiences it. You know how to market that solution, and you know how to sell the solution. So you know how to bring the money in. You probably also know how to fundraise if you're going to learn. And these business skills are what makes a company valuable. So let's think like an investor for a moment. Investors invest because they want to return on their capital. And so when you're a founder, you're also investing. You want to return on your capital. Good code does not give you a return on your capital. What does customer contracts repeatable revenue as in cash. Cash is ROI, right? So yes, you do absolutely need to have a good product in order for you to be able to sell it. But a good product alone does not mean financial success. And I always give the example of Wikipedia. We all use Wikipedia. Millions of people around the world use Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a foundation that makes no money. So just because you have a popular product that lots of people love, you. Using it doesn't mean that it's going to be very successful financially. So the problem at the early stages is that when you don't have a product at all, or you just have an early stage prototype, or maybe something that was, you know, coded by somebody that you met randomly or just found enough work for, like, a super cheap rate. So basically, you just have a very, very basic MVP. You are obviously limited. And what you can do to commercialize it, even like in the story that I told you, when somebody is willing to pay you, you're still like, somebody needs to build it, and it's not going to be me. So at the start, there is massive emphasis on the technical side, because you need a technical person to build you the thing. But in the long run, that is not what is going to make you successful. It's commercialization that will make you successful. But by default, product building has to come first. Commercialization has to come second. This is why, if you have this split early on, and you're only thinking about, okay, I need to have the product made, you are ignoring what's going to happen in the future. And non technical founders often feel very desperate in the early stages, because they need to have the product made in order for them to basically carry on. This is why they give away too much equity to somebody who can build that product. But this is short term thinking. This is using short term needs to make a long term decision equity. You know, it doesn't, it feels free at the beginning. So it doesn't feel like you're handing somebody three and a half million dollars, but actually, equity is the most expensive thing you'll ever give away, because if your company succeeds, that 30 to 50% slice becomes life changing, money, voting power, control of the product, control of the board, control of your future. Investors, control of your company's future. So never, ever give away equity lightly and never fast. So that was reason one. Number two, coding is not the same as leading product development and really understanding what the product does. So somebody who can write code is not automatically somebody who can design a product that users love. Someone who can code is not somebody who can understand users or prioritize features. Yes, they can build those features, but they might not pick the right ones to to build like right now. They might not be able to think strategically or build a scalable system, because coding is execution. And what I'm talking about is product leadership. As a non technical founder, you can and should be the product leader. And this is precisely what I teach inside of the tech for non technical founders program. And so think of Steve Jobs. He's probably the most famous non technical founder of all time. He was obsessed with the needs of the user. He was famously obsessed with design, with elegance, with commercial strategy and the experience. So those early advertising campaigns that got everybody to love Apple, that was really his vision, because he was the one that was selecting the creators, the advertising firms and so on. Also think about, you know, the music revolution. It was his insight to sell individual songs for 99 cents, as opposed to sell whole albums. And that's not a technical idea. It required technical execution, but it was a business insight that reshaped the music industry. The code simply followed that insight. So this is what this means for you as a non technical founder, you don't need to write code, but you do need to understand the technical production process well enough to lead product development. This means you need to learn the digital production development. This means you need to learn the digital product development process. You need to understand how to evaluate developers. You need to have an idea of what good architecture looks like. You don't need to build it yourself. You need to know how to release your minimum viable product and what you're going to do after it's released. You need to be able to understand some technical trade offs. So like, what happens if we are going to have lots of video in our platform? What are the trade offs that we're going to have to make if we do that? Or what are the technical trade offs we're going to make if we need our platform to be super, super secure, you also need to understand how to avoid being misled by jargon. Now this is all very doable, and these are basically what I would call digital leadership skills that are totally learnable. This is literally what we teach in the tech for non technical founders program we have been doing. Now for over six years. So I know what I'm talking about. I know what I'm talking about because our students keep on getting results. Because when you master these skills, you stop feeling intimidated, and you stop looking for somebody who can code to solve all of your problems. So our students, for example, are building scalable businesses. They are making money, they are raising investment, and not because they become technical founders, but because they become product leaders. This is what allows you to attract real technical partners, because really good technical talent wants to work with really good product leaders. Okay, here's point number three to consider when you are on the verge of getting a technical founder. I want you to know that a technical co founder is not a developer, and this distinction alone could actually save you lots and lots of pain. Think about this. So a developer has to write code, but when you're thinking about a co founder, that somebody who's going to help you build a company that's a different skill set, because a true technical co founder is not just somebody who writes code. They need to be able to set the long term architecture, and not in the broad strokes that you're doing it as a non technical founder, but actually from a technical point of view, they need to be able to choose the right tech stack for the business. That's a strategic decision. They need to hire and lead future engineers. So that means that they need to have some management skills, and lots of coders don't have any management skills. They need to be able to align tech decisions with commercial goals. Lots of people who can code have no idea about how companies make money. So a lot of coders literally have no idea how to do this. Your technical co founder will need to manage technical debt. They will need to take responsibility for outcomes, and they also need to have some ability to communicate with investors. As a non technical founder, really, that's going to be mostly your job, but the CTO co founder is going to have to come out sometimes, so they need to have some ability to communicate the broader vision and speak to investors. And honestly, I have met brilliant developers who just love writing code, and they do not want this strategic role that requires communication, hiring and management and so on. They don't want it. They're not trained for it, and that's completely normal, because writing code is a fundamentally different job. So what I often see is that non technical founders mistake this idea of, oh, this person can code with they can run