y helo thar

How to Find a Technical Co-founder

The Best Case for a Non-Technical Co-Founder

When a non-technical founder sets out to find a technical partner, the default assumption is often: “I have the vision, they’ll build it, we’ll split the company.”

But that mindset usually leads nowhere. Engineers are pitched daily by “idea people.” What separates the best non-technical founders from the rest is how much work they’ve already done before starting the search.

So, what does the best case actually look like?

1. They’ve Done the Homework

2. They’re Already Carrying Risk

In the best case, the non-technical founder isn’t asking the technical co-founder to take all the risk. They’ve:

This signals they’re not outsourcing the heavy lifting — they’re in it alongside their future partner.

The Time Investment

Hours Spent on Failures

Customer discovery dead-ends: 100 hours. Talking to people who seem like potential customers but reveal the problem isn’t painful enough.

Landing pages / experiments that flop: 160 hours. Four weeks full-time building no-code MVPs, running ads, trying cold outreach — only to get zero signups or “false positives.”

Pitch revisions & discarded approaches: 40 hours. Rewriting decks, re-framing positioning, tossing out whole approaches that don’t resonate.

Total hours spent on dead-ends: 300 hours.

The Hours Spent on "Success"

Getting to “we know there’s a market and we know people will pay” typically takes:

Customer discovery interviews: 100 hours. Talking to 25 prospective customers, synthesizing notes, iterating on problem framing.

Market validation experiments: 160 hours. Building landing pages, running ads, cold emailing, doing sales calls.

Iteration cycles: 40 hours. Revising the pitch, reworking positioning, discarding false positives, and starting over.

Total on the successful germ of an idea: easily 300 hours before there’s strong evidence. Multiple iterations on the same problem space. That’s a solid 2 months of full-time work.

The Technical Co-Founder's Perspective

So you get all this work done. By now you've spent 600 hours on the problem. You have this incredible idea with strong signs of traction.

Now picture the conversation when you bring this to an engineer:

“Here’s my validated problem space. I’ve got a notebook full of interviews, a waitlist, wireframes, even some design experiments. We’ve stripped down the dream features into something closer to an MVP.”

What the engineer hears:

Then comes the equity question:

There's an assumption in a 50/50 equity split that both founders will contribute equally in the long time horizon to the company. If this isn't the case, you shouldn't consider a 50/50 equity split in the first place. So let's say you do think that 50/50 is a fair split. What now?

Note that there's a difference in hours-worked of 200 hours. What accounts for this economic differential and how do you square this circle?

Cash Equity, Sweat Equity

My suggestion is simple. Just calculate it this way:

600 hours of the non-technical founder matches up to 600 hours of the technical founder.

There's another 200 hours of necessary work unaccounted for.

100 hours of that is donated into the company by the technical founder.

The last 100 hours? Purchased by the non-technical co-founder at the technical founder's hourly rate.

If the non-technical founder makes $100k/yr, that rounds out to around $50/hr. That's a $5,000 buy-in to even make this all fair. It’s not about the dollar figure itself. It’s about the signal of seriousness and the equalization of sacrifices.

Asymmetrical Founders

This framework should work for asymmetrical founders as well so long as you can clearly turn everyone's initial contributions into numerical values. 70-30 equity split? The person with 70% needs to contribute more in the short-term.

If one founder contributes $20,000 of their own cash while another contributes 400 hours of coding, you can normalize those contributions by putting both into dollar terms (e.g. $50/hr coding). That makes the split transparent and removes ambiguity.

Here's a formula. (Engineers love formulas!)

(Your $/Hr * Your Hours + Your Cash) / Your Equity
=
(Their $/Hr * Their Hours + Their Cash) / Their Equity

Is the non-technical founder a president of a major bank and the technical founder a junior developer? The numbers would likely look very lopsided in terms of dollars per hour, and the numbers will bear that out.

The reason it’s so hard to find a technical co-founder is that most non-technical founders underestimate the true short-term cost of creating something from nothing. The few who succeed are the ones who do the legwork, run the numbers, and show they’re willing to cover the differences.

Only then is 50/50 truly 50/50.

Note: This piece is entirely about short-term framing. Equity splits matter a lot more in the long-run. But in the short-term, this is a framework to think about everyone's skin in the game. You can't expect to have a 90-10 equity split with an engineer without pretty much entirely paying for all of the engineer's time for the initial lift is all this is about. Go

Note 2: The payments don't even necessarily need to be in cash. They could be in SAFEs or convertible notes. But they need to be a tangible short-term incentive for a tangible short-term contribution.