So if you’re a non-technical person with an idea for a tech startup and you need to find a cofounder, how do you do it? The first step is to stop thinking about what you can offer them to join your startup, and start thinking about what you can offer them, period.

If you’re starting a web company and you can’t code, there are a few things you can bring to the table, including:

• experience managing a successful startup
• sales and marketing experience, especially in a startup environment
• valuable connections, especially in a startup environment
• money

If you have the first three, you’re probably not going to have a tough time finding developers willing to work with you, so you probably won’t be reading this post. And if you had the fourth one, you could just hire developers, so what’s left? I’ll tell you what’s not left: your idea. The reality is that the only thing the vast majority of non-technical founders can really offer is the ability to hustle and work their ass off to support the development effort. And that’s not something most of them want to hear or want to do.

My advice: if you’re looking for a skilled developer for a software startup, consider them an equal founder and split the pie accordingly. And then work 10x as hard as them to make up for the fact that they’re probably better off without you than you are without them.

Or maybe this is just the arrogant developer in me? Feel free to post counter-examples where non-technical founders didn’t bring any of the above 4 things to the table and the startup was a success.

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That was two years ago, and HN has quite literally changed my life. It’s by far the best community I’ve ever been a part of online, and perhaps one of the best offline as well. I’ve learned a ton, gotten involved in other ventures that I wouldn’t have otherwise, and made lots of very valuable connections. There’s a lot to say, but here’s the gist of what makes HN so awesome:

Less sizzle, more steak

HN is inherently different from Reddit (a YC company, btw) and Digg, for a few reasons. I think the association with PG / YC has helped tremendously, but there’s also the fact that it’s not a democracy. PG and the YC alumni have the power to kill stories and comments, or change their titles, and I think this has a tremendous effect on keeping the right kinds of people interested in the site, and also shaping the behavior of those who stick around. Tech community sites always seem to be a victim of their success, and as the community grows and becomes more diverse, the only content that reaches the top is that which appeals to the lowest common denominator. So after the site gets a more mass-market audience, you start to see lots of flamebait, top 10 lists, funny videos, etc. It’s designed to appeal to our baser instincts, and it usually works. By contrast, HN discourages any kind of hyperbole, top 10 anything, linkbait, etc. Titles are encouraged to be short, descriptive, and simple. And often if they aren’t, an editor changes or kills them. Submitted stories that link to blogspam instead of the original article are often changed to point to the richer source. The end result is an incredibly high signal-to-noise ratio. I often find that almost every single story on the front-page is an in-depth and thought-provoking piece on a deep and intellectually engaging subject. Where else can you find that?

Deep intellectual curiosity

HN definitely skews more to the subjects of technology and startups, but you can find good articles and commentary on almost any intellectually-engaging subject (and if you can’t, you should submit some). As an example, some of the top articles from the last week or so include this piece from Gourmet magazine on bribing your way into exclusive restaurants, an article about how to fail a Ph.D., an article about how India’s “red rain” may contain life from elsewhere in the galaxy, and a report about marginal tax rates at different socioeconomic levels. And all of these stories have amazing commentary by the HN users, which brings me to my next point:

Rich conversations

The comments on HN are incredible. Mind-blowingly so. Maybe I’m stupid and other users aren’t impressed, but hanging out on HN is like sitting in a room with a group of thousands of super-smart folks with incredibly diverse life experiences and deep domain expertise across a huge variety of topics. And all you do all day is bring up interesting topics and really explore them in detail, listening to the folks with the most experience in each topic, asking questions, etc. I love all the articles on HN, but I’d estimate that 2/3rds of the value I derive from HN is in the comments, not the articles. And why are the comments so incredible? Glad you asked:

Amazingly accomplished members

I doubt anyone tracks the stats, but it sometimes seems like 50% of the rockstars in the tech world are on HN, from founders and CEOs to investors. It’s not uncommon to see a news story about a technology company and then see the CEO or founder on HN telling folks what’s really going on.

And on top of that, you’ve got the real stars, the folks slugging it out in the trenches of small, medium, and large companies all over the world. Some of these folks are much, much smarter than their humility would lead you to believe. When I see stories on patent or startup law, I wait for grellas to show up and tell us what’s really going on. If security issues are up for discussion, I know that I’ll learn something when tptacek posts. And then there are the folks who have such an intelligent and unique voice that you can tell who the comment is before you see their username (patio11 and edw519, to name two).

