| My strong bias is towards getting the technical background. If you have that, partnering with more technical people is a lot more likely to work, otherwise the only possible posture that works is blind trust, which most people aren't capable of. However this is coming from the son of a businessman who started reading his Wall Street Journal in 3rd grade, so I've found partnering with business people to be easy (amusingly, in many of the startups I've worked for I've helped the point man procuring office space, since unless you have a background in that area you e.g. have no idea how slow the real estate clock cycle is). To finish, when you think of the historical hardware and software long term superstars many if not most were founded and lead by at least one person with serious technical chops, perhaps even uber-salesman Larry Ellison of Oracle. Obvious examples are Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the founders of Google and the Chairman/CEO they picked, Ken Olsen of DEC, H&P of HP and I'm sure I'm forgetting many others. Tom Watson, Jr., who saved IBM with his massively successful push into computers, is the most famous exception to this pattern ... but seeing that he grew up in the predecessor punched card industry and undoubtedly absorbed a lot of technical stuff including most especially attitudes he's got to be a special case. As you probably know, the list of technical companies ruined by non-techie leaders is nearly infinite, but it's balanced at least in part by techies not getting the business side of things. Can any of you think of major counterexamples of complete non-techies who massively succeeded over a long term, including retaining their initial key technical people? Steve Jobs is the only one I can think of off the top of my head (and he fails the retention test, e.g. he burned out the Macintosh development team, didn't he?) but he clearly has unique relevant design talents that make him a special case. |