How to find a technical co-founder without compromising our company's plans?

While safeguarding the core idea and strategic direction of your concept is important, asking a prospective technical co-founder to sign confidentiality or nondisclosure agreements is not at all practical.

The key to building and attracting any talent to your new startup idea is to create an enticing enough pitch out of it. Perfect the pitch and it will reverse the power dynamics of your recruitment process. Instead of your team looking for value from others, others will be looking for value from your team.

For an example, take a look at DropBox's intro video. The idea that is pitched is very broad without going into specific details on how they're going to accomplish their desired solution. And by keeping everything in broader terms, you essentially protect your core strategy without compromising it from getting stolen - as duly noted by others within the community, highly unlikely.

"But, what if my pitch isn't enticing enough?" - Then all the networking and convincing in the world won't get you anywhere. How are you going to expect investors to invest into an idea that developers aren't even interested in building?

It's time to roll up your sleeves and get dirty. Here's the fun part!: - Hire freelancers (via HireACoder, Elance, Craigslist, Mutual Friends, etc) to build the minimal viable product for you. Build something that generates an enticing amount of traffic that will make it easier for you to pitch to potential technical co-founders.

This is great because it will test your capability, self-drive, and willingness to risk something behind this idea of yours. You will learn basic project management, wireframing, and working with technical folks. Good luck!

I get asked this question about 10 times a week I think.

Your question however isn't really "how" to find one as much as how to deal with a person once you've found someone. First off, you should have a level of your idea that you don't mind sharing without an NDA. As a developer myself, I don't want to sign an NDA with every yahoo looking for a tech cofounder. Give me the gist of the idea and if I'm interested then we can look into NDAs. I don't have time to sign an NDA with everyone, much less keep every "business guy's" "it's like Groupon" idea straight and not inadvertently violate an NDA because of a very vague idea.

If the idea is so basic that you can't give someone a basic idea without compromising the idea then your idea is weak. You'll have other problems, such as a larger company copying you as soon as it gets any traction (assuming its actually a good idea). If it's really that indefensible I wouldn't even bother with an NDA.

It's hard being a non-technical cofounder in the early days of a tech startup as those guys really have all the responsibility and power. I'd make sure you find someone you genuinely like and can get along with.

Your "safeguards" are a combo of a confidentiality agreement (a.k.a. NDAs) and a non-compete agreement.

I am a tech founder. I think that a NDA is a good start. Someone has already said that the execution of a plan is more important then the plan itself. You want to make sure that before you get into details of the startup your candidate has potential and willingness to participate. My absolute favorite on this is Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html)

Yes you should protect your intellectual property, but that's only necessary once you've actually asked them to write some code.

What I do is hire someone as an independent contractor and pay them for their first contribution to the startup. Before they start working they need to sign a document that makes it clear who owns the code.

Then if you both work well together and want to move forward you can discuss moving forward with a mix of equity and cash, but under the same agreements as before about the code belonging to the corporation not any one individual.