Technical Founders

“That's probably the number one mistake is you just go, okay, well, like I'm an engineer, so I want a sales guy who can talk to me and understands engineering, and that's like, well, that's not a really good criteria for sales.”

“One of my I guess theses is that there is a lot of untapped potential and just like really strong technical folks in making them a bit more commercial because the types of problems on the go to market side there, I would say generally a little bit more hairy. …”

“The real thing I look for, besides, I'd say technical ability is a kind of, it's an important prerequisite. We back technical founders. But I asked myself how magnetic is this person? That word magnetic. Specifically, I'm asking myself, if this person started …”

“One of the issues I think a technical founder has is that they will never understand sales to the bare metal.”

“Which actually, I think that's even, you know, going back to the YC, the cult of YC, I'm starting to realize that is actually one of the core things that we've always believed that extremely technical people those are the people who probably should be, like, …”

“So many technical founders, especially people who've worked at big companies, end up making the mistake of thinking that the value that they're creating is in the sophistication of their technology, not the problem it's solving.”

“If you have equal equity with someone and you have a seat at the table in decision making, just because it's not working doesn't mean you get the right to blame other people.”

“When you come from a technical technical background, you won't become like a service person or a communication person. They want, and maybe it's actually not an objective to become. So you have to stay a little bit what you are, because ultimately you have to …”

“A technical founder is a partner in this whole journey of a startup, and it requires really intense level of commitment, and you're in just a dev.”

“And you're going to have a bias towards building a good enough versus the perfect architecture, because if you worked at a big company, you might have been rewarded for the perfect architecture, but not for a startup.”

“Technical founders often misunderstand the value they can get out of Fang. And misunderstand is an understatement. They grossly misunderstand what value they can extract from a Fang job and what value they can't extract.”

“I think on the flip side, I think what somebody sometimes just wants to hire for too soon tends to be sales. Like there's a lot of the time founders are like, particularly technical founders are like, I'm not good at sales. I know we should do some more sales.…”

“You cannot Hold everybody to your standards, and at the end of the day, and after being an engineer for many years, it doesn't matter if, you know, the buttons work. There's so many big systems are built with duct tape, and they work, so you gotta get over tha…”

“And then most enterprise technical founders don't know marketing. They don't actually know how marketing truly works. So there's, that's why they're still hidden in some way.”

“I think most founders get passionate about an idea and forget to really Do the math of when they'll get customers, when the customers will want to pay, and how much, and they don't, and they're too shy, because they're technical founders, sometimes they're too…”

“And so I actually think that as we go forward, the typical like technical founder who has a CS undergrad and maybe dropped out is not actually necessary. And someone who might be really strong in another area who has unique insight into the future and so has t…”

“I think this is probably the number one error technical founders make, and it's the following, right? So, alright, so I'm in my lab, and I make my cool thing, my cool widget, whatever it is, and then the big logical fallacy we all make is that whatever, that w…”

“So one of the things that technical founders, you know, they're pretty good usually at the vision thing. They're not so good at asking for the order, right?”

“In my experience, the growth kind of stops when they try to run sales too much and kind of get involved in an area where They have not a lot of experience, right?”

“And we've seen many founders have theoretical models for how they would like sales to work. And those have tend to be been like extremely unsuccessful.”

“And when you're starting out your teams, if you don't have that sales strategy, Hire, which a lot of times people don't, you know, you're not building a business. You're building a feature”

“And I think actually one of the biggest logical fallacies that technical founders do is the following is they think that if you create a widget, it has intrinsic value and anybody that runs across that widget will be able to not only Understand how cool it is,…”

“Where I've seen that go wrong the most often is then the ability to attract, evaluate, and retain technical talent. And so, we have a strong, strong preference. For founding teams that have at least one technical founder. We also have a strong preference for t…”

“And, you know, this actually aligns with the philosophy of the firm here at Andreessen Horowitz. Our focus has largely been looking for the technical phenomenon, the technical founder, And then building around kind of a strong go-to-market engine and go-to-mar…”