Becoming your own tech co founder
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[00:00:00] If you're an aspiring entrepreneur and you have big ideas that you wanna build, but you do not have the technical knowledge and knowhow, and you definitely do not have a technical co-founder, then this episode is for you. I. I'm gonna show you a much faster way than just wasting years of your life trying to convince developers and technical folks to join your startup and build your idea for you.
[00:00:21] And I can show you
[00:00:22] how you can do this yourself by becoming your own technical co-founder, just like I did
[00:00:27] Here's the deal. If you are a non-technical founder, you've probably heard a hundred times that you need a technical co-founder to build your product. I believe that too. And don't get me wrong, it's really important to have a technical person if you are building an internet-based product. But trying to convince other people who are experienced engineers to do the work for you is frankly a losing game.
[00:00:50] Welcome to Easier Said Than Done with me, Zubin Pratap, where I share with you the tens of thousands of dollars worth of self development that I did on my journey from 37 year old lawyer to professional software engineer. The goal of this podcast is to show you how to actually do those things that are EASIER SAID THAN DONE.
[00:01:09] Trying to convince other people who are experienced engineers to do the work for you is frankly a losing game.
[00:01:15] .They're just not going to be interested. They're gonna look at you as a complete noob. They're gonna be like, well, hey, what's in it for me? And it's too risky, and they've got better things to do, right? And it's super risky for you.
[00:01:26] This is an important point. The truth is
[00:01:28] finding the right technical co-founder is ridiculously hard. And even if you do find someone, things can and often do fall apart,
[00:01:36] even if you've known them for years. I wasted years looking for the perfect CTO or technical co-founder to join me, and I lost years looking for that.
[00:01:46] And then when I finally found someone, they were a good person, but actually they became my CTO because I. Paid the company. They worked at a lot of money to develop my MVP, and then that person loved it so much they joined me. However, a few months into joining me, they had a baby and they had to leave.
[00:02:01] And that's when I finally decided to learn some basic coding instead. And that changed everything.
[00:02:07] It changed my life since then, right? I was a 37-year-old lawyer. I was trying to do the startup and then I learned to code to keep the startup alive. And then I ended up joining Google a few years later.
[00:02:16] And now I work in big tech as a software engineer. 'cause. Frankly, my startup failed even with the right technical help, right? But that helped me to move forward. So if you are stuck in this loop of searching and waiting and hoping and pitching technical folks and hoping that some of them will give you the opportunity, then this episode is for you because you don't necessarily need that.
[00:02:35] So let's talk about
[00:02:36] how you can learn to code - not to a professional engineering grade - you definitely don't need to do that, but enough to achieve all your goals
[00:02:44] and hey, maybe even get funded, right, so you can get out of that rut and actually make momentum on your ideas and build a life and build the company that you're looking to build.
[00:02:53] Unfortunately the startup world makes it sound like finding a technical co-founder is as simple as saying, Hey, I've got this amazing idea. We're gonna change the world together. Why don't you build it for me? You can do all the work and I'll take all the credit, but then you know, I'll give you some equity, which is worth nothing anyway, but that doesn't matter.
[00:03:08] One day it'll be worth a billion dollars. Look, that's not how the real world work, okay? I spent years trying. Here's what my search looked like. I scrolled through endless forums. I scrolled through LinkedIn. I asked friends. I hit up my contact list, basically anywhere I thought I could find someone to go, oh, I attended so many meetups.
[00:03:26] I've lost track, right? And I met people who are very capable, who I really wanted to partner with, who I knew could do the job. But because I was non-technical, I did not know how to correctly estimate. I would say stupid things like this is not a hard app. This is a very simple app. This can be done pretty soon.
[00:03:42] But I had no basis on which to say this 'cause I was non-technical. And so I incurred the anger and irritation of these people who are like, Hey, you think it may be easy because it looks easy to for you, but under the hood, engineering is a hard thing to do. Developing products is a hard thing to do and you don't know how high this mountain is.
[00:03:59] So how do you know it's not a high mountain when you have never climbed this mountain before They, they were right. You know? I also met people who were very unmotivated. Or people who are motivated for all the wrong reasons, or worse people who completely assured me that they were on my side and they would not do anything or wanted to get rich quick or who knew as little as I did, but pretended they knew more.
