Tech cofounders might be in a state of frictional shortage. Before people argue with me (it's rare that I'd call engineering talent in a state of "shortage") I think it's important to note that fault lies with the business co-founders. By "frictional shortage", I mean that cultural factors (low social status of technical people, due to a half-century of us selling ourselves poorly) prevent the market (with equity a larger factor in this market than salaries, because tech base salaries are quite reasonable) from clearing.
Right now, business co-founders trade 2-4 points higher on a 10-point scale. I'm a Tech 8, and a Biz 8 wouldn't, realistically speaking, mix with me. A Biz 6 would try to push me down to 5-10% equity, with the cliff and vesting that would make me more of an employee than co-founder anyway, and take the CEO job.
A Biz 6 can deliver Sequoia on an idea, and a Biz 8 is turning away executive-level offers and board positions and 11-to-3, 7-figure jobs at VC funds. A Tech 8 is happy to break $140k and get interesting projects. I've written at length about this skew: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/an-insight-o... . Biz 8 have other, very lucrative, options. A Tech 8 who is objectively just as good at his job (and a harder job) doesn't have the same.
The Tech 8+ drop out of the co-founder market around age 30 (and it's rare that someone even gets to Tech 8 before that age) because they get used to Biz 5's offering 2.5% equity to work on someone else's idea (as opposed to a shared idea with hard technical problems at the core).
See, too many business co-founders want to charge so much for the investor-level contacts, like they're Marlo fucking Stanfield charging $10 million for "a connect", that people usually trickle out before they even get to the Tech 6+ (much less Tech 8+) level. Jeff Dean stays in-house at Google for a reason.
Technical co-founders wouldn't be hard to find if the market could clear. They're hard to find because, while early-stage startups can't pay market salaries for understandable reasons, sociological factors keep equity amounts at shortage prices for good tech talent.
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Tech cofounders might be in a state of frictional shortage. Before people argue with me (it's rare that I'd call engineering talent in a state of "shortage") I think it's important to note that fault lies with the business co-founders. By "frictional shortage", I mean that cultural factors (low social status of technical people, due to a half-century of us selling ourselves poorly) prevent the market (with equity a larger factor in this market than salaries, because tech base salaries are quite reasonable) from clearing.
Right now, business co-founders trade 2-4 points higher on a 10-point scale. I'm a Tech 8, and a Biz 8 wouldn't, realistically speaking, mix with me. A Biz 6 would try to push me down to 5-10% equity, with the cliff and vesting that would make me more of an employee than co-founder anyway, and take the CEO job.
A Biz 6 can deliver Sequoia on an idea, and a Biz 8 is turning away executive-level offers and board positions and 11-to-3, 7-figure jobs at VC funds. A Tech 8 is happy to break $140k and get interesting projects. I've written at length about this skew: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/an-insight-o... . Biz 8 have other, very lucrative, options. A Tech 8 who is objectively just as good at his job (and a harder job) doesn't have the same.
The Tech 8+ drop out of the co-founder market around age 30 (and it's rare that someone even gets to Tech 8 before that age) because they get used to Biz 5's offering 2.5% equity to work on someone else's idea (as opposed to a shared idea with hard technical problems at the core).
See, too many business co-founders want to charge so much for the investor-level contacts, like they're Marlo fucking Stanfield charging $10 million for "a connect", that people usually trickle out before they even get to the Tech 6+ (much less Tech 8+) level. Jeff Dean stays in-house at Google for a reason.
Technical co-founders wouldn't be hard to find if the market could clear. They're hard to find because, while early-stage startups can't pay market salaries for understandable reasons, sociological factors keep equity amounts at shortage prices for good tech talent.