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I don't think they necessarily need to be technical. But there is a huge advantage to being a person that can just roll up their sleeves and do pretty much anyt

I don't think they necessarily need to be technical. But there is a huge advantage to being a person that can just roll up their sleeves and do pretty much anything that needs to be done, whatever it is. It does not have to be technical. It is a mindset of being open to researching stuff, trying to figure things out, accepting and learning from failures and doing 20% to get 80% of benefit. A person with this kind of mindset will IMO almost inevitably become at least a little bit technical. Just enough to be dangerous and look silly a bit when they are out of their depth. I have enormous respect for people like that when they dive in into application development with no prior coding experience or can understand complex development ideas because they are truly open and willing and working to understand rather than put artificial barriers before them.

acdha 4y ago
Someone needs to be technical or they’ll get hit by a number of problems which are almost always fatal: consulting companies (especially the large ones) will take them for a ride, burning budget and likely failing to deliver something viable; they are likely to make bad hires because it’s hard to tell people who can’t deliver or, more commonly, who aren’t capable of building what the business needs right now; and the more general version of that last point, someone needs to be making sure that you’re building something secure, reliable, etc. which is compatible with both your budget and the kind of app you’re building. That doesn’t strictly have to be a technical cofounder but if not that’s a significant degree of trust placed on an early hire.
- twawaaay 4y ago
  Which is to say there are upsides to being expert in the field. The question is whether every company requires technical people to run the company just because they need an app to sell their services. One theory is that in future every company will be a technical company -- because merciless competition will favour companies driven by technical, scientific mindset. But I don't think we are there yet.
  - acdha 4y ago
    I think this really comes back to the question of how custom your technology needs are. My local coffee shop has a website and apps but the owner doesn't need to be a programmer because they have the _exact_ same needs as everyone else, and something like ToastTab can be licensed and used without modification. The same is true of a lot of online stores where their business is conceptually very similar to many others. If your business is less like that, however, I do think it's critical to find someone you have a high degree of trust will make reasonable calls. Once you start needing things like custom development you're saying that technology is core to your business. That doesn't mean the CEO needs to be a techie any more than the CEO of a restaurant chain needs to be a chef but they definitely need someone whose judgement the CEO respects.
cccybernetic 4y ago
As a technical founder, I agree with you to a degree, but not completely. I've come to appreciate sharp, non-technical founders with business acumen and who can see the "forest for the trees". There are times where being "technical" is actually a crutch, because you're more likely to: 1. Waste time / obsess over small technical details that in the grand scheme of things don't really matter, or at the very least, don't matter until you have validated product market fit. These details can be anything, from the design or shape of a button, or the perfect fully-normalized schema for your database or whatever. 2. You over-engineer technical solutions, like building a homegrown SaaS app or fleshing out a database for something that should have been validated inside of Google Sheets or email. 3. Idea generation - because they are non-technical, they often see potential products where technical people won’t because the technical person overestimates the amount that a non-technical person will commit to solving a problem. If you asked a technical person how to do XYZ, they might say something like, "oh that's easy, just set up a ABC server and VPN into it and run this bash script and blah blah blah". A sharp non-technical founder would immediately sense that to the average person this is absurd, and thus a potential product opportunity. I see this particular bias all the time on Hacker News.
- twawaaay 4y ago
  It is a bit like saying there is a risk to having technical knowledge and the risk is that the guy will actually try to use it. You can't have a person that is an expert in everything. The best you can hope for is to have a person that is an expert in a key area for your business and then intelligent enough to be able to cover for a lot of additional stuff and wise enough to understand and work around his limitations. For example, if I was non-technical founder but we decided to divide responsibilities so that technical matters are still my area, I would make sure to use whatever technical knowledge I have primarily to hire good technical people and to check their claims. In a lot of modern startups, software development and business development are two key areas so it makes sense to have two founders, one with technical chops and another understanding business development. But that's not always how things play out in real life. One thing is that there is a lot of range for "non-technical". We can be talking about non-technical person being able to understand how AI works in principle and what it can or cannot do but not being able to do anything in practice or write a line of code. Or a person that doesn't appreciate programming at all and has not even slightest clue to how computers work.

acdha 4y ago

Someone needs to be technical or they’ll get hit by a number of problems which are almost always fatal: consulting companies (especially the large ones) will take them for a ride, burning budget and likely failing to deliver something viable; they are likely to make bad hires because it’s hard to tell people who can’t deliver or, more commonly, who aren’t capable of building what the business needs right now; and the more general version of that last point, someone needs to be making sure that you’re building something secure, reliable, etc. which is compatible with both your budget and the kind of app you’re building. That doesn’t strictly have to be a technical cofounder but if not that’s a significant degree of trust placed on an early hire.

twawaaay 4y ago
Which is to say there are upsides to being expert in the field. The question is whether every company requires technical people to run the company just because they need an app to sell their services. One theory is that in future every company will be a technical company -- because merciless competition will favour companies driven by technical, scientific mindset. But I don't think we are there yet.
- acdha 4y ago
  I think this really comes back to the question of how custom your technology needs are. My local coffee shop has a website and apps but the owner doesn't need to be a programmer because they have the _exact_ same needs as everyone else, and something like ToastTab can be licensed and used without modification. The same is true of a lot of online stores where their business is conceptually very similar to many others. If your business is less like that, however, I do think it's critical to find someone you have a high degree of trust will make reasonable calls. Once you start needing things like custom development you're saying that technology is core to your business. That doesn't mean the CEO needs to be a techie any more than the CEO of a restaurant chain needs to be a chef but they definitely need someone whose judgement the CEO respects.

cccybernetic 4y ago

As a technical founder, I agree with you to a degree, but not completely. I've come to appreciate sharp, non-technical founders with business acumen and who can see the "forest for the trees". There are times where being "technical" is actually a crutch, because you're more likely to: 1. Waste time / obsess over small technical details that in the grand scheme of things don't really matter, or at the very least, don't matter until you have validated product market fit. These details can be anything, from the design or shape of a button, or the perfect fully-normalized schema for your database or whatever. 2. You over-engineer technical solutions, like building a homegrown SaaS app or fleshing out a database for something that should have been validated inside of Google Sheets or email. 3. Idea generation - because they are non-technical, they often see potential products where technical people won’t because the technical person overestimates the amount that a non-technical person will commit to solving a problem. If you asked a technical person how to do XYZ, they might say something like, "oh that's easy, just set up a ABC server and VPN into it and run this bash script and blah blah blah". A sharp non-technical founder would immediately sense that to the average person this is absurd, and thus a potential product opportunity. I see this particular bias all the time on Hacker News.

twawaaay 4y ago
It is a bit like saying there is a risk to having technical knowledge and the risk is that the guy will actually try to use it. You can't have a person that is an expert in everything. The best you can hope for is to have a person that is an expert in a key area for your business and then intelligent enough to be able to cover for a lot of additional stuff and wise enough to understand and work around his limitations. For example, if I was non-technical founder but we decided to divide responsibilities so that technical matters are still my area, I would make sure to use whatever technical knowledge I have primarily to hire good technical people and to check their claims. In a lot of modern startups, software development and business development are two key areas so it makes sense to have two founders, one with technical chops and another understanding business development. But that's not always how things play out in real life. One thing is that there is a lot of range for "non-technical". We can be talking about non-technical person being able to understand how AI works in principle and what it can or cannot do but not being able to do anything in practice or write a line of code. Or a person that doesn't appreciate programming at all and has not even slightest clue to how computers work.