From my personal experience: The "business" person should learn a little about computability and feasibility. You don't necessarily have to understand the the

From my personal experience: The "business" person should learn a little about computability and feasibility. You don't necessarily have to understand the theory and mathematics of it all but should have a sense of when a problem is intractable. I had one startup try to recruit me as an intern to build an AI that would pass the Turing test and generate their marketing content for them. I had another "business guy" push strongly for an idea based on AI that could predict the future, then quit when it finally got through to him that I was not going to spend my life researching an intractable problem. I've had marketing people try to explain that solving the traveling salesman problem is an easy opportunity. I'd like to see a business person who really understands market research, especially pricing. Make sure you're finding stuff that the programmer wouldn't have found himself. Avoid making premature statements of strategy - many quantitative people will (rightly) see this as a weak attempt to appear decisive. Legal and accounting are great things to take off the programmers' shoulders. Let the engineers handle at least half of the "idea" phase. Let them take some support as well, since they'll be able to answer technical support queries best. Don't jump to grab "all the networking" unless you've been asked to - programmers who found companies often rebel against being shoved into the backroom.