I coach a lot of first-time founders. And one of the most common things I hear is:
“I just need to find a lead dev.”
No, you don’t.
You need a cofounder. A partner. A soulmate.
If you’re trying to build something real, something hard, something important, you don’t need someone who can write code. You need someone who believes what you believe. Someone who can carry the load when you’re too tired. Someone who finishes your sentence not because they’re guessing what sounds good, but because they’ve been thinking about the same problem with the same level of obsession as you.
That’s what Paul Canetti found when he got a random LinkedIn DM in 2010. He was building MAZ (then hilariously named MagAppZine), a platform to help publishers create mobile apps. He needed an iOS engineer. What he got instead was Shikah Arora, his future cofounder, partner, and the missing piece of a company that would go on to serve thousands and eventually get acquired.
The tools didn’t exist. They didn’t have funding. He had a cofounder in Hawaii, a new one in India, and he was in New York. Skype. Gchat. No Slack. But it worked because the commitment was real and the bar was high.
So if you’re building right now, remember:
Don’t settle.
Don’t hire just for skills.
Find the person who already believes what you believe.
Then go.
That’s not a dev. That’s a cofounder.
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