At dinner the other night with New York entrepreneurs we realized that half of us came from technical backgrounds, and half not. One of the non-technical founders said something like, “I wish that I could get in there and help with the coding, but that’s one place where hard work isn’t enough. You really have to know how.”
My immediate response, echoed by the other technical founders, was “No, you don’t want to know how to code!” The problem is that if you know how, then you feel guilty for not doing it. In fact, the more competent you are, the easier it is to think that you can or should do it all. It’s the classic problem of founders not wanting to let go.
On the other hand, if you are a non-technical founder, you are forced from day one to rely on other people to build your product. You learn other skills like “how to assess someone’s competency” and “how to inspire others to work” and “how to lead.” These are skills that scale.
(In the parlance of The Black Swan, coding is in the same category of bakers, dentists, and prostitutes.)
Still, in the early stages of any company (and especially when there is no company, but just an idea) a non-technical founder can blow a lot of money paying other people to build prototypes that don’t work.
It broke my heart last year (in a purely business sense) when I talked to a business guy who had spent nearly $20,000 on outsourced programming to build something that really didn’t work.
In a perfect world, you need a founder of each type who trust each other, or a technical founder who knows when to let go.