all of the technology. These are really, really different skill sets. And actually, I would much rather that you would hire a development team and keep building traction than try to kind of force a co founder relationship with the wrong technical person. Because, you know, if it doesn't work out, it's quite easier and far less emotionally expensive to replace a developer than to untangle a co founder relationship. Now we've got two more points to go. Point number four, you as a non technical founder, you can build a lot before ever needing a technical co founder, and this is the mindset shift that I really want you to make, because traction attracts people, desperation repels them. So when you are running around thinking, I can't start anything because I need this technical person, you're desperate, and when you're desperate, you're not very attractive. So think of it like dating. If somebody has a stable life, if they have confidence, if they have purpose, if they have momentum, if they have money, people naturally are interested in like, Who is this person going places? But if somebody is running around saying, Please love me. I don't have anything yet, but somehow I'm going to figure it out. It will be great, but please, please, please, choose me. That's kind of worrying. And so what I would say to that person, I would say, look, focus on your life, focus on getting a steady job, focus on your career, focus on your hobbies, focus on your health, focus on your finances, and you know, do that first and then attract a really great person. So the same dynamic exists in co founder searches. You don't need a technical co founder to begin. You need momentum. So you need to make your product. You need to make your venture sexy enough that great technical talent joins you. So the good thing is that today, you can validate 80% of your idea using AI prototyping tools. I mentioned quite a few of them already on the show. You can also use no code tools. You can literally do user interviews even before you do. Any AI testing, you can create waitlist, you can create pilot programs and so on. Because what ideally I would want you to do is I would want you to already have a test product, as in a prototype that you have created with AI, that you have tested with your target market, that you have then recreated based on that feedback. And you know, then you're really ready to actually take it to developers, take it to a technical co founder, and to say, like, look, not only do I have vision, I also have some people who told me that they're actually willing to use this and to pay for it. So by the time you truly need a CTO level partner, I want you to have user insights. I want you to have evidence that what you're doing makes sense, like evidence from actual potential customers. I want you to even actually have some people who are interested in who genuinely said yes, when this comes out, please let us know. And I want you to have a real plan for how you're going to release this thing and get to revenue and get to scale, and this gives you leverage. Leverage replaces fear. What I mean by that is if you genuinely know that you're doing something useful, you genuinely see that from the market, you have this level of confidence that attracts people because a high caliber technical co founder only wants to work on something that's going to go places. So prove that you're going to go places, and then people will join you. So basically, your job is to go first, to build momentum, to create value, to show traction, and then great people show up. Okay? And now point number five, you have to speak tech, even if you have a technical co founder. So let's imagine this scenario where you actually have a great person. They have, you know, they have great character. They are really, they've had really a senior development jobs. They've also hired developers. They've led developers like they are the dream technical co founder, and they want to work with you. And you also talked about splits, and they're not angling for a 5050, situation, because they know that the real insight and the real commercialization is yours, I mean, so you're basically in this dream scenario. Even in the Super dream scenario, I don't want you to think, oh, okay, well, they're just going to be in charge of the tech and I'm just going to sell things. That's not the right way to do things. If technology is a major part of your business, having no understanding of how your tech product works puts you into a really dangerous position, and definitely not in a leadership position. Even if you have a super brilliant technical co founder, you still need to be able to ask the right questions of your developer. You need to be able to challenge their assumptions, because sometimes they are going to be wrong. So you need to know how to do that. You need to understand. You need to understand their timelines and the trade offs that they're making. You are also going to be hiring and firing some of the technical talent, even if you have a technical co founder, because team dynamics still matter. You need to be able to understand the jargon. You need to know, okay, what happens on the back end, what's a front end and so on. You need to understand some of the core terminology, like, what's an API and like, how is our tech stack made? And this will help you to evaluate architectural decisions and set priorities and identify red flags early, because if you just think that there's this technical person who is just doing everything, and I'm just focusing on the money, you are not really leading properly, and you're outsourcing your agency, and that's a really, really dangerous position to be in. And basically no investor is going to back a founder who has no control over the technical side of their own business and no understanding of it. So basically, a technical co founder

Sophia Matveeva  24:04

is not a substitute for leadership. They're your partner, and partners need peers, not passengers. This is why I always say to people, if you're a non technical founder, you have to learn to speak tech that's not coding, but that's leading a tech company when you can do this. Technical co founders actually respect you more. So I am very much a non technical founder, and I work with and collaborate with very experienced developers, and they have respect for me. I have respect for them because I have learned what they do, and I have learned how to collaborate with them when you know how to speak. Tech investors also believe in you more because you have that credibility. And I think most importantly, you stop feeling intimidated by other people, and you stop feeling intimidated by your own product. Let's have a quick recap of these five point. It. Number one, be aware of the unfair split trap of how you split your equity with a technical co founder. Number two, remember that coding is not the same as product leadership, and as a non technical founder, you can certainly lead product development. In fact, I think you should. Number three, a real technical co founder is not a developer, because a developer is not necessarily a strategist or a leader. Number four, you, as a non technical founder, can build a lot before ever needing a technical co founder. And last but not least, you must still speak tech, even if you have a technical co founder, because if you just leave everything about technology to them, you are outsourcing your agency, and you're not being a leader. And if you want to start building traction before you've even spoken to a potential technical co founder, which I suggest you do, then what you need is my free class on how to build your test product using AI and test it with your target market. This class is free and it takes 27 minutes to watch, so you literally have nothing to lose and a lot to gain. You can get this class at Tech fan on, techies.ca, forward slash AI class. That's tech for non techies.co. Forward slash AI class, or just get it via the link in the show notes and on that note, thank you very much for learning from me today. I'm wishing you a wonderful day, and I shall be back in your delightful smart years next week. Ciao