It has rained frogs before and, yes, it occasionally rains dragons. This is one of those times.

I have a startup concept. I think it’s legit. Here are some of its features:

• validated business model. This is an improvement (using machine learning, user-supplied data, and an innovative market mechanic that has never existed before) on a billion-dollar industry. 
• a “sexy” problem. I’m not getting into details, but if we pull this off, it’ll be known around the world, and hundreds of thousands of people will love (and some will pay lots of money for) the product.
• a progressive outlook. One of my major gripes with most of “Social” is that it’s focused on documenting social graphs rather than expanding them and improving peoples’ lives. This is focused on hard-core expansion.
• lots of open-source activity. For the goal of rapid prototyping, I’d like to build this thing in Clojure. We’ll be building up Clojure’s machine-learning infrastructure in a major way, and we’ll be putting a lot of our best stuff into the open-source world.
• “blue ocean” (for now). Right now, there are no competitors. There will be, within time, so we need to get a head start.
• pivot potential. One of the subproblems is to assess code quality (including documentation, hence NLP) automatically, and that’s something that could become an enterprise product if the riskier, many-moving-parts concept that I have in mind proves impractical.

Here are the downsides:

• I have about 2 weeks to pull starting parts together. I’ve worked for some terrible startups that have wrecked my finances, so I don’t have the savings that a person of my age should. I can’t afford to burn savings, at all. I’m going to need a “10x hustler” (co-founder #1; see below) who can bring in month-to-month money right away. Failing that, we can’t do the project. I’m married and almost 30 and can no longer afford to pretend that “boring adult stuff”– like health insurance, the need to save for retirement, and saving for future child-raising expenses– don’t exist. I don’t expect to be matching the compensation level I’d be getting in finance (I regularly turn away $200k+ hedge fund jobs, and I wouldn’t draw that much out) but I can’t afford to be savings-negative.
  
• We’ll be heavily reliant on third-party relationships. This is a problem with three main classes of actors. For two of them, there’s already strong signal that they would participate. The third class (who will provide our starting data) is more uncertain; it has two subclasses, one of which would be thrilled to participate but whose data will require serious NLP to mine, the other of which will have high-signal data but want to protect its interests. It’ll probably take 6 months to get that in order, and I’ll need someone with strong negotiation skills.
• We’ll need front-end expertise. I’ve worked on back-end projects my whole life, but back-end is hard to sell. That comes down to front-end work. I can learn FE, and I will, but while I come up to speed on the presentation aspects, we’re going to need someone who’s already capable of building kickass demos.

Here are some traits of the company I want to build:

• “Mid-growth”: after 25 people, no more than 40% headcount growth per year. I don’t want to be one of those horrible VC-istan companies that loses its culture in fast hiring. This isn’t a problem that requires a lot of “meat” but it does require a lot of smarts. 
• Open allocation after 25 people. In our high-risk startup stage, we’ll make some autonomy compromises that are necessary to make the damn thing work. Laser focus. (We’ll be compromising our own autonomy, as its leaders, so it’s only fair…) However, once we’re de-risked, we simply won’t have jockeying for “plum projects” or “head count” squabbles as managers fight turf wars, because people will be able to transfer freely across the company, making projects compete for engineers rather than the reverse. No corrupt “transfer process” infrastructure that devolves into managerial extortion. I want a “stop-complaining-and-fix-the-damn-thing” culture where, instead of complaining to managers to get things done, people dive in and do it.
• Outside of a traditional “tech hub”, with tolerance of distributed work. This is a longer-term project than the go-viral-or-die VC-istan nonsense. We’re going to need some very strong people, and we’ll need to pay them well, but we can’t afford to locate ourselves in a city where $150k is “a unit”. If this happens, I think we’ll probably set up in Austin, Madison, Portland, Pittsburgh or possibly Boston– unless business needs require us to be in SF or NYC. Of course, we’ll need to draw talent from everywhere and we’ll allow ourselves to be up to about 25% distributed.
• Targets of 25+% female technologists, 40+% over-35, and 25+% with-children. Talent comes form all places, and we better be serious about making sure that all kinds of people are able to fit in: not just privileged, young white males like me. Forty-seven-year-old woman who happens to be a top-notch Lisper? Ready to kick ass? Then come in! I want this to be a company that I’d be happy to work for at age 60. This isn’t only because value diversity (although that’s true) but also because, if no women or older people want to work for you, it’s a sign that you have a fucked-up culture. We need canaries and we need to make sure they thrive.
• Employees given the same respect of investors. Because they are. In fact, they’re investors of time and their careers which (in my view) accords them even more respect.
• Profit-sharing over equity. Tiny equity allotments, typical in VC-istan, will be replaced with much larger profit-shares. My intention is to kick 50% of profits back to employees with no software engineer getting less than 1/(2*N) of that where N is the number of people.
• Programmer is the highest title. We’ll have CxOs for external purposes as we market the company. Internally, the highest title will be Programmer. Not “Principal Software Developer” or “Chief Architect” or “Senior Staff Software Engineer XVI”. Top title (in pay, and respect) is Programmer (link NSFW; Zed Shaw rant).
• Non-extortive workplace. Teaching and inspiring others will be the only method of management. To the extent that we will may need “people management”, we will never accord them with unilateral termination or credibility-reduction powers. If they are not helpful to the managed, they go. Employees work for the company, not their specific “bosses”, and have the right to change managers or projects as needed.
• No “performance” reviews. The language of “performance” reviews is fucking insulting and I won’t tolerate it in the company we build. We’ll have impact reviews in which we assess how well an employee’s work is being integrated with the rest of the company. Unless bad-faith non-performance is obvious, low-impact is our fault, not the employee’s, and we will work together to fix that.

