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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

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.

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.