“I’ve got this HUGE idea. I just need to find a technical co-founder.” Ugh. I’ve heard that too many times over the last few years and it almost always ends badly.

I was in this situation and we barely escaped. I write this post to put you out of your miserable technical co-founder search and give you some realistic options.

The Challenge of Finding a Technical Co-Founder

To find a great technical co-founder, you need to convince them of the following:

• Your idea is better than all of their ideas
• The equity is worth spending all of their spare time working for no money
• You are worth 50% of the equity of the company
• You will execute and convert an idea into a big successful business
• You’re better than all of the other biz people pitching them

This is the second part of a two part series of posts. The first post was entitled What To Look For In A Business Co-Founder. It seems that potential technical cofounders are approached by business cofounders a lot more than business cofounders are approached by technical cofounders. I thought about why that was after writing the post. In essence, I think it comes down to the fact that it’s a lot easier to identify the tangible skills of a technical cofounder from a high level perspective. Do they code? Yes. Okay, they could be a technical cofounder. At the end of the day “being able to code” is a small piece of the technical cofounder puzzle. Here are the qualities that make sense to look for in a technical co-founder.

A past record of building things

Potential technical cofounders should have a past record of building things. They may be very large projects with hundreds of people or they may just be very simple applications that never went anywhere. Learning how to code often happens best through practice exercises. The same can be said for building an entire company or large product as a technical cofounder. The more your potential technical cofounder has built things, the more pattern recognition they will have.