Tips For Technical Startup Founders | Startup School

**Diana Hu** (0:09)
Welcome everyone to How to Build and Succeed as a Technical Founder for this Startup School Talk. Quick intro, I'm Diana Hu. I'm currently a Group Partner at YC.
And previously, I was a co-founder and CTO for Escher Reality, which was a startup building augmented reality SDK for game developers. And we eventually had an exit and sold to Niantic, where I was the Director of Engineering and heading up all of the AR platform there. So I know a few things about building something from, well, it's just an idea to then a prototype to launching an MVP, which is like a bit duct tape-y to then scaling it and getting to product market fit and scaling systems to millions of users. So what are we gonna cover in this talk is three stages. First is what is the role of the technical founder and who are they? Number two, how do you build in each of the different stages where all of you are in startup school?
Ideating, which is just an idea, you're just getting started. Building an MVP once you got some validation and getting it to launch and then launch where you wanna iterate towards product market fit.
And then I'll have a small section on how the role of the technical founder evolves post product market fit. I won't cover it too much because a lot of you at the startup school are mostly in this earlier stage. And I'm excited to give this talk because I compiled it from many conversations and chats with many YC technical founders, like from Algolia, Segment, Optimally, WayApp. So I'm excited for all of their inputs and examples in here. All right, the technical founder. Sometimes I hear non-technical founders say, I need somebody to build my app.
So that isn't going to cut it. A technical founder is a partner in this whole journey of a startup, and it requires really intense level of commitment. And you're just a dev. What does a technical founder do? They lead a lot of the building of the product, of course, and also talking with users. And sometimes I get the question of who is the CEO or CTO for a technical founder, and this is a nuanced answer. It really depends on the type of product, the industry you're in, the complete scale composition of the team to figure out who the CEO or CTO is.
And I've seen technical founders be the CEO, the CTO, or various other roles. And what does the role of the technical founder look like in the early stages? It looks a lot like being a lead developer. Like if you've been a lead developer at a company, you are in charge of putting the project together and building it and getting it out to the finish line.
Or if you're contributing to a open source project and you're the main developer, you make all the tech choices. But there's some key differences from being a lead developer. You gotta do all the tech things. Like if you're doing software, you're gonna have to do the front end, the back end, DevOps, the website, the UX, even IT to provision the Google accounts, anything. If you're building hardware and maybe you're just familiar with electrical and working with EagleCAD, you'll have to get familiar with the mechanical too. And you'll, of course, as part of doing all the tech things, you'll have to talk with users to really get those insights to iterate. 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.
You're going to have bias towards action and moving quickly, and actually deciding with a lot of incomplete information. You're going to get comfortable with technical debt, inefficient processes, and a lot of ugly code, and basically lots of chaos. And all of this is to say is the technical founder is committed to the success of your company.
And that means doing whatever it takes to get it to work. And it's not going to cut it. If you're an employee at a company, I sometimes hear, oh, this task or this thing is not in my pay grade. No, that's not going to cut it here. You got to do it. This next section on how to build.
The first stage is the ideating stage where you just have an idea of what you want to build. And the goal here is to build a prototype as soon as possible with the singular focus to build something to show and demo to users. And it doesn't even have to work fully. In parallel, your CEO, co-founder will be finding a list of users in these next couple of days to tee up meetings to show the prototype when it's ready. So the principle here is to build very quickly in a matter of days. And sometimes I hear it's like, oh, Diana, a day, prototype, that seems impossible. How do you do it? And one way of doing it is building on top of a lot of prototyping software, and you keep it super, super simple. So for example, if you're a software company, you will build a clickable prototype, perhaps using something like Figma or Envision. If you're a DevTools company, you may just have a script that you wrote in an afternoon and just launch it on the terminal.