So we tried it again with a different panel, again with excellent turnout. Which included one lone non-programmer--basically, someone looking to get into the proverbial head of his (hypothetical?) technical co-founder. (Needless to write, I was overjoyed at the hustle.)
Another thing they don't teach you in Programmer School(TM) is that the words "I'm looking for a technical co-founder" mean "I expect someone else to do all the development without a guaranteed paycheck." And I'm not necessarily knocking that attitude. Mainly because I don't buy into the idea that any job should be solely about the paycheck. (When it is, that's an unconscionable Management #FAIL.)
For a programmer, there are any number of reasons to step into the alternate-reality bubble of brand-new startup. Maybe she wants to make a bazillion dollars as a founder. Maybe she's really scratching her own itch, and the non-technical founder is just there to make the process scale. Maybe she wants to stick it to a particularly oppressive oligopoly. Maybe she wants to make something breathtakingly new. Maybe she just wants full control over her greenfield code. Maybe she wants the cachet of working for a sexy startup.
Any of those is a perfectly legitimate reason for a garden-variety software developer to become a technical co-founder. Or, for that matter, join an ambitious start-up at a steep discount. Which is precisely what the non-technical co-founder is looking for as they hustle an actual business into existence.
But here's the thing: Once that bargain between the non-technical and technical co-founder is made, it cannot be changed without steep penalties. And both the technical and non-technical founders have to grok that.
So here's the war-story I couldn't tell last night. (I moderated the discussion, so it would have been out of line.) Disclaimer: Everyone involved has since moved on to other things, so I'm not "tattling." A few years ago, I was approached by someone I knew only through social media. "Do you want to change the world?" was the pitch. Fair enough: The product hit that (narrow) sweet spot between "disruptive" and "in the public interest." (Go on...) There were meet-n-greets and salary-vs.-equity numbers thrown around and blahblahblah. But then the founder, kicking back at their desk, said, "I want to make a @#$%^~* lot of money."
Whoa there, Nellie: That's not the horse I saddled.
For various reasons--mostly unrelated and outside my control--our association never got off the ground. For me, it was an expensive lesson that opened my eyes to the self-involved monomania involved in running a startup. The lesson which I'm "donating" here, however, is something beyond that. I prefer to believe that the bait-and-switch chronicled above was not deliberate. Doing well and doing good are not always mutually exclusive. I prefer to believe that, too.
A lot of ink (real and digital) has been spilled on the notion that vision, creativity, and commitment (the critical DNA of a startup for which money is the spark of life) cannot be bought. Fair point. It's been documented since the 1950s that tying pay to creativity actually makes people less creative. But what's missing from those essays (of which I am guilty) is that just because those loftier qualities can't be bought does not mean that they can't be sold.
Seems like a contradiction, no?
Let's throw back to good ol' Dr. Maslow and his famous hierarchy. Except think of each tier as its own separate country--complete with its own currency.
When a person is working strictly for a paycheck, s/he is being paid primarily in the currency of the "Safety" country. Which, since we came down from the trees and invented trade, means that the currency exchange into the "Physiological" tier is pretty much a 1:1 transaction. An ample and steady paycheck assures that this person stays comfortably in this zone. That's normally not something a startup can offer.
However, someone taking a pay cut to work for a hot start-up, by contrast, is being paid at least partly in the currency of the "Esteem" country. Similarly, someone working to change the world (or to stick it to The Man) is cashing their check at the "Self-Actualisation" bank.
Switching currencies without notice--and especially without paying the exchange rate--is management and leadership suicide. A mass exodus of technical founders and early hires is thoroughly justified: Only naifs or morons should expect otherwise.
For instance, when working the traditional (and increasingly mythical) 9-to-5 job, one expects to spend 40+ hours away from the family one might be supporting. That's the deal. Beyond that? Time-and-a-half overtime was at least partly intended to be a penalty for taking away one's time with loved ones. Similarly, when Yahoo's Marissa Meyer rescinded work-from-home flexibility with no increase in compensation, the furor was completely predictable. That's the Safety - Family exchange rate in action. In the case of time-and-a-half, the exchange rate is agreed on. In the case of Yahoo, it was unacknowledged--hence, the (well-deserved) backlash.
