- Hey man, we gotta keep 'em on their toes.
So, we gotta ask...
Are they on their heels?
So they're gonna shift.
They gotta shift. Get on your toes.
Get on your toes.
(upbeat music)
How to recruit a technical co-founder.
The elusive, technical side of the business.
I mean this is funny how people can get super far.
Like build the product,
get some early traction in customer,
and really not have a technical team built out.
It's kinda like owning a restaurant
and not having a chef.
Like, of course, you can start off
and, you know, build the recipes yourself.
and test them in the kitchen.
And even get your friends and family
to come eat at your restaurant.
But at some point, it probably makes sense
to bring in somebody that's been trained
and knows what they're doing
and ideally passionate about it.
What I want to share in this video
is the three areas that you gotta go to physically,
one not, to find some of the best talent
that you can bring on to your team.
So this is all about technical.
Pretty much all my companies, from Flowtown to
Clarity, you know I've been involved
in investing in 30-plus other companies
as an Angel investor.
I've built my own companies.
There's always been the technical side of it.
Even though I taught myself how to program when I was 17,
a long time ago, I learned
it is not the best use of my time
and I always introduce way more bugs
than it's worth it.
So, finding that partner,
you know Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak.
You know Zuckerberg had Dustin Moskovitz.
Even though Mark is a good programmer,
he had somebody else that could kind of
lead and think about that.
And what I want to share with you guys today
is the strategy that at the very end
I'm going to talk to you about the IKEA effect.
You don't want to miss that
'cause it brings everything together.
You actually gotta bring the goods.
So first place you gotta go look is at events.
You know I think some of the best minds,
technical minds, go to other user groups,
meetups, conferences around their industry and their topic.
And this is true for me on so many levels.
I remember I was actually working
in a co-working space.
One of my favorite things to do is deputize other people.
To like, if you see these, you know,
this great kind of this type of person, let me know.
And I was working at a co-working space
and the owner Sasha came up to me
and was like, "Do you know Otavio?"
And I'm like, "No, who's Otavio?"
She's like, oh you gotta meet him.
He's not here today but tomorrow
let me make sure I introduce you guys.
And I was like, oh that's awesome.
So the next day I come in, I start working.
All of a sudden she's like,
"Hey I want to introduce you to Otavio."
And not only does she introduce me to probably
to this day one of the smartest minds I've ever met.
One of my mentors told me when I moved to San Franciso,
he said the only thing I would suggest you do
is find one the smartest people you can
and just try to spend as much time as they'll allow you to.
And here I am watching a demo of an iPhone
translate in real time English words to Spanish
and then Spanish words to English.
It was called Quest Visual.
Three years later it was bought by Google
and Otavio, to this day, I just saw a Facebook post
where he was sharing like a game he built
that essentially maps the environment
in real time for fun.
I mean the guy is literally a brilliant person
and the way I met him was going to a location,
a physical location, and letting people know that
if you run into a certain type of person let me know.
I think most people just don't put out to the world
who they're looking for.
So one is go to events.
Go to other user groups, technical user groups,
programming meet ups.
Go to Meetup.com.
There's events happening all around you in your city.
Big events in North America that you can go to.
That would have really brilliant people
that you can interact with.
To try to find those key hires.
Second thing is go to the schools.
I mean there's so many schools
that have programming classes.
Colleges that if you just showed up
as a person that wants to build a company,
like they're trying to have their students get jobs.
So if you say, "Look, I'm starting a new venture
"and I wanna hire your students,"
trust me they will work with you
to figure out how to have that happen.
And my favorite trick is just to ask everybody
who's the smartest person in your class.
Ask the teacher, "Who's the smartest student you have?"
And that name, that person, there the ones you connect with.
Those are the ones you kind of meetup afterwards for coffee.
They're the ones you ping, you know, for advice
but you want to make that list.
You want to start interacting with those people
to bring them into your world.
The third area is online.
Okay, there's online communities
of really incredible, technical talent.
One of them is GitHub.
If you just go on GitHub, you can actually,
I don't know if you can search by location but you can
find really competent programmers
that are building and contributing to the world.
For free on their own time.
They're essentially so passionate about solving problems
that they're writing the code in a open source manner.
They're giving back and maybe those folks
that you find in those communities
are not the ones that are looking for jobs
or maybe their doing their own thing.
But they're the ones that know all the top talent
and if you could do something to create value for lives,
if you could build a relationship with them,
that has incredible value to you as a business
and for your ability to hire other technical co-founders.
Now, first tip that I wanna give is,
and then I'm gonna talk about the IKEA effect,
is bring the goods.
There's three key P's that you need to bring
if you wanna attract a technical co-founder.
First is a prototype.
I really believe that if you paid somebody
to build an MVP that's one thing.
I don't even believe you should actually do that.
I think you should build a clickable prototype,
which is a simulation of your software.
Have something to show them.
Show them you're serious, so bring the prototype.
The second thing you wanna bring is presale.
Go find ideal customers.
Show them your prototype and get them to pre-commit
to using the product
or buying into the vision of the product
and if you don't spend the money give it back.
And people are like, "Oh I can't find anybody to do this."
You know what?
It's a $10 billionindustry called crowd funding
around rewards and equity.
Its the overall industry about 40 billion,
but just the crowd funding, the equity,
and the rewards component is 10 billion.
Everyday people on Indiegogo and Kickstarter
fund their projects and there's no difference
for you to get presales from customers.
And the third area is, you gotta bring some passion.
I mean, if you think just 'cause you have an idea
and it's kind of a good idea,
that I'm gonna get somebody
to be my technical co-founder
and you don't bring a level of energy,
excitement, passion, knowledge,
understanding, market research,
then good luck because anybody that's that good
that could be one of your co-founders,
probably have their own ideas.
Probably could build their own thing.
Probably don't need to work with you.
Could probably work at Facebook or Google.
So you need to bring that extra magic.
Now finally, I wanna share with you guys the IKEA effect.
Because it's kind of in the vein of what I suggest
of hiring people.
You know Pitbull said it best in one of his songs.
He said, "Ask for money get advice,
"Ask for advice get money twice."
Yes, I am quoting Pitbull.
And the reason why is IKEA,
you probably bought their furniture every startup has,
has this thing they learn where they
are able to sell you furniture cheaper
because they, they off load the labor cost
to you.
If you've never realized that,
like all the costs it would've took them
to assemble or preassemble the furniture,
they say no we're just gonna include a little allen key
and this little dinky screwdriver and now you
are responsible for putting it together.
And what happens is when you buy, let's say a desk,
and you put it together,
after you've created you actually have a higher sense
of value because you contributed in the creation.
It's called the IKEA effect.
It's actually a psychological,
kind of a study in psychology,
that anything that you participate in creating
has a higher value than if you just bought it
for its utility and this is true
for software when you're building it.
If you bring a technical co-founder in
just to ask for advice, help them guide the development,
guide the product, guide the decisions
on what platforms to use.
Over time there gonna start thinking
or valuing your idea maybe more than their own.
Especially if you start getting customer's pre-orders.
That is the magic and that is the process.
And there's no way to fast track it,
but if you do it you will find somebody incredible.
You'll be able to work with them before you work with them
and really make a solution come to life.
And that is my wish for you, as per usual,
I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life
and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.
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