Joint Ventures for Techies - a beginner’s guide
This post is for the techies. If you don’t consider yourself a techie, look away now.
Ok, now we’ve got rid of them, let’s talk about Joint Ventures.
If it hasn’t happened to you yet then it almost certainly will eventually. Someone comes along with a sure-fire idea but needs someone with your skillset to make it work. He[1] has no money to invest, so invites you to be part of a joint venture. Perhaps you’ll be offered equal shares in the proceeds, although IME you’ll usually be offered a lot less, because - after all - it was he who had the Brilliant Idea. And Brilliant Ideas are worth their weight in gold[2], aren’t they?
Your first time: You are asked to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA)[3] to protect his marvellous idea before he will even discuss it with you. Putting on your best suit (you know, the one you normally only wear for weddings and funerals) you trot along to the meeting all damp eyed and intimidated. You turn up at the meeeting, sign the NDA, listen to the idea. You smile kindly and tell him as gently as you can that Google or Microsoft or the bloke down the road have been doing this for ages. You even give him some URLs where he can learn more. And then you leave.
Your second time: You tell your contact that you’ll sign the NDA only if it also protects YOU for the things YOU bring to the meeting. He cancels the meeting the day before and you don’t hear from him again.
Third time lucky: This one turns up with an NDA which offers you the same protections if gives him. You sign it and listen. Your eyes widen slightly - this is a brilliant idea. Pure genius. Ok, it’s a bit sketchy on the precise detail, but your creative imagination is already way ahead of him. You KNOW you can make this work, and it’s a winner. A sure-fire money spinner. You agree to take 30%, and sign on the dotted line. I just hope you read (and argued about) the small print, but that’s a detail and not all that relevant here.
Work begins. Two or three meetings with the guy with the Brilliant Idea fit into a hectic three weeks of specification, coding, revising, testing, bugfixing, and about 3 hours sleep a night. You are exhausted, but you still manage to drive 200 miles to meet the Idea Man to see how he likes your code so far. You are a little disappointed but not too surprised that he hasn’t looked at the latest batch of changes. After all, you only told him about them five days ago, and he’s very, very busy having yet more brilliant ideas, plus he has a business to run.
Another month goes by, and you might begin to hear a nagging voice telling you that as well as working on the JV you should also be doing something about earning a living. Or eating proper food. Or sleeping occasionally. You try to phone your new partner, but he is too busy to talk to you. You finally get through one Friday evening as he’s about to leave the office. Yes, of course, he’ll look at the new software over the weekend. This is going to be big.
Three weeks later and you are stuck. You’ve got so far with the project, but you know it’s not finished and you need the creative insight of the Big Idea Man. Your emails go unanswered, and he’s always “on the other line” or “out of the office - can I get him to call you back?”
And then realisation dawns. You look at what you have created and you see it’s not finished. You see the holes in the Big Idea that you “abstracted away” when you were coding. Abstractions that need the final Big Idea before they can work. In desperation, you call and INSIST he talks to you.
And then you hear it: “Hey, dude, the Big Idea was just an idea; just a thought; just a ‘let’s run this up the flagpole and see who salutes it’ kind of thing. But I don’t think it’s really going to work, is it? I didn’t look at those changes a few weeks ago, but I think by now we both know it’s not going anywhere. Anyway, I’m working on something else now. You didn’t spend *too* much time on it, did you?”
Don’t misunderstand me: Joint Ventures *can* be good for techies. But not when you don’t get paid. If someone approaches you with an idea for a joint venture, make sure that they put in as much as you do. Since most of the effort is in the implementation of the idea, and that’s your job, make sure you get paid for the work you do. Sure, you might have to take a smaller cut of the final profits, but at least you’ll be able to pay your bills. And paying for your time concentrates their mind on making sure they actually look at what you are doing and keep feeding back to keep it on track.
Footnotes:
[1] Use of “he” is for the sake of brevity and does not indicate a gender bias.
[2] This is literally true. Have you ever weighed an idea? (Actually, the current market value of an Idea is £0.00167 - approximately tuppence a dozen.)
[3] Every NDA I have ever seen says something like “The Company will tell the techie some stuff, and the techie may not tell anyone else that stuff or use that stuff ever”. they never say “The techie has 25 years of experience gained at the Bit-face, and we promise not to rip off the code he produces.” Well, not without a fight, anyway.