The rarest commodity in the startup industry is not capital, or customers, or revenue, it’s technical co-founders, or CTOs (Chief Technical Officers).

This is largely because the kind of software engineer likely to make a great co-founder and CTO aren’t short of options for rewarding career choices, both professionally and financially.

So it’s usually no good just offering equity or cash. You need non-fiscal motivation. One kind of non-fiscal motivation is a personal relationship. Our community sometimes makes the mistake of thinking you have to be an asshole to be a great CEO. In fact, building and managing friendships is probably the most important skill for a potential CEO.

People focus on Steve Jobs, the archetype Founding Asshole of the World’s Most Successful Company Ever, but Jobs marketed and sold the products that Steve Wozniak (‘Woz’) made. Woz worked all night and all weekend to create insanely great products for Apple not because Steve shouted at him, and especially not because Woz was well compensated. He worked so hard because he was highly motivated, because Steve was his best friend.

Steve was Woz’s best friend because Steve helped him relate to the world, helped Woz create a work environment and a social circle that validated who Woz was, which supported his creativity and facilitated his productivity.

Goal: become a good friend to talented engineers who aspire to become a CTO.

How do I relate to an engineer?

Engineers are wired differently to the rest of us, so it might take a bit of work on your part to learn about their interests, how they like to relate, what they pay respect to, and who they aspire to be, but it’s worth the investment.

Help them with the things they find hard to do well in their life. And then maybe you can persuade them to dump their job and join you.

In the short-term, you need something to hook the potential CTOs you meet at startup weekends, right? Well, CTOs aren’t motivated by the usual “in 50 words or less” elevator pitch a CEO uses to pique the interest of potential investors.

CTOs are more often motivated by the opportunity to work on solving what they consider to be interesting problems. And yet most elevator pitches seem to imply that all the interesting problems are solved, and that only the execution remains. That’s all bassackwards.

If you want to motivate a potential CTO you need to rephrase your elevator pitch to be about the interesting problems yet to be solved.

“My hypothesis is that we could really change this industry if we could just find a way to solve [insert interesting problem] but nobody’s solved it before because the solutions are just too hard or expensive.”

How do I tell good from bad?

Bad potential CTOs will tell you they’ve already solved the problem over at Startup B (a good CTO is never satisfied with existing solutions). Or that they already solved it and hadn’t told anyone (a good CTO understand the importance of publishing, promoting and commercialising their work). Or that they’d rather keep working on it alone and aren’t interested in bringing it to market as part of a team (a good CTO isn’t just an engineer, they’re the leader of your technical team, capable of helping you recruit, inspire and lead other engineers.)

Good potential CTOs know about StartupB’s solution but can see that there’s probably a better way, and just can’t let that interesting problem go by without wanting to do just a little work on the answer, just to prove that maybe it’s not as big or as unsolvable as you think it is.

That’s a great entree into working on the problem together, and into figuring out what it might take to get them out of their current job and working on the problem full-time.

Great potential CTOs will tell you they have a broad understanding of how to chunk the problem up into addressable bits, and that they would really get a kick out of bringing on some less experienced engineers and working with them on knocking them all over.

(This post was based on my answer to a question on Quora, voted up by other Quora users. As it concerns engineers, I hope some of the people who read this blog post will want to refute the points I make, challenge my generalisations, refine the question and propose alternative answers. Startup entrepreneurs: I recommend you pay close attention to who’s commenting on this post — they may be potential CTOs 😉