[00:04:19] Right? I, along the way did meet a few people who are a good fit, and I did mention, I, you know, I had my technical co-founder, Luke, who was a great guy. But he had family reasons for not wanting to continue, right? And so. All through this experience, I realized most of the people, and I was really, really playing the volume game here.
[00:04:36] Like I'm talking about speaking to 15, 20 people per week for over a year. Right. Trying to find someone. It was massive. Like I'd gone all into this thing, I'd quit my job. It was really important, right? And most people weren't interested in the idea. Some people were interested, but absolutely horrified that, you know, I was non-technical and they did not want to work with someone like that.
[00:04:54] Even though I had a business background and all of that, they didn't care right? In, in this world, engineering is really, really important to get your ideas off the ground. Now keep in mind, this is 2017 or so, so it was well before the AI boom that we now have had, had started. There was a different machine learning and big data boom then, but not the large language model-based gen ai boom.
[00:05:14] So it was a very different world, right? Having said that. Now that I'm technical, I know that just using LLMs to build a product is not gonna work, right? Any. Any success story you see out there of people who've done that are experienced engineers who compressed their time, like made it 10 times shorter to build something.
[00:05:31] So it took two weeks, or you know, two months more like it, rather than 20 months to build something. Right? That's what's happened, but they've experienced coders. They know how to do it. They know exactly what to tell the LLM, they know how to debug, they know how to get unblocked, and they know all the systems and components that go into the system in order to make.
[00:05:48] To make a robust app right now. We know there, if you look at the news, you'll see several people have done this. You'll see people have, you know, built gaming startups and other startups were in, in about two months and got valuations and things like that. And I can assure you all of them had a very strongly technical person on the team doing it.
[00:06:05] Right. You can also look at even before the a IL and buzz you know, Peter, levels of levels .io and stuff. So he had. Created a bunch of little startups that were all monetized. You know, they were all solopreneur kind of positively cash flowed startups that he had done. I think the digital nomads list and a whole bunch of things, right?
[00:06:23] And he generates several million dollars a year, I think, from these remote work and nomad list. And, and other things, right? But he was pretty technical and he did this before the LLM boom. And now he uses that to make it even faster to very quickly prototype ideas and describe them, right? So for him, doing it really fast, if you listen to his podcast on Lex Friedman, for example, he talks about doing it really fast.
[00:06:45] Because you can do that now with LLMs, but he has a strong technical background before that. He had built products before that. And so all he's done is compressed the time to quickly test. If it doesn't work, he can throw it out. There's not a lot of time spent in building that out. And so he can throw it out, try a new idea until he finds things that works.
[00:07:01] Right. And there's another guy, I think Danny Postma I think he coded something called headlime. Which is a tool for AI generated marketing copy. And he sold it for a seven figure sum, right? All because he knew how to take an idea and build it himself anywhere. And he used AI to accelerate that. So, you know, you can do stuff like that.
[00:07:17] And to be honest, a lot of these apps now that are getting high valuations, they're just wrappers. They're just thin little facades around like a chat G PT or something like that. So not, there's not even something very defensible there right now. Of course, I'm not saying that those products are like that.
[00:07:31] I'm saying a lot of the startups in the AI space are just what are known as thin wrappers around an open AI or a Gemini model, and there's not a lot of IP that's gone into the actual product.
[00:07:40] The advantage that these people have is that they don't have to wait for somebody else to bring their ideas to life because they were already technical or technical enough to start using AI in a really formidable way so they could experiment and iterate and launch really fast. And then just let the market tell them whether it was a successful idea or not, which is a huge superpower because every time they had an idea, they weren't dependent on somebody else to help bring it to life.
[00:08:02] They weren't dependent on somebody else's time. I cannot tell you how frustrating it is when you are super motivated at some about something, but you can't do something, right? Think of kids, for example, who really want to get to the game, who really wanna get to the ice cream store, but they need their parents to drive them, right?
[00:08:17] It's that sort of sense of frustrated impatience because you, you. You are completely dependent on the other person to help you get to where you want to go, and that's the opportunity you're missing if you don't know how to code. Now, again, not to a professional grade, just enough to really get a good job done, especially now with ai.