Thus, when a glamourous unicorn startup is acquired by a company with deep pockets, each and every aqui-hire will (rightfully) expect to receive deep-pocket wages. If, for no other reason that the fact that the startup's "glamour discount" on their paycheck is no longer justified. Goodbye, cool factor; hello, boring behemoth. Esteem currency, meet Safety currency. Cha-ching!
And, finally, there's that idealistic, self-motivating Self-Actualisation crowd with their penthouse view of the hierarchy. From where I sit, commuting Safety currency to Self-Actualisation currency seems like pure alchemy. Unless you're Elon Musk, maybe. Otherwise? Morality, meet profit motive. Creativity, meet "...because we've always done it this way." Spontaneity, meet process. Problem solving, meet executive fiat. Lack of prejudice and acceptance of facts, may I introduce bureaucracy and vanity metrics. It's gonna take a huge payday to cover the exchange rate for all the chips that are cashed at that exit event.
Yet the technical co-founder as well as the early hires have some responsibility for maintaining the integrity of the currencies and their personal exchange rates. Mostly that involves respecting one's market value and being willing to take it elsewhere, of course. But also recognising the necessary pitfalls that come with a successful startup.
Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm details the process of bringing a new-new product (meaning something that didn't previously exist...particularly one that consumers have to actively wrap their brains around) to market. The "chasm" is the no-person's-land between the bleeding edge early adopters and the outer edges of the mainstream. In software development terms, that generally translates to going from simply "Make it work" to "Make it secure" + "Make it fast" + "Make it pretty" + "Make it scale."
That all involves more people. Assuming that the money doesn't run out first, that means more eyeballs on the product and different perspectives on where it is headed. Assuming outside funding, those "different perspectives" are guaranteed to devalue technical perfection in favour of faster time to market. And also guaranteed to cramp your style as CTO, even if you're only in it for your share of the jackpot.
As the company scales up, maybe you're brave enough to hire people just as bright and fearless and self-directing as you are. That's no guarantee that anyone else will be. So not everyone you work with will necessarily be as motivated and/or talented as the original gang. And, strangely enough, senior devs are grumpy about on-boarding new-hires when they still have deadlines to hit. Point new-hires at the wiki? That's been gathering dust for months. Maybe they can just jump in head-first via source control history? Ha! Not even an Ent could make sense of all those branches. And oh, dear sweet FSM, not another Slack channel--you gotta be kidding me. Can I pretty-please just get back to coding The Thing?
(Hint: Nope.)
And then comes the day when you've busted your rear to make month-over-month profits sustainable. Which is precisely when the VCs decide that they need "someone to take us to the next level." Whether that turns out to be a seasoned industry insider or just the douchebro smarmasaurus ex-roommate of one of the VCs, you can pretty much kiss any remaining startup vibe goodbye.
Exactly how much equity will to make up for that in terms of cold, hard cash? That's not a rhetorical question. That's a number that should be revisited regularly and often. Preferably objectively, and not merely in the immediate wake of those little twinges you feel at...
- "We didn't think you wanted to be at that meeting."
- "What's our policy/process for that?"
- "Why are you wasting your team's time interviewing candidates?"
- "Can't we offshore some of this?"
- "All the conference rooms are booked."
- "The Board wants to bring in a growth hacker."
- "You need to step back from the code and focus on the team."
But, as a developer, you get exactly one startup experience before you can't claim that you never knew what hit you. You get exactly one excuse for naively being caught flat-footed with worthless equity and/or a bank balance that hasn't kept pace with your contributions to the company. It's probably better if you get it over with earlier in your career, but that's ultimately up to you.
Because your "reward" for bringing your product across the chasm is to turn around and find the bridge burned behind you. Like I said, all those intangible "perks" living in the upper stories of Maslow's hierarchy can't be bought. But now they have to be cashed out regardless of whether or not you're ready to sell. Just make sure that the payout matches your exchange rate. After all, you might just want to build yourself a new bridge into your next startup.
