I am a non-technical founder. What do you think are the best questions to ask a potential technical co-founder(s) or any co-founder when deciding whether to partner with them? I have a client order that needs to be fulfilled and identified potential future products so would like a longer term partner vs. using various development shops for each build. I bring the business experience, sales, legal, finance, network of “experts” (it’s science based) and domain expertise (it’s an enterprise product).
I invested years in identifying the market, validated customers etc. and secured a sale based on a concept that had not been built (it had been built for another domain but it is not possible to get hold of this) and have more warm BD leads. Once the client offered a large potential budget, my original technical co-founder (we were 50/50) decided he didn’t want to go forward on that basis and felt I should get zero equity. In hindsight, I realized that I had not educated myself enough on the engineering and product development so had felt he was the only one to do this.
I read /story/not-lose-technical-co-foundersemployees/ and thought it was helpful. I don’t want to be blindsided again and I want to be more clear on everyone’s abilities. What’s everyone’s thoughts on the best questions to ask and also what questions they should have asked?
Thank you