[00:08:32] LLMs doing a lot of the heavy lifting, right? But you need to know. How to play the instrument or how music should sound before you can compose and orchestrate and work with the ai.
[00:08:42] and you are the composer. And if you don't know music, you can't compose.
[00:08:45] So it's not just about creating products either. It's also about opening those to new ideas and experimenting with markets and learning about business. 'cause there's one thing to build a product, there's another thing to actually build a business using that product because everything needs a revenue stream and there's.
[00:08:59] You know, costs and expenses and legal and, and negotiations involved and all that. Now. And going back to the technical stuff,
[00:09:07] if you're not technical, you're kind of stuck, like I said, waiting for somebody else to execute your vision.
[00:09:12] And I was in that position for years, for almost half a decade, right?
[00:09:16] And I'm telling you now, it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, I'm gonna share with you very briefly. This article I wrote in, let's see, 2019, right? In fact, I just started my first dev job. And I'd done this podcast with free code camps, Quincy Lassen, the founder of Free free code Camp back in 2019.
[00:09:33] And at the end of it, we talked about how becoming my own technical co-founder was such a big unlock for me, right? And so I wrote this blog back then, even though I just started my first dev job. In fact, I was gonna start in April, I think, of 20 20 19. And I just decided, okay, I'm gonna have to, you know, over the next six months, wind down my startup.
[00:09:50] And so I talked about, hey, you know, how does get being your own technical co-founder work? And I should call out, I actually got this idea from Sam Altman, he mentioned his own blog, but from many years ago when I was in Tech Crunch in San Francisco again, I think 2018, or, maybe the end of 2017. And he mentioned how, you know, it's faster mathematically to be, to learn to hack yourself. And that was back then, this was before LLMs, right? So I took that idea very seriously. When I talk, saw him talking about it on stage, I took it, I read the blog, I took it very seriously.
[00:10:22] And then I decided to implement that in my own life. Now, it wasn't easy back then because obviously you know, it was still a different kind of world. It was almost 10 years ago. It's much easier now to learn with ai, but it's also much harder at one level because. It's, it's, it gives you the impression of you being able to figure it out yourself.
[00:10:38] And like anything you, you could in theory learn, like I'm a self-taught guitarist, but it took me nine years to get any good. Had I gotten an instructor. I've gotten pretty good in about two years, right? So we talk about massive differences in just quality when you, when you get the right help. Now, the core problem when it comes to searching for a co-founder, in my view is of course, it takes a lot of time.
[00:10:57] It's very frustrating. You lose the opportunity 'cause you're getting delayed every single day that someone's not building it. You are totally dependent on that person. It's a huge source of risk and anxiety. And every day that the thing doesn't get done, because they don't bring the same level of intensity that you do, you lose the market opportunity.
[00:11:15] Somebody else could come in and steal you, right? If somebody else could come in and execute a better, somebody with more funding or a better idea or more product history can come in and out, ex execute you. Before you've even started. Right? And there's an other deeply psychological one. 'cause you know, I'm all about the mindset and I'm, I'm all about the focus and all about controlling your mind and circumstances to effect big change in your life.
[00:11:34] Searching for a technical co-founder can feel like progress could make you look like, Hey, am I doing things every day? It's like all those people who come to me to learn to code for the Parsity Inner Circle. And they're like, yeah, I've been doing this course and I've been in that course and I've been doing this course.
[00:11:47] And I'm like, you've been in courses for two years. And you've not even got a single interview. Right? And the reason for that is. Action is not all made equal. A lot of action is busy work that made that can look like progress, make you feel like, Hey, I'm spending three hours a day on something. Sure, but is it in the right direction?
[00:12:03] And is it moving the needle right?
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[00:12:47] A lot of action is busy work that made that can look like progress, make you feel like, Hey, I'm spending three hours a day on something. Sure, but .And is it moving the needle right? Because you can run as fast as you want from New York to Los Angeles, but if you head east, you're never gonna get there. Doesn't matter whether you take a plane, it doesn't matter how fast you go. If you're going from New York to Los Angeles and you go east or not, you're not gonna get there.
[00:13:08] Right. So the same reason, just being able to put in a lot of effort and brute forces is not gonna work. It'll make you feel like you're making progress, but it's not actually doing anything. You're probably just stalling, to be honest, and it's very time consuming. So here are the big, let me try and summarize for you, you know, the top four or five points that I think the real downsides to this.
