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Ask HN: The case of the semi-technical co-founder
There are many debates about the necessity of having a technical co-founder in a start-up and many opinions subscribe to the views that without a technical co-founder, the probability of failure is much higher. I'll use CTO as a synonym to technical co-founder from here in.
The reasons giving are that a non-CTO founded start-up will fail is because the "business" founder can't hire the right talent because he won't know what to look for. There are many other reasons but I want to focus on this one here.
My question is, what about the case of a semi-technical founder, or founders that don't know how to code explicitly, but they are very familiar with development processes, they have enough grasp of the technical side to at least partially gauge how development is progressing, and they can compile blueprints etc. well enough for other programmers to quickly execute them?
Compare this to the current archetypal view of CTO + 'business guy' founding team, and how do you think it bodes in terms of failure probability?
- hga 16y ago"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." ( 1/2 :-) Seriously, if you don't know how to code you still won't get too much of the critical stuff. You'll still have to find at least one programmer you absolutely and without reservation trust, although if you handle things correctly you'll be more valuable than a not-at-all-technical co-founder. Just be careful: e.g. I had one project die (and mostly lost a friend in the process) when he decided he knew the design process I was teaching him better than I did ... which was pretty unlikely seeing as by then I'd been programming for two decades and had used it from start to finish four years earlier in a technically very successful project. His misapprehension was of a nature that blocked my work on the design, and, well, it all ended in tears.