What technical founders need from a deal-side co-founder
The other half of the founding team, from someone who has sat on both sides of the table.
I founded a fintech that was accepted into the FCA Regulatory Sandbox, where I was responsible for machine learning, engineering and R&D and managed the CTO and a team of six. The Effect TypeScript library was incubated and funded at that company, led by our then CTO Michael Arnaldi, and open-sourced, building on the work of fp-ts. Today I sit on the board of Effectful Technologies, which is backed by Amplify Partners and Heavybit.
Before that, I spent two decades on the investor side. That combination gives me a clear view of what an exceptional technical founder needs from the person beside them.
Capital as a product
Fundraising is not an event; it is a product with its own roadmap. The best founding teams know, at any moment, what the next round must prove, who will lead it and what the business has to look like on the day it is raised. Someone on the team should own that roadmap full-time.
The story and the product must agree
Investors notice quickly when the fundraising narrative and the product roadmap tell different stories. The deal-side co-founder’s job is to keep them aligned, so that every milestone the engineers ship also moves the valuation.
Protecting focus
At a high-growth company the scarcest resource is the technical founder’s attention. A good commercial co-founder takes the board, the investors, the contracts and the finance stack off their plate, and brings back only the decisions that genuinely need them.
Open source as an asset
Open-source adoption is a real asset. Turning it into a commercial asset without damaging the community is one of the hardest problems in developer tools, and one of the most interesting.
I am interested in co-founder and founding-executive roles at well-funded AI, fintech and proptech companies. If that is your company, I would like to hear from you.