[00:13:27] Okay. Other than the ones I've already mentioned. So, one is it's super time consuming. I, I did talk about that. You know, it's taking, finding the right person. Takes forever. And like dating, you don't really know if it's the right person until many months or years in. Right? And you don't really know if it's a good fit.
[00:13:41] Now, the the, the next point, I'd say number two is that it's a real gamble, okay? You're kind of relying on luck and hard work and pounding the pave to find someone who's killed and motivated, and ask me your vision as you are. And I can tell you most people. Will tell you they are, but they're just not.
[00:13:58] They're not gonna feel that fire in their belly the way you do. Okay? Number three, the more desperate you get, and this is the very subtle psychological one, right? But the more desperate you get, the more times going by, the more frustrated and weakened you feel, the longer you search. Then you're gonna feel desperation and desperation leads to very bad decisions, which are basically compromises.
[00:14:17] Now I see this all the time with people wanting to change their career to code as well. So it's very similar to looking for a technical co-founder in that you want something, you are here, the thing you want is there, and you don't know how to actually close the gap, right? And that leads to desperation, frustration, 'cause you're trying all these things, but the gap is not getting closed and that leads to bad decisions and compromises and excuses and so on, right?
[00:14:38] So you end up settling for the wrong co-founder. Just to be able to move forward, just like you end up settling for the wrong set of language or the wrong set of courses, just to feel like you're making something, you know, some sort of progress. Okay. The fourth one would be you lose credibility. Now, this is an important one.
[00:14:54] If you don't understand enough to talk about the thing you're asking someone else to do. So if you are asking someone else to build an app or a product for you and you don't understand what that goes into that and the use terminology that you don't understand or you think you understand because you read it in a blog.
[00:15:08] But it's very clear. Like recently, one of the students talked about, in one of the mock interviews that we do in the Parsity Inner Circle, she talked about, oh, I, you know, had I known this, I would've used React. Because React helps to not repeat your code. Now, that's not really what React does. Any code can be built in a way, whether you build it with React or not any other library or framework or just.
[00:15:27] Naked language, you can build it in ways to not repeat itself. Right? But this person genuinely thought that that was reacts big selling point, is that it helps you to reuse code in other parts. And I was like, well, that's not the main point of react. So, you know, that's an example where in an interview you could say something that clearly shows you don't have that level of depth, not that person's fault.
[00:15:45] They still only about three months in. But you know, it's dangerous sometimes to leak that kind of information that shows that you're a total new or you're clueless and that makes you lose credibility. Once you lose credibility, it's very hard to gain their respect or their trust, or even their interest, right?
[00:16:01] Because they're not gonna know whether you are doing a good job on your end. So why would they take all the risk of putting that time? 'cause most likely you're not able to pay them. If you're paying them, then they're just a freelancer. They're not a co-founder, right? And they're not a technical CTO or something like that.
[00:16:15] So if you are not able to really speak to them about the thing they're doing, how are you even gonna supervise them, control them
[00:16:22] , manage them,
[00:16:23] point them in the right direction,
[00:16:26] give them feedback on what they're building because they're gonna lose respect and trust for you if you don't know what you're talking about and you're trying to tell them how they should do their job, and you don't know if they're doing a good job or not, it's complete trust at that point in time.
[00:16:36] Right? And number five is a, oh, this is a big mistake. And I get this all the time. When people reach out on LinkedIn, say, Hey, I'm trying to build a startup. You know? Okay. Here's the thing. Most people are so obsessed about building V zero of the product, the MVP. Okay? 'cause that's what we think about, Oh we build it, and we launch it
[00:16:53] and they just want to get to launch.
[00:16:54] But here's the truth. Launch is stage one.
[00:16:57] Exactly like most people think learning to code is the most important step in changing your career to becoming an engineer.
[00:17:02] It's not. It's actually step one or step two
[00:17:06] , right? Similarly, launching is step one or step two. After that, you've got to actually maintain the product.