Incredibly supportive and helpful community

Multiple times per day, people post links to their new startup or project and ask for advice or feedback and the community always responds. I can tell you from experience that you can expect: a) encouragement for launching something (this is huge), b) positive feedback on the stuff you’re doing right, and c) someone kicking your ass for the areas you’re falling short. It’s a humbling experience to have people who have started, built, and sold startups for tens of millions going through your baby startup project, but it’s a great way to turbocharge your growth.

Additionally, the HN community is always ready to offer advice. Not sure if you should take that promising job with a startup or go back to grad school? Want to know who’s hiring? Want to meet like-minded people in Toronto, Tokyo, or Timbuktu? Need a cofounder to apply to YC with? These are the types of questions that get answered on HN every day, and it creates a vibe that’s hard to find elsewhere. People email you back if you reach out to them, and it’s not uncommon to get emails from other HN folks about a post submitted or a good comment.

OK, enough fawning. In spite of all the awesome-sauce, there are some things I don’t like:

Huge time-sink

This is one of those negative things that’s the result of something positive, but the consequences are definitely negative. I can easily burn up a couple hours a day on HN. That’s almost without trying. I head there when I’m bored, when I hit a hard problem, or when I’m standing in line at the grocery store. I’ve learned an incredible amount over the last couple years, so I wouldn’t say it’s a waste of time, but it’s easy to spend too much time here, instead of applying what you’ve learned.

Can tend towards group-think

There’s definitely a variety of opinions on most topics, and watching several very smart people skillfully debate all sides of a complex issue is a rare treat. That said, there are a number of positions that aren’t well-received. Some of them are related to typically controversial topics like politics and religion, so the community tends to avoid those subjects altogether. But there are other examples as well. For example:

A bit elitist, especially about programming vs. business

For whatever reason, hackers seem to really look down on business folks, portraying them as empty, vapid suits and no skills other than schmoozing their way into a top MBA program. Speaking as a developer who served as a product manager at a large company, there’s definitely a cultural divide from the other side as well, and business people don’t always give tech people the respect they deserve either. On HN, you see this kind of attitude being displayed all over the place, sometimes explicitly, but often more subtle. You can almost guarantee that any post about a disagreement between management and the tech guys will result in the community posting support for the tech folks. And the hackers almost always minimize the contributions of the business folks to a venture. The really ironic thing is that the majority of the startups and projects created by the HN crowd will fail, not for lack of technical excellence, but because they don’t understand the fundamentals of sales and marketing.

However, in spite of these caveats, I deeply value the time I’ve spent interacting on HN, the amazing stories I’ve heard, the connections I’ve made, and the lessons I’ve learned through the experience of others. If you’re into tech, business, startups, or anything that might appeal to a group of independent, logical, curious, and incredibly smart folks, please do check out HN. Just be sure you read the guidelines first.

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The situation gets really ugly when you consider that you could invest all that money saved. We still need cell phones, but we’d just get prepaid phones and use Skype for calls in the office, which could easily cut our monthly bill from $150 / month down to $50 / month. If we invested that $700 we saved by not buying the phones, and then saved an extra $100 / month at an inflation-adjusted return of 8% over the next 40 years, we’d end up with $366,000 (even after you adjust for inflation). I’m not sure there’s any Tetris clone or Wikipedia entry that’s worth that much to me. This is especially true when I consider that I too often use the phone as a means to escape my current reality, which is detrimental to my desire to be more present, purposeful, and engaged.

Now, you can break just about anything down like this. Enjoying that cup of coffee? Well just think of how much you could have if you never drank coffee again and invested the money instead!! Some financial authors advocate just this, though I think the more salient point is that you should think carefully about what’s really important to you, and look at the true cost of ownership before you flush hundreds of thousands down the toilet without even realizing it.

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1. Magento is much better than most of the alternatives.

The popular PHP open-source competitors are OSCommerce, ZenCart, QuickCart, and X-Cart. There are others, but these are the ones I see most often. I haven’t used QuickCart and X-Cart much, but I’ve worked on multiple sites with the first two, and they’re all universally terrible. It’s hard for me to imagine a piece of software more poorly designed than OSCommerce is. There are no “modules”: plugins are “installed” by following directions in a text file to hack the application core. Stuff like: “open cart.php, find line 37, which should look something like this, and paste this in after it.” This means that after you install a few plugins, you can never upgrade the core, and you’ll have more and more issues installing future plugins, because the core code won’t look like those text instructions expect it to. Truly awful. If you designed OSCommerce, you should be ashamed of yourself.

By contrast, Magento is pretty clean, follows a standard, uses object-oriented design patterns, and is completely modular.

