Three ways to get the technical half

Route one: give away equity

A technical cofounder is the best outcome available and the hardest to get. Somebody who owns the problem the way you do, who is there at eleven at night when the thing falls over, and who is paid in the same currency as you: the company being worth something later.

It fails in two ways. The first is that you don't find one. Good technical cofounders are being asked by everyone, and the ones available quickly are usually available for a reason.

The second is worse. You find someone, you like them, and you sign twenty-five per cent over to a person you've known for three months. Eighteen months later they leave, or they stop working, or you disagree about direction, and a quarter of your company is now owned by somebody who isn't building it. Vesting helps and doesn't solve it.

The arithmetic that matters: what is twenty-five per cent of what you think this company could be worth, and what would it cost to buy the same engineering hours in cash. If the second number is smaller by a wide margin, equity is buying you commitment rather than labour. Sometimes that's exactly right. Be clear that it's what you're buying.

Route two: hire an agency

Predictable, contractual, and available on Monday. You write a specification, they quote a fixed price, they build it.

It fails when the specification is wrong, and for a first product the specification is nearly always wrong. Not because you wrote it badly. Because the thing you learn in month two is that customers want a different version of what you asked for, and by then the fixed price is fixed against the old one.

The second failure is quieter. An agency is paid to deliver what was agreed, and under a fixed-price contract that is the correct behaviour. Nobody in that arrangement is paid to tell you that feature four is a bad idea. So it gets built.

Agencies work well when you know exactly what you want, the scope genuinely won't move, and the thing is a known shape. A marketing site, a mobile app version of an existing product, an integration between two systems that already exist.

Route three: rent the technical half

Senior engineers on fixed days a week, holding the decisions a technical cofounder would hold, without equity and without a founder title. Monthly, cancellable, with a term.

It fails when you need somebody who cares the way an owner cares. A rented team will tell you the truth and will do the work, and they will not lie awake about your churn rate. If what you actually need is a partner rather than a capability, this isn't it, and any supplier who tells you otherwise is selling.

It also stops making sense at a predictable point. Once you have your own engineers and enough revenue to keep them, holding the technical decisions in-house is better in every direction. The right version of this arrangement helps you get there and says so out loud.

The question that decides it

Not "which is cheapest." Ask instead: do I know what to build, and do I know who should decide when I'm wrong?

If you know both, an agency is fine and probably cheapest. If you know neither, you need a person, and equity is the honest price of a person. If you know the first but not the second, which is the most common position a first-time founder is in, renting the technical half is the arrangement that fits, because it buys judgement without buying a permanent partner.