Here are three types of non-technical cofounders that rock:
The Camp Director (motivation)
A camp director has this magical way of getting talented people to provide help. It’s mostly just sales, but being a straight-up salesman is not enough. Camp directors sell a vision. All the freakin’ time. If you’re not good asking for help or don’t enjoy it, this is the skillset in a founder that you’re looking for.
My technical cofounders almost never ask for help. They solve coding problems by figuring it out for themselves. Great engineers love the challenge of working through a solution on their own.
Whether it be employees, investors, advisors, media, users, whatever, camp director style cofounders get people on board and generally love doing it. Want proof that you found a great Camp Directot cofounder? You’ll see it everywhere in the quality of people that he attracts to help with all sorts of random things.
The Steve Jobs Protoge (product)
The Steve Jobs protoge rocks as a cofounder. Obviously. If it’s for real at any order of magnitude. If he has 1% the talent of Jobs, you’re golden! This type of cofounder is just obsessed about product design stuff. You know intuitively while working with him that feature creep will never be a problem. Launching early may become difficult because he’s such a perfectionist, but that’s a problem you’ll deal with.
The great part about this type of cofounder is that they exhibit early proof everywhere they go. They keep impeccably awesome apartments. They have blogs that are exquisitely well-designed. They’re own personal branding is clean, articulate, and meaningful. They take great delight in simple products.
The Hustler (sales)
The hustler gets meetings and closes deals. He’s generally more scrappy than polished. He never gives up and is endlessly creative. I have only anectdotal data on this, but I feel like the best hustlers I know look, at first, to be fairly unimpressive. Maybe there’s some kind of chip-on-the-shoulder thing going on there that motivates a guy to keep going after a hundred no’s.
Testing the hustler may be difficult to at first because they may not have had a good reason to hustle ever before. For these guys, a little real life test will do just fine. Check out howTristan Walker got his job at Foursquare. That’s hustle.
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