At the stage of an institutional seed round, I'd generally agree with you. At that point you're big enough that screwing up your customer experience will hurt

At the stage of an institutional seed round, I'd generally agree with you. At that point you're big enough that screwing up your customer experience will hurt you. It's the early-founder stage, where you're still proving out an idea and verifying that people will use it and likely will have to pivot several times, that I think sales + engineering (or ops if technology is not your core competency) is key. The advantage of having a really good engineer over a product person is that a really good engineer can "hit the high notes" and deliver a product that most ordinary people assume is impossible.