Non-Technical Founders Waste Time Seeking Co-Founders Before Validating Ideas
Alan Jones · 20 VC 045: From Idea to Pitch with Alan Jones, Founding Investor @ Startmate · Jun 15, 2015 · at 7:45
Alan Jones, investor at Startmate, explains why non-technical founders should avoid spending capital on early product development prior to testing business economics.
0:00 / 0:21exact quote · 21.8s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Many non-technical entrepreneurs spend a lot of time going to meetups trying to find that potential technical co-founder. So that wastes a whole chunk of time, and then potentially when they start to build out their product team they might spend several 100,000 dollars building a product first, and then take it to market, and then find that the economics don't work.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Alan Jones
Australia Has an Abundance of Founders but Lacks Technical Co-Founders
“There's no shortage of entrepreneurs in Australia, but there's a real shortage of technical co-founders.”
Pitching Requires Emotional Storytelling, Not the Standard VC Metrics Template
“So we need to become great storytellers, and that never, never, never Fits the templates that the VCs want to see. Why? Because the VCs want to punch all the metrics into a spreadsheet and judge you coldly and rationally. The best thing that we can do is grab …”
Australia Will Produce Multiple $100M+ Tech Venture Funds by 2020
“In the Australian marketplace, there are now a number of funds in about that size, and all of us are looking to about 10 X the size of our investment capacity. So, I think we'll see in the next five years, I think we'll see a number of a hundred mil and greate…”
Blue Chili Will Exceed Its Goal of 100 Startups by 2016
“In fact, I'm pretty confident we're going to smash our goal of 100 by 20 16.”
Experienced Product Builders Should Bootstrap Instead of Raising Capital
“If you're a great product person, so if you've spent five or seven or 10 years building tech startup products, then your greatest skill and your most likely path to market is to bootstrap and build your own product.”
Recruit Technical Co-Founders by Framing Business Goals as Programming Challenges
“They don't see generally, they don't see business problems as nearly as interesting as great mathematical or logical or programming problems. And so I encourage people to break their business goal and their customer aspiration and the journey of their business…”