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
- LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor - 29th April 2026
- Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause - 27th April 2026
- DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026