In any startup, founders have to play more than one role. Ergo having a strict business person and strict coder isn't great. What's better is if you have: -

In any startup, founders have to play more than one role. Ergo having a strict business person and strict coder isn't great. What's better is if you have: - A product person who's done product management, product marketing, user experience and design. Ideally they have a CS background and can understand technology. - A technical person who's a generalist and can code things up from front to back. They should also have some sense of front-end design as well as product. BOTH needs to have some business sense. By having product/technical overlap, they can work together to create an elegant solution both in the product sense as well as the technical sense. By both having business sense, they can create a product that fits a business. A business person with no sense of product is not a cofounder because they can't scope anything out. Just having ideas and describing a solution by mouth or pointing at another website and saying "do this" is not cofounder material. A coder who needs to be told exactly what to do for anything and has no feedback or insight on the product/business is also not a cofounder. These aren't hard and fast rules but is my conclusion based on my entrepreneur experiences. Great product/business people are more than just ideas. Great technical people are more than just "coders."