Ask HN: Do I let my brother take over as CTO?

On the tech side, if you've got a silverlight-based app that you'd think might be better as a pure javascript-based offering (the 50% issue you mentioned elsewhere) bringing someone in who is not a js guru isn't going to get you any further along. So... someone coming in and wanting to change tech mostly just to suit them (although I think there can be some financial advantages to java/php over a .net approach) doesn't sound like a good move.

Putting on my "old guy" hat... you're 15. He's not much older. You're both young and he's wanting to horn in on your baby because he saw a movie. This just doesn't good to me, but the ages - and family angle - make it worse. I'd steer clear of this one as politely as possible.

If your current project doesn't pan out, perhaps you can start something new together later, but approach that with a clean slate.

I do kind of feel like he's taking advantage of me, I get that feeling a lot actually. I do think he could be a great asset in the future, mostly when the work becomes too much for me but I really do get the feeling that he wants to take over and do it all.

I want this to work out, I don't like high school. I am willing to accept failure but there is more than one idea I've thought of that I like, only this is the one that I think I can do the best on right at this moment, and in the far future I want to work on those. (Those have high starting costs whereas this has almost no costs in the beginning and I see personal gain from this because K-12 Education is awful)

Old man speaking here again. It's fashionable the past few years to drop out of college and head to Silicon Valley to strike it rich. I get that. I would not recommend dropping out of high school. You've got perhaps 2 years left of it. If you want to slack there and hone your skills on something else - fine. But unless people are already paying you a crapload of money for stuff you've done, stick it out. That probably sounds very 'stick in the mud', and it possibly is. Just... stick it out. Out of the probably 70-80 years you've got left on this planet, another 2 spent getting the most rudimentary education and exposure to a variety of ideas (even if it sucks) isn't going to kill you, or indeed kill your startup baby.

If there's one thing I've learned over the years is that good ideas and good opportunities constantly present themselves - it's like a river. You need to be able to grab on to one when you're ready, and at 15 I'm just not sure you're ready.

Yes, we see stories of 9 year old CEOs making fortunes on the web (one started a furniture company or something like that) but they also have close-knit supportive parents and families. You've not mentioned parents, but you're already not on the same wavelength as your brother, which is a big red flag.

I did a 'startup' (services consultancy, really) with my brother for several years - it didn't end well, but we've stayed friendly and in touch, which (to me) is ultimately more important.

Well I never said I'd drop out, even if it came off that I implied that. The idea I'm working on involves K-12 education. It's essentially a file-sharing network for academia and hobbyists. But the file-sharing part is mashed in with your courses, so when a teacher posts the homework any other teacher can use that homework as well or if a student doesn't understand how to do the night's homework they can just search for the concept (i.e Quadratic Equations) and it will come up with a list of videos made by teachers for that concept. That's a very informal and not a very elaborate description but that's essentially it.

> My question is should I let him take over as CTO?

I say remove the word "CTO" or any other 3-letter acronym that starts with C from your lexicon for now. Can he be your partner -- that is, can you depend on him and be open and honest with him?

> told me he had watched the Social Network last night, and it made him want to work on this with me

Yikes.

I honestly don't know if I can depend on him or not, if it's any indicator of dependability, he had around a 2.8 GPA in College and he wasn't really doing any side-projects. His main ordeal would probably be his job, as he has a full-time job as a System Admin. If I judge his dependability based on that then it's shit. I think I'll ask him why he wants to do this and if he's honest about that his response will tell me whether he's dependable.

Him watching the Social Network and being motivated from that is slightly worrisome to me as well, but it was a movie that even with it being mostly fictitious, it still showed the possibility of success in Silicon Valley.

Everything you've said on this post leads to a big, flashing, neon sign saying "DON'T DO IT, MAN".

It's your own choice, but if you can't depend on him, doesn't have the skills in the areas he'd need to have, and seemingly wants to muscle in because he's watched a movie, then I think it's probably better if you find a way to decline without being too rude about it.

Maybe help brainstorm his own idea he can run with, if only to be supportive?

It seems just from your tone in the post and your comment below that you already think he's not dependable and not someone you want to work with.

If you think he brings VITAL skills to the table that your venture won't get launched without, I would consider using reverse vesting to make sure he gets out what he puts in.

For an explanation of reverse vesting: http://www.venturechoice.com/glossary/reverse-vesting.htm

I think you should take this project on your own. You are 15 and have a lot to learn. Even if this idea fails you will learn from it's execution more than if your brother takes over. Also, you are in my eyes more passionate about it compared to someone who gets a bit of fire in his belly due to watching Brave Heart, oh i mean socialnetwork. Learn you some python!

I don't want this to be just something I learn from. I want this to be something useful to many different people and allow people to both learn and enjoy their own hobbies better. I might explain later what the idea is if it's relevant to what someone comments.

Good, do it. Forget your brother and get something working that people can use. I can guarantee you, however, that by doing so, you will learn something. Don't be averse to that.

I'm fully expecting this to be a learning process, only I don't want that to be the goal. I'm still deciding whether or not to tell him no, I sort of like the idea of working with him, mostly because he knows a whole lot more than I do for development but I also feel like I'll do a lot better job than he would, and I don't like the idea of founding a company based upon cronyism. Maybe I'll need him in the future but right now I don't think I do

This sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

No way I would let someone who wasn't interested in this sort of thing until he saw a movie take over as anything beyond coffee-maker and maybe QA monkey at first.

His exact words were something along the lines of "The Social Network made me realize I don't just want to be an employee of a big company"

I might have over-exaggerated or I might not have, but I interpreted that as "I want to work with you because I saw the Social Network."

Back to the Future made realize I want to travel through time, and eventually ride a levitating skateboard.

However, reality never quite mirrors the movies.

It's great that your brother, after watching a movie that encapsulated about .000000001% of his total lifetime, realized he might want to pursue a different path in life. But, IMO, the best approach to this is not to think he is suddenly capable of taking over the technology operation of ANY startup. Maybe what wasn't clear in the movie is that most of the people involved in the early iteration of facebook had been performing their roles for some prior amount of time. Zuckerberg had been hacking for a while, the finance guy had been involved in finance for some time (he was the president of the investment club or something like that). You don't just watch a film and say "I'm CTO, bitch"

Yeah, this is true.

i don't see any problems with "I don't know any other languages than .NET/Mono/Silverlight" if it gets the job done.

Execution matters more than what programming language it is. Don't switch programming languages to suit somebody else.

That doesn't actually answer your question, but it is something you should think about.

I completely agree but I haven't done any real underlying code yet. I've completely designed all of the UI in Silverlight, and there are somethings I don't like about that, i.e all users have to have Silverlight installed, and even with a roughly 50% install base that still leaves the other 50% to install it, which some people won't want to do and overall just reduces the maximum number of users. But I didn't want to go ahead and jump on the bandwagon to learn PHP or ASP.NET because I think Silverlight is better than all of those. It has almost everything this needs out of the box and I can develop for it for free with DreamSpark. My real main issue with my brother working with me on this is that we completely disagree on what to use to code it. I do agree that a normal website would be nice but to get the same level of power and clean user-interface would be a huge amount of work and time.

I'd be weary of any new college grad that lists Java and C and C++ and Python on his resume, all while having no side projects to show work in such languages.

If anything, he may have taken courses where those languages were used to complete assignments, but that leaves you far from a software developer.