[00:17:13] This is the big thing that I was completely unprepared for. I'd spent high five figures, almost six figures in building the first version of my application. That's how I found my CTO by the way. So again, it's not like he trusted me and joined me. He saw that I was. Pouring in tens of thousands of dollars of my own money and being in their office every day while him and his team were trying to build this and he said, Hey, I could probably do this on nights and weekends, and this is after seven months of me paying them.
[00:17:38] Right? I can probably do this on nights and weekends if you gimme a small cut, you know, I'm happy to join 'cause I really believe in this idea. Unfortunately he had to move on. But that's a different matter 'cause he had a baby. It's totally okay. Right. But. Even when you find someone to do it, once they launch the product, your real work starts because you're gonna run into bugs, you're gonna run into integration issues, you're gonna run into user requirements or user experiences that weren't what you wanted.
[00:17:59] They're gonna, you're gonna have feature requests, you're gonna have technical issues, you're gonna have APIs that change.
[00:18:04] And if you can't handle any of that yourself, you're back to square one because what you're now stuck with is a product that doesn't work the way it needs to, and you're pouring more and more money and time in just maintaining it.
[00:18:14] That's why companies have software engineers going all the time, is because the real work is maintaining the application, not building new features. Okay, yes, for high growth companies, building new features, but really think about your bank, do you think in building new features all the time. Maybe a few times a year, but on the whole, most of the work is in maintaining the existing applications.
[00:18:34] Okay? So if you can't handle any of that yourself, you're really back to square one. And so please, please, please, please, please, ease. Do not think that the work ends after the launch. The launch is not the big deal. The launch is a big milestone for you emotionally and psychologically, but from the product's point of view, it is day zero.
[00:18:50] Okay? Now, just to give you a little bit of a positive spin on all this, there is some good news, okay? You don't need to be a professional level developer to fix this. I've, I've mentioned this before. You do not need to get to pro grade. You do not mean to need to do data structures and algorithms. You do not need to learn every framework and language.
[00:19:06] To compete in interviews, heck,
[00:19:07] you do not even need interviews, right? All you need is to get good enough at the coding stuff so that you have the freedom, power, and control to move forward without being dependent on anyone else.
[00:19:17] And here is the interesting part. When you do that, when you get to that level, the.
[00:19:22] Like I did. Suddenly
[00:19:24] technical co-founders just come outta the woodwork. 'cause they suddenly say, Hey, this person's put in a lot of commitment. This person knows my language. This person understands the tools. This person can build it themselves and they're going to do it. And now they respect the fact that you're kind of like one of them.
[00:19:38] And you had that kind of hustle and grit. Okay,
[00:19:40] so I'm going to give you a couple of. Maybe three suggestions. Okay. On how to solve this problem of becoming your own technical co-founder. Step by step one, just stop overthinking. Start learning. Okay. And, and I get it. The idea of learning to code can feel overwhelming.
[00:19:56] It's so much easier to just talk to people and hit them up on LinkedIn. This is the exact same problem. A lot of coders in the, in the future, in the Parsity Inner Circle Pro program feel as well, right? They, once they get good at the code, it's so addictive to just get good at the code. It's like, you know, it's so easy to just reach out to people at LinkedIn and they don't bother to market themselves to get interviews on.
[00:20:16] I really write them about it. Right. Similarly, it's very. Tempting to just stay stuck in, Hey, I'm gonna reach out to people on Twitter, on LinkedIn, or whatever it is, and on, you know, Reddit or whatever. And I that's, I'm, I'd much rather do that five hours a day than learn to code five hours a day. Now here's the thing, if you learn to code five hours a day or three hours a day, in about four months, you'll be able to start building most of your things.
[00:20:36] But you have to be really intentional those four hours a day and over those three or four months or whatever it is. You know, two to 300 hours. If you can do two to 300 hours of focused, high quality, directionally correct learning, you can pretty much build anything you want after that or learn what you need to after that.
[00:20:53] Like that's the foundational piece, right? I say it takes about two to 300 hours to learn the basics of programming enough to do things on your own. And then it takes about three to 400 hours to get ready for interviews and get to professional grade. But for you guys who want to be your own technical co-founders, two to 300 hours.
[00:21:08] If you never started before, say 300 hours and you can get there, right? But it's really, really important. Not do too much. In, in the Inner Circle program, we talk about the minimum effective dose, right? Which is basically do the least amount required to get to your goals, the minimum effective dose, okay?
