My daughter and I were in the same position around 18 months ago. Neither of us knew any coding, but we wanted to do a startup. I have an mba and another profes

My daughter and I were in the same position around 18 months ago. Neither of us knew any coding, but we wanted to do a startup. I have an mba and another professional degree and wanted to do a startup, so in theory, I could have tried to find a tech cofounder, but in the end, felt I would be in a better position if I learnt to code. As usual, paul graham says it better than I can, "anyone reasonably smart can probably get to an edge of programming (e.g. building mobile apps) in a year. Since a successful startup will consume at least 3-5 years of your life, a year's preparation would be a reasonable investment. Especially if you're also looking for a cofounder." I would advise against the bootcamp (unless it's free?), you don't need one as long as you have one or two buddies who code, who can advise you on what to learn and help you when you get stuck, the response to your post suggests that you will have a lot of people who would be willing to help! It might be a good idea to put an email in your HN profile, make it easier for folks to get in touch. We started with python (udacity cs101), lisp/scheme using the free 'simply scheme' book ( https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/ss-toc2.html https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/ss-toc2.html ) together with learning some of the tools like unix command-line/vim/git, then a course on web programming (udacity cs253), while she was doing college full-time, and I was working full-time. We then started learning rails and working almost full-time on the startup around Oct 2014, and launched v1 of our web app in March 2015. Still working on getting more customers :). Don't be in too much of a rush to leave what you do now: I think it's definitely a good idea to have a 'day job' that pays the bills, while you work on little projects that are interesting to you and help you learn the various technologies, you may well find one of them turns into something a lot bigger. We also applied to yc (unsuccessfully), which may have been good for us: I think the value of the advice they can give is high, but I now think it's kind of a waste of the opportunity if you're not raising money at the end. We are still figuring out 'what users want', and in hindsight, raising money would have been both difficult to resist, and a terrible idea for us at that time. Most of the advice yc gives is 'open source', for example, paul graham's essays and books, jessica livingston's book, the yc startup school etc, so you don't need to get into yc to learn what they have to say. I now think that the best time to go through yc would be after you've internalized what they teach, have made something users want, are growing, and now need funding so you can grow even faster. I think YC fulfilled a different role in the early days when it was so small, but is now so competitive, it's best to think of it a bit like hiring an investment bank when looking to IPO. In theory, they take a chunk of equity in exchange for good capital markets advice that will get you a much better valuation: as far as investment banks go, this is usually self-interested bullshit, but I think would be an accurate description of the value of yc. Best of luck, and get in touch by email, it would be good to chat!