Okay, so here are two co-founders I will absolutely need.

Co-founder #1: a business co-founder.

You respect and understand technology (but enough to leave it alone) and you know how to sell it. We will be equals but, to the outside world, you’ll be the CEO. You have the contacts and resources to keep this idea funded and make sure it is coherent with the market. You will have authority to change business strategy. If you tell me that we need to “pivot” because the market is not interested in what we are offering, I will trust your judgment and make it happen. This will give you a great deal of authority over what is now “my idea” but, once we are a team it is no longer my idea. You’ll be responsible for driving what we do to market coherence (i.e. keeping us paid and profitable).

You will raise money and public interest in the product, but your ultimate goal must be to bring us to profitability as quickly as we can there (so we can protect ourselves from aggressive investors who might threaten the culture). If we cannot raise capital through typical means, then you will find consulting clients, for me and other programmers we employ, sufficient to fund the firm until we are profitable. (I’m a top-notch functional programmer with machine learning experience; it shouldn’t be hard for you to do that. You’d have to really fucking suck at sales not to be able to sell me, and when we start, all the programmers we hire are going to be roughly as good as I am, if not better.)

Remember: we have about two weeks (starting today) to decide if this can happen. If not, I get a day job and (because I’m sick of “job hopping”) I am going to make a real effort to stay there for 4+ years, meaning that this window closes.

Co-founder #2: top-notch front-end programmer and designer.

You’re a top-notch front-end programmer, fluent in technologies like JavaScript/ClojureScript and HTML5. You’re a designer and teacher who doesn’t consider his or her work done until it’s easy to use. We’ll probably spend a large percentage of the first 6 months teaching each other so that I have a passing competency at what you do, and vice versa. Ultimately, we’re both going to be full-stack. But for the short-term, I need someone who’s already “plug-and-play” when it comes to front-end design work. We will be on terms of equality but your title (for external reference) will be Chief Design Officer.

Co-founder #3: that’s me. 

Who in the eff am I? In 2003, I invented a kick-ass card game called Ambition. In 2004, I earned an Honorable Mention (58 out of 120 points; about 65th place nationally) on the Putnam exam. I was a data scientist “before it was cool” and have been using functional programming languages and working on machine learning projects since about 2006. I’ve used Clojure, which is what we’ll be building our back-end in, off and on since 2008, when it was brand-spanking-new. I run a blog (this one) that gets about 2,000 hits per day, with almost all of that in the technology community.

I will work on the back-end programming, the machine learning research, and also the cultural infrastructure that will make us one of the best companies in the world circa 2018. For external purposes, I will Chief Technology Officer and Cultural Director. However, I intend to cede the CTO role (remember that titles are only of external importance) within time and take a Chief Research Officer role.

Okay, let’s go.

If you want to talk, now’s the time. Email me at michael.o.church at Google’s email service, and we’ll talk. Please tell me which of the two roles above you believe you’d be able to fill, and I’ll get back to you within a couple of hours, or the next morning if you write at night. I’m also generally available for phone conversations between 6:30 and 22:00 EDT.