This is a great, concise story.<p>To me, the most valuable insight in this article isn't that a non-tech founder needs to get super-technical. Rather, it's that he needs to demonstrate a willingness to do everything he possibly can. <i>That</i> is the secret sauce. It's not about being able to talk shot for shot with a super-techy coder. It's about not being the kind of person who throws his hands up in the air and sets limits to what he can or can't do, or will or won't do. Being a successful entrepreneur means doing <i>anything</i> and <i>everything</i> it takes to get to success. And it's a serious red flag when the co-founder, from the get-go, is already broadcasting that he's setting limits for himself (such as not even attempting a prototype).<p>So big kudos to you for posting this. This is awesome and inspiring.
Good post, but I would change the title. It's not about technical co-founders being overrated. It's about how it's a good idea to make yourself technical <i>enough</i> if you are a business person who wants to start a company based on a web application.
<i>After a few months I had a prototype and it actually worked. The application screen-scraped data, stored it in a database, presented it to the user, and then submitted data to an external system.</i><p>Much better decision than hiring someone that could do it in a day.
I think the reason people crap on business ops co-founders, is because most of the time they don't want to be co-founders. Unlike the author of the articles, you see a lot of mba types who don't respect what coders do. So in the end, they don't want to give their 'technical co-founder' equity or sometimes even a fair wage. That's assuming we're even beyond the business dood's idea being making a 'facebook killer'
The video for his startup is awesome:<p><a href="http://flexmint.com/" rel="nofollow">http://flexmint.com/</a><p>Although, I wonder if Mint might have some issues with the domain/name.
As a technical co-founder myself, I first read the title and thought "Oh, cute... look at them trying so hard!" but then I read the article and it has some good valuable information,.<p>Sidenote:
I should share this to everyone who tries to get me to join their "$1b idea" companies and the ones willing enough to follow that article might actually get somewhere.
I think the article is best summarized as "Don't let the lack of a co-founder hold you back". No matter what your expertise, the farther you get with your idea on your own the more likely someone will join you.<p>I do think the idea of "learning to code" to start something is pretty silly, just like the idea of "learning to sell" is pretty silly. Yes, you can learn them while starting a company but the process will be painful. Get advisors, mentors and possibly job experience in areas where you are weak instead of burning your precious start-up time on learning something new.
Great post. I want to call attention to Will's first comment from Josh Strike, who articulated what I'm thinking pretty well.<p>(Doesn't seem like I can link to it, so I'm pasting - and truncating, so I encourage you to read his full comment):<p>Most coders are autodidacts. The ones without a DIY ethos drop out pretty quickly. Frankly, the reason the tech side feels free to give the business side a lot of crap -- other than the fact that you guys make more than we do, in mysterious ways unimaginable to us -- is that the business heads tend to lack that DIY drive to figure it out for themselves. Basically, wasting our time with things they could google, or learn to do, if they were as diligent as we are being (and we, being paid less to do more, feel a right to gripe). But you don't sound like that; actually, you sound like you took the hacker mentality and applied it to business, which is what we'd all like to do. SO, bravo. The fact that you did that is great. Don't rest on your laurels (or your co-founder); keep improving yourself.<p>[...]<p>The most important thing to remember if you're going to delegate -- whether it's hammering nails, making pizza dough or writing code -- is that the guy with his hands in the pie has the power to demolish you if you don't understand what he's doing. And lives by the sweat of his balls. So buy him a beer...and never consider anything to be magic. If you do, you've just put yourself in the dangerous position of not being able to fix it when it breaks down.
If you're looking for a "code monkey" that isn't a technical co-founder. In fact I'd say if you're even looking a CTO with shares that still isn't a technical co-founder. To me a technical co-founder is someone with vision as much as hands on; the first person that comes to my mind is The Woz — or Ub Iwerks for Disney. Someone like that teamed with an evil genius biz person or creative director can conquer the world.
I'd go so far as to add that the business guy having a modest amount of technical chops will make getting that technical guy easier, make getting funding easier, and make the creation of the product easier.<p>This is the Right approach.
In any startup, founders have to play more than one role. Ergo having a strict business person and strict coder isn't great.<p>What's better is if you have:
- A product person who's done product management, product marketing, user experience and design. Ideally they have a CS background and can understand technology.
