About me
- Chair of DUCSS
- Never founded a startup
- Never ran a startup
- Take everything in this presentation with more than a pinch of salt
- May not be correct or logical, but this is what CS students will think
So what's the problem?
- You need a technical co-founder, or an engineer
- Engineers are hard to find
- CS students like to hide
- Right now is a great example
Why do we hide?
- CS is really hard
- Computers continually make us feel stupid
- Many CS students take this to heart and feel they aren't up to it
- Imposter Syndrome
Finding engineers
- DUCSS
- Tech meetups
- Wider network
Talking to engineers
- A co-founder is like an investor
- Except money is easier to part with than time
- You need to make them believe your vision as much as you do
- Why should they join you rather than work for Google, Facebook or Apple?
- They will have much better offers monetarily. Offer something else
- Hiring is the hardest thing you will ever do
Identifying skills you need
- What is your actual product?
- Designer, front-end, back-end, mobile
- How much can you get away with not doing?
- How much can you get away with doing yourself?
- You can teach yourself to build your MVP
Some hard('ish) questions
- Why?
- What do you bring to the table?
- Ideas are really cheap. And 100 other people have had it before you
- If you haven't been interested in learning how code works, why are you founding a tech company?
- If your product is tech, why should you get equal equity for inequal work?
More questions
- How much do you know about the tech world?
- What problems does it have?
- What culture do you want your company to have?
- What are you like to work with?
- Why are you starting a company?
Evaluating potential engineers
- Ignore their degree. College doesn't matter.
- What side-projects have they built?
- What companies have they worked for?
- Are they capable of leading?
- They're going to be the ones (hopefully) hiring your engineering team
- You need to be able to trust them completely
Staying in touch with tech
- You need to breathe tech as much as your co-founder and your engineers
- Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, TechCrunch, The Verge, Twitter...
- Irish tech meetups
- Learning to code
- Stay in touch, get interested, make friends. Expand your network naturally