2. Magento still is pretty terrible.

The main issue I have with Magento is the documentation. Specifically, that there isn’t any. It’s an incredibly powerful ecommerce platform, built around an extensible architecture that developers can extend, and the docs would all fit on a few sheets of paper. It’s very, very frustrating, and even more so because the business model of the company who produced Magento apparently is to sell subscriptions to the “Enterprise Edition” at $12,000 a year, so they have little incentive to create good docs to help developers avoid the need for their expensive services.

3. If you can, use Shopify.

Ecommerce is a fairly complicated area and the software generally reflects that. So if you can avoid reinventing the wheel, you should. You can do this via using open source platforms like Magento, but you’ll still spend a pretty penny on design and development talent. Another way to go if you need something a little less flexible are hosted ecommerce offerings like Yahoo Stores or Shopify. From what I’ve seen of Shopify, they offer an incredible value for people just getting started in ecommerce (and even some pretty big stores) for a very reasonable price. And you still have the option of customizing things to a great degree. However, there will be those times when you just need more control than hosted solutions offer. And when those times come, I can honestly say that Magento is a great solution. Just be prepared to pull your hair out for a few weeks (or months) while you learn your way around.

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So if you’re about to go to college or you’re in college and you’re thinking that maybe you should skip it because so many other successful folks did, take a second look. If you don’t have that something that pretty much forces you to drop out, I wouldn’t do it. If you feel like you’re torn and you’re not sure what to do, don’t quit. You should only quit if you literally just can’t keep going because you’ve started something on the side and it’s blowing up so fast that you can’t keep your head above water. And even then, you should try and leave the doors open to return in a year or two if things don’t work out.

Oh, and if you’re entrepreneurially-inclined, do seriously consider starting something in college. You probably will never have as easy a launching pad and such a plethora of potential co-founders. It could go nowhere (but you’ll learn something), it could pay for books and beers, or it could be the start of the story you’ll tell someday about how you dropped out of Harvard to run your fledgling company that’s now worth billions. You really have very little to lose.

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It’s a nice ideal, and one that perhaps we should aim for, but here’s why it won’t happen for awhile:

1. The technology that’s widely in use just isn’t there yet. Many of MIT’s OpenCourseWare courses have only notes, no video, and the ones that have video often lack resolution to be able to read the notes on the board. Also, has anyone ever used Blackboard? It’s horrible. Unfortunately, Blackboard is basically a patent troll company wrapped in the guise of an online education software company, and their patent portfolio hangs like a dark cloud over this space, crushing a lot of potential innovations.

2. Not everyone has the tenacity to sit through four years of college classes and really learn something. Even fewer have the dedication to do it on their own, remotely, with no human interaction other than a webcam to guide them.

3. Schools such as MIT serve as a filter and a credibility indicator. They have great professors, of course, but anyone can obtain the raw knowledge they teach. What’s harder to obtain on your own is the stamp of approval that you’ve learned the material. Anyone who went to a top school will tell you that having it on their resume makes a difference in getting a response from a hiring manager. Many people look at such a resume and think: “MIT…must be pretty smart.” That’s the power of a credibility indicator at work.

4. The people that are needed to make such a huge shift happen are 1) parents, 2) government (for incentives), 3) existing institutions of higher learning, 4) employers (to hire these graduates). Aside from the organizational incentives for these groups, which also are not favorable to such a shift, the people who make up each of these groups are likely to have degrees that are granted using the current model, and thus none are likely to want to undermine their own education choices. What’s the incentive for them to break with status quo?

5. School isn’t just about what you learn…the best schools serve as a kind of bridging ground between childhood and adulthood. Perhaps there are better ways to accomplish this, but some kind of “GED for higher education” hardly seems to be a good solution. I’d rather hire employees who are smart and dedicated than knowledgeable. Most of what they need to know can be taught, but character and raw intelligence can’t be, or at least not easily. Getting good enough grades in high school to get into a great school and then doing well in that school indicate both mental aptitude and the perseverance that I want in people who work for me.

Let me be clear: I absolutely love iTunes U, OpenCourseWare, and all of the other really innovative online education options that we have at our fingertips. I’m just skeptical that they serve the same purpose as college, and even if they do, that our society has the willpower and foresight to be able to replace the college industry so easily. What are your thoughts?

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3. Free at last!

I don’t have kids, but after playing with the app, I think it would be something that most children would enjoy playing with. It’s got fun music and sound effects, colorful pictures, and interactive animations on every letter. They really did a great job on the app, and all the work they’ve put into it over the last few months really shows. At $2.99, it’s a huge bargain compared with what you’d pay for a non-interactive book about the ABCs, and your kids are sure to spend a lot more time playing with this and exploring the alphabet.