[00:21:24] And your goal is to build a prototype, and as you build it, you learn more and you'll get better at building the next version, but just ship something to get real users to tell you whether it's any good or not. That's your goal. Do not need to get to professional grade standards. Okay? So stop telling yourself that coding isn't for me.
[00:21:39] And, you know, and I'd, I'd rather speak to other people and my, you know, my big strength is doing, you know, the big vision stuff. You can tell yourself all that, but you're not making any progress. Okay? Just start. Start working. If you want, join the Inner Circle program, you wouldn't be the first person who's doing entrepreneurial work in the program.
[00:21:55] Who doesn't want to become a SWE? In fact, I'd say about 20% of our students don't necessarily wanna become software engineers. They want to become other things using that technical skill, right? So. Just start somewhere, even if you don't wanna work with us, that's totally okay. Pick a something like a free code camp or, you know, whatever it is.
[00:22:11] Or a Udemy course a good one. And stick to it. Stick to it. Do it 60 to one 20 minutes a day and give it, you know, until about 200 hours. You'll be shocked with how much you can learn. Okay? Step two is build something small. Once you've started getting the hang of it, you know, you know about 200 hours in.
[00:22:28] Unfortunately, this is where a lot of people mess up, right? They try to learn everything at once or they try to jump around too much, or they don't stick with something long enough or they're trying to build when they're learning to spell. You can't write an essay when you've just learned to spell and put sentences together.
[00:22:42] Okay? Knowing how to put some knowing how to spell or put some sentence together is not enough to teach you how to structure an entire essay or a novel, so don't leap to the novel stage. Start small. Just layer on the basics. Okay. For me it was, you know, building a basic landing page, then working on the backend.
[00:22:58] 'cause I had to, for the startup to just understand how the data is set up. And to be honest, I think I spent weeks just understanding how my CTO guy had, had set up the, the GIT repository and I didn't know any of that. Like, the tooling is so important. It's not just about the language, just the tooling.
[00:23:13] How do I access this code? How do I read this, how do I understand what's going on here? If I want to change it, how do I safely change it so that I can bring it back? Like things of that, that's what real world engineering is about. And for you, when you are building your startup, that's the kind of stuff you need to be really careful about because if you break something, you need to know how to unbreak it.
[00:23:28] Okay? So learn about the tools. Pick one small project at a time. Practice practice. Practice, practice, right? Think through problems, learn how to research problems. That's a. Big one when you're developing, especially when you're not you're not a professional grade, is you will come up against a lot of problems, have that expectation upfront.
[00:23:44] You're gonna come up against a lot of problems and you gotta get good at researching it. And guys, I cannot tell you how much easier it is to research things now with the AI L lms, especially with Google AI search, it is so easy 'cause it's a conversation and it's doing the research for you. Okay? You're delegating the research.
[00:24:01] I remember just three years ago, right? You had to research for hours and hours, sometimes days go down all sorts of rabbit holes, make notes, and then try and pull it all together. And experiment. And experiment and experiment. 'cause you are doing the research now you're asking the questions and delegating the research.
[00:24:16] But you need to ask good questions, which will come with time. Right? So. The best way to do something simple is to start small, is to, you know, pick an area you're already excited about. If it's a startup, for example, just start by learning the front end. How would you build a basic webpage for it, right?
[00:24:29] You learn a lot of front-end concepts and a lot of basic programming fundamentals. And then you say, well, I want a little bit of data, or I want to add a login, or something like that. Just start small, and that becomes a project that consumes you for a week or two. You know, that's how you do it. So that's step two.
[00:24:44] Step three is. You want to use your coding experience as a way to build your own credibility and also empathy with what a professional developer does. Right? One expect unexpected benefit of learning to code for me was that it completely changed the way I interacted with developers, which by the way is my theory as to why they were suddenly more interested to work with me.
[00:25:01] Right? Before I was that person, the one who would say, Hey, this should only take a couple of hours, right? Without having any clue what I was talking about. Oh, hey, you, you could be, you. You're a smart guy. You could knock this out in, in a weekend. I'd be that guy, right? How annoying now I get that a lot and it really infuriates me, so I totally understand why the developers and the professional coders used to get mad at me back then.
