Change your standards (really).

In my experience with start ups, developers rarely come in early. Some of the best developers I work with come in at lunch. This is because they are night owls and work better at night.

Not understanding that pure-bread developers work differently is denying the basis of your product.

It sounds like, on a personal level, that you want your co-founder (who is technical) to be more like you. Well sorry, that's not going to happen. You need to understand that you wanted to work with him in the first place because of who he is and what he is capable of, not what time he gets up in the morning.

As a little background, I am a developer. I do however, wake up at 6:30, and I'm at my desk at 7:50am. This is before any other developer (and more times than not before anyone else has even shown up). I'm not like most developers, this is my personal choice, and I understand that.

Demoralizing him and berating him will further his cause to be dissonant to "business." This includes coming in later and later over time, not wearing "professional" clothes, or being hard to work with.

My heart-felt advice is to apologize for being a prick to someone so important to your product, your business, and your success, and set a road map for increasing co-founder communication and understanding. You chose him because he was different. If he had the same skills as you, you wouldn't need him.

So first apologize to yourself, forgive yourself for being close-minded. Then apologize to him, and the interns. It takes a big person to be able to do that. It won't be fun.

Then have a candid, non-confrontational conversation with him. Figure out where the communication ended (I guarantee this is your issue). Remember, you're in this together.

If he doesn't come in early enough for calls or presentation, do it without him. Ask him to give you the materials or knowledge you need to do it well. Maybe do some of the things you think he should. Try to help him do his job better, which may not be looking professional, having sane work hours, etc. If hes an engineer or developer, his job is probably building the product.

You may be surprised that the cool helpful guy you met is actually still there.

I think the two of you might be overlooking some of the social pressure involved in taking thousands of dollars from a close friend. If I made that offer to any one of my friends, they'd turn it down every time. They might say it's impossible, or come up with some other excuse, but most of the reluctance will come from having to see me again if their idea fails.

If you changed your offer to something like, "Hey, I've got about $5k laying around, and I want to start a business, are you interested? What do you think we should do?", you'd probably see more action.

I personally think this has more to do with your friendship than the idea of your friends being mentally "poor".

The core argument amounts to:

-- quote --

"The core of the problem has not been self-discipline or a lack of opportunity," Karelis says. "My argument is that the cause of poverty has been poverty."

-- end quote --

Being Indian, I have spent a lot of time observing and thinking about poverty from childhood, and in recent years, doing something about it. I believe he has hit the nail on the head with his analysis of the problem, yet I completely disagree with his solution, which is negative income tax i.e direct government cash to the poor.

Here is where I believe he is right. Poverty is a "phase transition" effect: there is a point of being too-poor below which you lose all motivation to better yourself, not only because there are too many problems but also because those problems are all interlinked, so solving just one feels utterly pointless. Spend time in any very poor neighborhood and you will see this. That poverty threshold would be different for different people, and you can aggregate these thresholds for a distinctly identifiable group to come up with a "group poverty threshold", which itself is a function of the group's history and culture. Once you are below that threshold, poverty is very hard to escape. You can state that as "poverty is the cause of poverty."

Yet, I also completely disagree with his solution - direct cash grant from the government. To prove the absurdity of it, imagine this on a global scale. Is the solution to Indian poverty then massive transfer of resources from the rich world?

So what is the solution then? Here is a sketch: the trouble is there are so many interlinked problems it is not even clear where to start. It is utterly chaotic. To overcome it, first create a very small "Zone of Order" (one room, one household, one neighborhood, one small company, one city ... whatever) where you establish clear, orderly systems. China called this the "Special Economic Zone" which they modeled by taking advice from Hong Kong and Taiwan businessmen.

Once you prove that working, scale it up. You have to bootstrap from that "Zone of Order", however small that is. At a personal level, it could be just one small corner of your shack or one hour a day of order, and for a country like India, it could be one city.

You can generalize this principle: the solution to any self-referential problem ("poverty is the cause of poverty") is bootstrapping from a very small seed. In fact, I believe most intractable problems are self-referential.

On a related note, read about "Charter Cities" http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-poli...

Now this is exactly the sort of thing we should be taking issue with (from the comments):

> A true noob should probably install java, download clojure and clojure-contrib, run the repl, and stay there for couple 2-3 weeks. No IDE, no web app dev, just functional and concurrent programming with clojure in a REPL. They'll be much better off in the long run because they'll either give up (and save time) or learn something truly outside their comfort zone (and understand the benefit of getting setup for real development).

When teaching someone a programming language, your first goal should always be to get them to the point where they've made something real in a domain they understand. Then, they can bootstrap that domain knowledge, and its application within the new language, and use it to "grow into" the rest of the language.

The best thing for Clojure would be something that lets you write web-apps (or games, or visualizations like Processing...) in it two minutes after clicking "Download"—because those users would be able to say they've done something in Clojure, be able to say they're sure of their knowledge (because if they weren't, the program wouldn't have worked, would it?) and be able to proceed to learn more with confidence. The worst thing would be to download Clojure and be stuck at a REPL invoking (defproto) to overload String methods with no goal in sight—because that kind of knowledge doesn't stick, and won't get you anywhere.

Welcome to startupland. You're fucked if you think you're going to find a good engineer that wants to work 9-5. "Compensate this tardiness" == LOL. Half the point of a startup is avoiding that lifestyle. At any startup I've worked that went anywhere, the engineers all worked noon - midnight. Good luck.

EDIT: followup - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469271

Old post:

I think the OP should be thankful his dev doesn't walk. If I partnered up with some biz guy who demanded I show up early for no other reason than appearance I'd assume he's an empty suit and leave. (9am is early in this industry, I've never had a job that demanded I show up before 10:00).

OP: You're a 2.5 man closet startup and you're asking your other half to be less productive for the sake of appearance. Are you sure he's the one with the problem?

All this talk of being "unprofessional" is a joke when it's two guys who just scrounged up enough capital to rent a cheap office trying to impress a fucking intern. Jesus Christ.

On second thought, I'm certain I'd bail if the OP was my "partner." The lack of thought put into this, the fact that you've considered trying to oust him instead of confronting him, the fact that you seem to lack the ability to look at your company critically (again: 2 dudes and some interns == 9-5 IS NOT A BIG DEAL) all shows a severe lack of biz sense or even common sense. You're obviously insecure (cares too much about appearance to some teenagers), ill-informed (does not understand developers or managing developers) and not equipped for a leadership position (talking to HN instead of the one person in the company who he should be talking to).

I hope the "partner" you're treating like an employee reads this thread and bails. You reached out to a forum instead of talking to someone who's your other half. I can't imagine how you'd run an actual company.

It sounds harsh but it's a harsh industry.