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Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

Having non-technical founders who failed to even outsource their project is an enormous red flag. Nobody there knew how to make the product a reality and if it is you who is doing 100% of the work, then you obviously deserve 100% of the equity. "Having an idea" is not worth equity.

If you thought the idea was great, there was an obvious golden opportunity for you, none of the people there are going to make this into a product, but you can. If the idea was bad, getting paid in equity means getting paid in something worthless.

The only situation where it is reasonable to deal with such a totally defunct organization is if they pay you a lot of money. And if there is a single missed payment you stop any work until you are paid.

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Too many fantasy tales of overnight successes out there. It takes an enormous amount of work to make things look easy - in a commercial setting. Some people just pick things up and are relatively good at them but they cannot productive it. To do so you have to be able explain it and they don’t understand it, they just do it. So they can’t make a business out of it and they cannot become top of their field because they lack the fundamentals and the work ethic.

I could talk anybody to death with all of my ideas. I only get to work on very few of them. I can’t imagine how sad a life it would be to only have one. It’s great for mentoring though because there’s always something shiny on the shelf and I can let them window shop for one they like.

I certainly should have spotted this as soon as they offered me a contract that was a clumsily-reworded version of the contract for the awful overseas contractors

Oh hi! Are you me?

In fairness I think "non-technical" needs to be clarified a little. I can easily envision (and have seen) founders who are not themselves actual software engineers but who have some background in project management or otherwise managing tech teams hiring an offshore team and moving very quickly to a viable product cost efficiently.

In fact I'd bet it's at least a coin-flip that this profile would actually be more effective than a hardcore CS background engineer who hasn't ever managed teams or launched and sold a product.

Of course that's a small caveat, since that's almost never what we're talking about, like in this example. But still, seems worth noting that the outsourcing of the build isn't necessarily the red flag, the red flag is the leader of the project having no experience in building and launching useful software.

> I think "non-technical" needs to be clarified a little

> non-technical founders who failed to even outsource their project

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