[00:25:20] Right? So. Understand the process well enough to have meaningful conversations. That builds your credibility, right? Because developers will then take you much more seriously because they can see, you've put in the effort to understand their world, which a, according to most developers means you're smart.
[00:25:35] I don't agree, but that's how a lot of developers think. And so they're gonna give you props for that, right? But the big picture here is that even if you do decide to bring on a technical co-founder, which is not a bad idea at all, you're gonna find it much easier to do than. You remove the risk that if they leave or drop out or you know, something happens or they lose interest or you have a falling out or they, they're not trustworthy or whatever, you can get rid of them if you need and continue without any serious loss of momentum, right?
[00:26:00] Because getting a partner only makes sense if you can also work with that partner to get the best out of them. And hey, if they leave, do you really want your startup to be at risk? Probably not, right? So you need to de-risk yourself as well, and you need to be able to communicate with them clearly. Have the credibility to take the call on their decisions, and if need be, tell them to change their decisions because you know, you are the one making the call, but you know enough to make that call.
[00:26:23] You have the credibility and the chops to make that call, right? And you're not. Completely dependent on them if they disagree. So let me leave you with some closing thoughts, right? Here's where I landed after years and years of trial and error, the hardware, right? Learning to code honestly doesn't have to be just about becoming a full-time developer.
[00:26:38] In fact, I'd argue that learning to code is a skill that is useful because there's so many levels, right? It's like why is, why is sport important for kids in school? Most of them will never make pro, we'll never make professional athletes, but it's important for all the other skills and for just the basic fitness, right?
[00:26:55] It's exactly the same principle. Why do so many of us learn things in school that we don't use in real life necessarily? Because it makes us more rounded and better and more effective at real life. Okay? Same thing with sports and things, so. I truly believe learning to be technical in this age, especially with ai, and most of us who are watching this will be knowledge workers, right?
[00:27:14] AI is a knowledge worker, so if you know how to code, you can work with tools much better than somebody else who doesn't know how to code. It just gives you that edge at the workplace. You don't have to be a professional software engineer. Like I said, I think one in five people in the Inner Circle program don't want to or decide not to become software engineers at the end because they find.
[00:27:34] All these other options to achieve their life goals. And that's something we take very seriously in the Inner Circle program is we don't force you guys to become engineers at all. In fact, we try and talk you out of it and see to encourage you to see other options because we go through about a month of goal setting and goal analysis and.
[00:27:49] And it's very clear, not many people want to actually become desk jockey software engineers, right? Like I, I was definitely one of them. So you want to combine those skills with other things to generate a whole bunch of lifestyle opportunities. 'cause hey, jobs come and go, but the skills stay forever.
[00:28:04] Right? And especially if you know how to learn. So if my closing thought on that is that if you're non, non-technical. Founder and you're stuck searching for a co-founder, then you know, honestly, from experience, it's not the only path forward, right? Just learn a little bit enough to make yourself effective so that you can unblock yourself and that can save you years.
[00:28:22] Guys, I'm not exaggerating, years of frustration and loss momentum, okay? Because the momentum in a new idea in executing a new idea is so important. So start small. Learn a little bit, have the right expectations, get good enough to get credibility with developers.
[00:28:36] Teach yourself, because then you de-risk your business because you'll never be dependent on somebody else.
[00:28:41] And you can hire and, and fire, and you can execute. Even when you know things are a bit rough, you can still deliver. Right? And hey. You see where it takes you, right? You might just surprise yourself. I never wanted to be a Google engineer. Heck, I never wanted to be a professional software engineer. When I left the law, I was like, okay, I'm gonna do the startup thing, and that's it.
[00:28:57] And I failed. I failed big time, right? But it's changed my life. Like I work remotely now. I, I work with amazing people. I work in tech, tech and building things. I'm teaching people tech. It is a phenomenal life that I could not have access had I stayed on as a lawyer, and I accidentally fell into it because I was trying to be my own technical co-founder.
[00:29:15] Alright, so thanks for listening to today's episode. I'll try and drop the links to, to that, to that LinkedIn article from March 2019 in the description. But, you know, connect with me on LinkedIn, ask me questions. Happy to answer. I'll see you next time. And don't forget, keep moving forward.
[00:29:29] Just subscribe, you know you gotta do it.
