A minimal response to The City of Founders Without Hackers.
New York City has a shortage of entrepreneurially minded technical talent. It’s not that there’s not enough engineers. Hardly. Columbia, NYU and the rest of the eastern seaboard spits out engineers in spades each year. But somehow those aren’t funneled into, aware of or interested in the NYC startups, at least at the early stage. Local engineers, it seems, want to be employees, not co-founders. [emphasis added]
Why aren’t the non-technical founders able to easily find technical co-founders? Because both sides are looking for the wrong thing in the wrong way. At least I know I am. As a startup-curious technically adept potential co-founder, it is not sufficient to wait to be found, I must be seeking, doing.
If non-technical founders cannot find technical founders, blame cannot rest squarely on the “engineers”. In the passage below, Saras Sarasvathy suggests that it is the responsibility of the entrepreneurs to also be cultivating the partners they would like to have. Where technical co-founders exist in short supply may not be because potential technical co-founders are lazy, it’s because both the techs and non-techs are lazy.
I learn this lesson again and again: The world will not come to you, asking you to do great things. You must simply do them.
Experienced professionals in the entrepreneurial arena, whether they are bankers, lawyers, VCs or other investors have always agreed with successful entrepreneurs that finding and leading the right people is the key to creating an enduring venture. These entrepreneurs know that such “right” people are not on the job market waiting for the jobs and incentives the entrepreneurs can offer them. Instead the “right” people need emotional ownership in whether they are bankers, lawyers, VCs or other investors have by the belief that the effects they create will embody their deepest passions and aspirations while enabling them to achieve their best potential.
But great entrepreneurs realize something more about the central role of people in shaping the urn. Using effectual logic, they understand that they too cannot wait around to find the “right” people all the time. Besides continually striving to attract the “right” people, they learn also to nurture and grow them in their own backyards. As Josiah Wedgewood wrote, “We have to make artists of mere men.”
Saras D. Sarasvathy, “What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial?” [pdf]
