The Role of Expertise

Until you find PM Fit and some scale, you will likely need to build, sell and pivot several times. So it's very hard to identify specific technical or business skills you need in co-founders at the start. I think well rounded people who can work very “hands on” are good co-founders. After you find PM Fit, you can start to find specialists to fill in gaps on the team.

I believe having a co-founding team with a mix of both business and technical experience is crucial.  This let’s you split technical and business responsibilities and divide work to people with better expertise.  For example, the technical co-founder can focus on product while the business co-founder can focus on fundraising and marketing.

I agree with Charles on this, especially for true early stage co-founders. It’s hard to know what specific areas you need more strength in when things are that early. Another way to think about it is that early stage co-founders basically by definition need to do a lot of different things well, so if you’re looking for a specialist that early you’re already going down the wrong path. I do think though that successful partnerships end up figuring out that some people more naturally contribute value in one way or another, and you find different roles that best help the business move forward. For example, my wife ended up being more in charge of marketing and sales, though we didn’t start off saying “hey let’s have you be the sales and marketing co-founder”.