Making your First Technical Hire as a Non-Technical Founder

Some of my non-technical friends in the startup world have asked me how to go about making their first technical hire. This post is intented to summarize the advice I often give out to people looking for a technical cofounder, or a first engineer at an early stage startup.

To start, I think that your first engineering hire is one of the most influcencial decisions you’ll make during the first few years of your company. They’ll often be responsible not only for building the mvp, but will likely also be responsible for hiring the rest of the technical team. This means that your prospective hire needs to be a well rounded engineer with strong interpersonnal skills.

When talking to potential candidates, focus on what you can actually evaluate. Since you’re non-technical, don’t do coding challenges or exercises, as you wouldn’t know what to look for (whether or not these are valuable is a seperate discussion). Instead, evaluate their communication skills, and how good they are at understanding your problem space. Some sample discussions could be :

  • Walk me through a large project you previously worked on from a product perspective and an engineering perspective
    • Do they understand the product they worked on?
    • Can they explain the engineering design and tradeoffs in a way you can understand?
  • How would you go about building our product?
    • Do they clarify the scope and specs of the product? How comfortable are you that they really understand what they’re going to build?
    • Is the first version they’re pitching scrappy? Do they have a plan for the eventual architecture a few years down the line?
    • Do they have a plan for quality assurance and monitoring? They should be able to explain how they’ll detect production impacting issues.

In all cases, they should be able to communicate the technical pieces effectively to you, a non-technical person. If the candidate is able to clearly explain how they built or are planning to build something, odds are that they’d be able to actually do it.