Tech Startups: What skills/technologies would the ideal technical co-founder possess?
11th February 2012
My answer to Tech Startups: What skills/technologies would the ideal technical co-founder possess? on Quora
The most important indicator is: can they ship? Can they prove that they know how to take a project from idea to running code deployed to a server somewhere with actual people interacting with it?
In my experience, the majority of people who graduate with a CS degree can’t program their way out of a wet paper bag. There are a few exceptions, and a few years working in industry often helps, but I think you’d be crazy to accept a CS degree as a sign that someone could help build a startup.
More recent articles
- First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic's general agent - 12th January 2026
- My answers to the questions I posed about porting open source code with LLMs - 11th January 2026
- Fly's new Sprites.dev addresses both developer sandboxes and API sandboxes at the same time - 9th January 2026