I am wondering what others think… some podcast says “to want a cofounder so that you get a free software engineer is the wrong motivation”. Ideally I would want funds to hire a senior developer to help with prototyping a solution. An alternative would be to hire a cofounder to do that… as a “free software engineer”, which would actually be extremely expensive in terms of equity.
What do others think? Can a full time senior developer start and lead the development of an MVP?
We can disagree on that. I’ve done 2 startups. One is past Series A, and I did the method above. The second, I tried to cody code, and for reasons above it failed.
In the early stages, the problem is, the CTO’s job is extremely diverse, and the business job is focused. As time progresses, the trend reverses (Business becomes diverse, tech becomes focused.). Day one is a good example:
Choose the best tech stack. Even from there, in the failure example, I spent weeks on tech selection, getting it wrong. However, in the Series A company, we tossed 5K at a handful of experts.
So my advice to all tech people starting out, is to discover and leverage expert talent, not to be the expert.