I'm a technical guy, but I don't think this has to be a polarized debate. I think business founders might have a few roles to play early in the startup: 1) Hi

I'm a technical guy, but I don't think this has to be a polarized debate. I think business founders might have a few roles to play early in the startup: 1) Hire new talent 2) Raise capital 3) Handle day to day things (frees the technical co-founder from much of the time-intensive due diligence) The business guy cannot conduct technical interviews, however. He also needs to be extremely reliable if he's negotiating term sheets. And he needs to stay active with business development stuff, probably leave it to the CTO to manage the technical people. Maybe it's possible to have both business and tech people, but I do agree that it's best to have more technical people early on. After all, how do you forge business relationships without a product? I would say if anything, the business guy should be responsible for going out and pitching every day. Get those business terms down to a tee, and make it a goal to have many high-quality and interested investors. That is something that itself can take up all of a technical founders' time. I met with one of the guys who started and sold EUNet (one of Europe's larger ISPs). He said "you know what makes a really good executive? It's the people who know to do the right things. Leave it to the middle-level managers and product developers to know how to do things right." Perhaps one of the goals of a business co-founder is to be absolutely sure about the market and the idea, or to always challenge it. Someone has to ask "are the engineers building something people want?" Most of the time, engineers are building something cool to them. And they're usually eager to work on challenging things. But is it something people want? I would say you're very lucky if the technical co-founder has this type of aptitude. I can only think of a few who do. Levchin has it, Zuckerberg has it, Gates and Jobs (Jobs being arguably less technical, but extremely product-driven) both have it too. Those are difficult people to find.