- A technical person who's a generalist and can code things up from front to back. They should also have some sense of front-end design as well as product.<p>BOTH needs to have some business sense.<p>By having product/technical overlap, they can work together to create an elegant solution both in the product sense as well as the technical sense. By both having business sense, they can create a product that fits a business.<p>A business person with no sense of product is not a cofounder because they can't scope anything out. Just having ideas and describing a solution by mouth or pointing at another website and saying "do this" is not cofounder material.<p>A coder who needs to be told exactly what to do for anything and has no feedback or insight on the product/business is also not a cofounder.<p>These aren't hard and fast rules but is my conclusion based on my entrepreneur experiences.<p>Great product/business people are more than just ideas. Great technical people are more than just "coders."
Despite the title, this guy <i>does</i> seem to assume he needs an experienced technologist as a cofounder. Can someone explain what the value a really experienced technologist adds is? (Additionally, can that value be provided by a first employee rather than a cofounder?)<p>(Context: I'm a journeyman-level technologist, trying to figure out where the point of diminishing returns for becoming a better one is.)
I agree with most part of this post. However, I think this article gave us an idea that a business co-founder who neither knows technology nor has the determination to learn technology can't succeed easily in today's context.<p>I don't think it's about overrating or underrating, it's just that technical co-founders don't want to work with people who haven't even tried to pick up the technologies. No one can say which one is more important, technology or business, because both of them are important.<p>Therefore, saying that technical co-founders are overrated is a bit irrelevant. We can also say that business co-founders are overrated because technical co-founders can pick up the business skills as well?<p>The world needs both aspect of skills. No matter they are overrated or underrated, both kinds of co-founders need to know at least basic understanding and sense about each other's.
Good post, I hope all the non-technical / idea guys read this and learn coding, much better than pissing-off technical guys by saying the usual "I have a great idea, it only needs coding, if u sign NDA, we can get this started"
For my exam revision (university) I've been reading about the history of computing.<p>In general what happened with many (Pascal, Leibniz, Schickard, etc.) is that they had an idea yet the current state of technology and skilled workers was not adequate.<p>So, many of them learnt how to do build their ideas themselves. They learnt the necessary skills. From the textbook:<p>".. he designed his first machine and contracted some local workmen for the construction work. An unworkable instrument was duly delivered. As many were to find after him, having a good idea was not enough, one also had to master the arts of tool making and engineering."
I have a friend that has done pretty much the same thing, although he hasn't found a tech cofounder yet.<p>My recommendation to the business types is to spec it out. Even if coding is beyond you, using something like Balsamiq to create a prototype that you can workshop, usability test, gauge interest in, etc. is a big help. Even if you can't convince a techie to join you, they'll be more likely to help point out the parts that will be easy or hard to implement, which can help define your MVP and estimate startup costs if you decide to outsource it.
Before you learn or when your contemplating to learn how to program its best you don't tackle programming as a whole. Get the basics first then start work on an idea you might have. Its suprising how solutions will stream in fast because you have a well defined problem in your mind no matter whether the idea is a desktop or web app. The best way to learn is to work on a real problem a few days after getting the basics. The hardest part isn't getting the answers but defining the problem at hand clearly.
Most technical mistakes that a non-technical founder can make will involve one of two things: Scalability, and maintainability<p>Lacking knowledge in these two things will not hinder an early startup website much, so it's easy to go ahead and build something without expertise in these domains.<p>The only thing that sucks about these situations is that once your company takes off, the engineers you hire will be left to maintain/fix the mess that the non-technical founder made - which can be quite miserable for the engineers.
Good post. The fact of the matter is that, these days, learning to code well enough to make a web site/app is not hard, it just takes time and determination. I've gone through a similar process - my motto has been "learn as much useful stuff as possible" e.g. Rails, Ajax, jquery, image editing, design principles, wireframes, mockups, git, sass, haml, mobile frameworks... Have a good idea AND be useful from day 1. That should be the goal. It's what I'm working toward, anyways.
This is amazing and exactly what I am doing. I kept thinking I need a technical cofounder, and I still wouldn't mind having one, but that doesn't mean I can't become a technical cofounder myself.<p>I took the same route. I picked up a ruby on rails book and just started building. I have experience with C++ and Java, but I haven't done any major coding in a couple years. I'm now building out my idea and it feels great not to have to depend on someone else to drive development.
The title is a bit misleading, but I constantly beg for non-technical colleagues to have any sort of application modelling skills. MS Paint Web Mockups, Excel, PDF Forms that save to an email 'database', anything that gives a clear picture of how things work. Huge bonus if the mockup actually functions. You don't need to invest in time learning Ruby or .net since the end result is communication.<p>Actual execution is where the technical cofounder comes into play.