I found a tech co-founder. Here is how. (1 of 4)

In this series, I’m going to explain the four steps I took, with specific time frame, that helped me find a tech co-founder.

I would not say it’s necessary for anyone without tech background to find a tech co-founder in order to build a startup. In fact, I started an experiment to build a startup without a tech co-founder here. I’ll include in this series how this experiment ends.

Here, I only want to states the four things I did, one after one, that helped me find a tech co-founder. I studied Philosophy and worked in global logistics. When I resigned, there’s only one person in my whole network doing startup himself. Three months later, I found a tech co-founder and living my startup life.

If you’re non-tech person like me and would like to find a tech cofounder, this is for you.

Step 1: Learn everything about startups not just coding.

Time Needed: 5 hours every other day after work and full day every weekend, for 6-8 months before taking Step 2. On-going for life.

In late 2011, I started to read a lot about VC, tech startups, and advancement in new technologies. I spent at least 3 to 5 hours a night reading articles, blog posts, interviews, TED videos, everything that brings me closer to the startup world simply out of interest.

I learned JavaScript on codecademy. I spent days and nights trial and error on wordpress and drupal. I tested with CSS and PHP. I learned  the differences between seed round and series A. I get to know what’s lean startup, what’s iteration, what’s A/B test.

Before that, I have no idea with any of above, except basic HTML tags.

When I first told my friends that I was learning how to code because I’m interested in that, they says it’s useless, given my work then.

When I first told a mentor that I was learning how to code because I’m interested in tech startups, he says it’s useless because it’s more important to think about business plan.

In his Quora answer to “How do I find good technical co-founders?”, Drew Hoston suggests that one thing to do is to “learn to code enough to bang out a prototype”. I totally agree with that.

To me, both then and now, the thing is not about the codes, but the language that technical people speaks. It’s to show them respect that you’re putting effort in learning how to communicate with them.

For other things that I learned apart from programming, they’ll become handy in Step 2 and Step 4.