Finding a Commercial Co-Founder

I'm lucky. I found an awesome co-founder for JFDI.Asia in Meng Weng Wong . 12+ years into our business relationship he's still the closest thing I have to a brother and he continues to inspire me with great insights. Here's one from a few years back ...

Asking a technical co-founder to build your business dream is like saying “I want to be a rock star but I can't sing or play guitar so please will you make the music for me?”

The point is well made. Becoming an expert in any practice takes years, so why should someone who has mastered any Art give up their time to paint your picture, tell your story or code your app when they have plenty of projects of their own? In the last few years that's been especially true in ecosystems like Singapore where good technical co-founders are rarer than pixies. If I got a dollar for everyone with a prestigious MBA who has asked me if I know someone who would work for nothing to realise their frankly derivative and technically unexciting project, I would be able to afford a prestigious MBA myself.

So recently, it has come as something of a surprise often to be asked a question that feels like looking the other way down a telescope. People with PhDs from prestigious universities who have created great technology ask me if I know an experienced entrepreneur who might be willing speculatively to give up a few years of their life to, you know, do that grubby selling thing while they do the clever stuff in the lab.

You can see where this is going. So I put together some starting points for a friend, based on my own experience.

An unusual combination of factors motivate someone capable to want to take on another person’s venture, rather than pursuing their own.

The short answer is that success hinges on alignment, not just in the business but also in life. Then the hard part is that you need someone who is entrepreneurial, but not so entrepreneurial that they are doing their own thing. I observe the following as making good candidates (there are no doubt numerous others):

1. Career changers including back-to-work parents who are motivated by a challenge AND who come from wealthy families, have wealthy life partners, or who have made unconventional lifestyle choices that mean they have financial discretion to take a risk. These folk need to put emotional ‘skin in the game’ to treat the project as more than a hobby / another trophy to put on the shelf / a stepping stone to something else.
2. Stable folk in their late 40s/50s who are looking for a second career, have done well and paid off the mortgage/sent the kids to college and who are now looking for something more meaningful. There is a growing body of evidence that shows someone in their 50s is 5-6X more likely to build a successful business than someone in their 20s. Again, home-makers who were formerly professionals before they put all that on hold to bring up the next generation may fall into this category. Even if they lack direct prior experience of running a business, they do have time, resources, and maturity. Give them flexibility to work around family commitments while they transition and they bring awesome multi-tasking skills.

At the risk of stereotyping to make a point succinctly, people who are more conflicted and therefore less likely to be strong candidates could include:

1. Existing successful entrepreneurs have little motivation to take on a side gig. If you know them well and can reciprocate somehow, by all means ask to have a coffee, once, but be specific in your ask and do your homework first. Google and YouTube are there to help you understand the mechanics of 'doing a startup': compared with 10 years ago there is now so much material online you have no excuse for sucking time from someone who has limited time on a runway before they run out of cash. And please, don't ask them to give you feedback on your business idea until you have talked to customers first. If you find you can't reach potential customers to have a meaningful conversation, you may just have got the feedback from the market you need.
2. Another technical person. You are building a business, not a research lab or a science project. If you find yourself randomly putting in 10% 'for marketing' in a grant application, expecting that will somehow fill and empower the empty chair round the table, you need to think again. Likewise if you are approving such a grant application.
3. Trophy-collectors who are attracted to the idea of calling themselves a co-founder but who don’t trust their own imagination and have always climbed up on the backs of others. These folk waste the time of ‘ideas people’ by milking their creativity. They want the glory of being a business founder without coming up with an idea and without taking a financial or reputation risk. Like prize dogs "first in class", they have jumped through every educational hoop put in front of them and for that very reason they will always run away when faced with a 'wicked' problem that includes unknowable risks.
4. Closet Consultants including former lawyers, accountants and advisors who are really hanging around waiting to charge billable hours “when you are funded”. It may be fine to hire them as advisors with a very specific brief and deliverables, but if the mindset is deep down still all about selling time they will never really contribute as a co-founder, particularly if they have unrealistic expectations about what the role entails based on years of spectatorship rather than being a player. This category often claim to have earned their chops as an entrepreneur because they ran a little side-gig that was really about a different spin on selling their time or milking their network. They can be great one-trick ponies but typically don't have the breadth of insight to make it as a co-founder.
5. Career Analysts who went into management consultancy straight out of a brand-name college, got bored puking PowerPoint by the age of 25, then went to business school. They give themselves away by filling their profile on LinkedIn with all the brand-names they used to work for, or used to study at, even though they don't any more. While polished and bursting with "executive presence" beyond their years, they lack experience of delivery. So they get stuck in paralysis-by-analysis desperately looking for a tried-and-tested model to apply out of their copious collection of business cases. I can't tell you how many Rocket Internet refugees fitting this category we welcomed to JFDI.Asia's open house events. They were all lovely people and they had all been toasted by their first experience of ambiguity. Full credit to them for jumping into the entrepreneurial fire (even if they didn't quite feel ready to post the experience of getting chewed up and spat out after 3 months on their LinkedIn profile). The few that survived and went back to try again often became excellent entrepreneurs able to think "ambidextrously" in both the business school mode needed for scaling once a business is working ('Plan and Perfect') as well as the entrepreneurial search mode needed to get to that happy position ('Launch and Learn').
6. Those who are lost and seeking a path, for example PhD’s who didn’t make the tenure track, or folk who have recently been through a major life change like divorce, redundancy or retirement but who have not yet finished processing it and want to treat a startup as rehabilitation. Likewise ne'er-do-wells bruised by life's tempest and seeking shelter from the storm. Many are smart survivors who deserve TLC. They can be highly committed in a manic kind of way but are unlikely to be great at working in teams while they work through building a new identity. Smart is much more of a commodity than many smart people realize. The ability to take a risk and go beyond what you know to deliver isn't. It needs someone 'comfortable in their own skin'.
7. Cubicle Office Refugees, product managers and management outcasts desperately trying to avoid going back to the corporate grind even though they and their life partners have built financial commitments around the illusion of security that a salary engenders. Sorry, but your experience of influencing, outsourcing and delegating means nothing when you have do it all on your own with zero budget. Entrepreneurship is about taking full responsibility for execution with partial information, building your own legitimacy independently of a mothership and so nothing like 'intrapreneurship'.

I don't want to end this post on a negative note so I will reframe the above last seven paragraphs to suggest that finding a way to help more people work entrepreneurially is, perhaps, one of the greatest challenges and opportunities for 2023 and beyond. The 'venture builder' model that is IMHO the next best step on from what Meng Weng Wong and I did ten years ago needs to solve that challenge in order to scale.