Check it out on iTunes!

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I know everyone in the tech community is drooling over this, but I’d give it 50/50 odds at best. The real advantage it has going for it is that Google can throw a lot of weight behind it and maybe push it through with sheer force of will. Here’s the problem with Wave: what is it? Every blog post I’ve read about it struggled with how to explain it. I read this entire post and I’m still not sure of how I’m supposed to use this thing or what pressing problem it solves. Even the videos I’ve seen are super long, presumably because you can’t really show it off in 60 seconds. “Well, it’s kind of a mix between email and IM, but also with wiki functionality and social networking…oh, and it’s got these crazy widgets and media sharing and stuff. Hmmm…you really have to play with it to understand.” 97% of the people I know wouldn’t get that, and don’t have the patience to figure it out. It seems like it’s just too flexible, that it can be used for a million different things, which makes it hard to know how to use at first. Think about almost every successful web site out there and how easy they are to explain, especially when they first launched. You would have zero trouble explaining Google, Youtube, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, etc. in a 60 second video.

Wave is like FriendFeed on crack, and FF is already dangerously close to being too much for most normal people to grok. I just don’t see it catching on.

I’m not often great about predictions (I thought Twitter was doomed when I first heard about it), but it’s nice to occasionally get something right

My rule of thumb for consumer internet products is that I need to be able to explain it to my grandparents in 60 seconds, and it needs to be easy enough to use that I can figure it out while I’m drunk [1]. Anything else is going to probably be too complicated for normal (read: non-masochistic) people to hassle with figuring out.

1. Not that I ever have been, of course

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1. Get it running
2. Do very high-level overview
3. Dig into specifics
4. Switch to clean backup or rollback with version control
5. Cleanup unused code
6. Fix some small bugs or issues

Get it running

I’m assuming you’re doing development on your local machine, so the first step is going to be getting the project running correctly. In part 1, I emphasized the importance of having a reference copy so you can tell the difference between config issues and things that are just broken. Get things setup, compare to reference copy, run through some user flows on both sites, and make sure you’re all set.

Do very high-level survey

I start with the basics, like where are the various config files, does it follow MVC or another design pattern, what’s the basic flow from file to file, etc. This is usually accomplished by tearing up the code, throwing debug statements around, etc. Take lots of notes, and add comments to files as you figure out what they do and why they’re there.

Dig into the specifics of the code

Once you have the higher-level stuff, try to figure out the core of the app and how it works. There are common things that most sites have, like authentication, but most projects have their own special sauce that’s unique. Sometimes it’s for good reason, often not, but you’ll need to understand it. Figure out what’s unique about this project and spend some time really mucking with the code here. Put in lots of comments and debug statements, and really try and understand the rough outlines of what the code is doing.

Switch to clean backup or rollback with version control

Depending on the damage you’ve done to the code, you might want to go back to a clean copy of the code, or revert your changes using whatever version control you’re using. However, this does mean you’ll lose those comments you made, so it’s a judgment call. The alternative is removing all your debug statements and other changes, and running through the app to ensure you haven’t introduced new problems.

Cleanup unused code

I hate code clutter. There’s nothing worse than starting a new project and seeing things like this:

• functions.php
• functions2.php
• _functions.php
• functions_by_brad.php
• functions_new.php
• old_functions2.php

Equally bad are files where 75% of the code has been commented out and just left hanging around. These are all consequences of not using version control properly. If at all possible, put the project in version control, figure out which of these files is currently in use, and clean the rest of this cruft out. This is optional at this stage, and sometimes I wait until later in the project when I’m more familiar with what goes where.

Fix small bugs or issues

Now that you’ve got a good high-level understanding of what’s what and how the program execution flow goes, and maybe even cleaned up some stuff, it’s time to add your own mark. I like to start with small bugs. The smaller the better, because you’ll spend time looking for where to make a small change, which gives you better understanding of the code. Big changes at first can leave you feeling overwhelmed. So look at the list of bugs or features that the client has provided and try to sort them in terms of anticipated difficulty and tackle the first couple that seem like a snap to fix.

You’ll know the project like the back of your hand in no time.

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• 1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
• 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college. (!!!)
• 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year. (!!!)
• 70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
• 57 percent of new books are not read to completion.

And even if they are readers, they might just not be interested. So while I always felt good about giving books to others, I wonder if it really made any difference. I’m still free to recommend books to others, and I do so constantly. They might not go read them, but I’ve realized that if the hassle of going to get the book is too much to overcome, reading it is also probably too much to overcome. And that reminded me of a very appropriate quote:

“Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?”
~Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

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