[hooande]

On one hand, I have to agree with webwright. The key question here is "What are you going to do for 10 hours a day while I build a product?". But if the "business guy" is truly good, you won't even have to ask that question.

Quick anecdote from "Founders at Work": Wozniac did ALL of the technical things for Apple in the early days. People have implied that Jobs took advantage of him, but in the book Woz says something to the effect of "Anything technical, I did. Anything business related, Steve did. And anything that either of us didn't know how to do, Steve just found a way to take care of it. He really wanted to have a company".

If the "business guy" can fill that role, or at least work with that much passion, then it doesn't matter if he never contributes a bit of code.

Personally: I would love to have an MBA with 5+ years of corporate experience on our team right now. B2B corporate people have a whole way of doing things and I know enough to know that I don't know anything about it.

[webwright]

Good example with Apple. But Apple was also a hardware company-- there are a few more biz things to take care of when you're a computer manufacturing startup.

FWIW, I'm speaking from experience. I'M THAT GUY-- if there is a non-technical thing to do at my startup, I do it. And if I didn't have the chops to do design, copywriting, and some light coding, I really wouldn't have 10 hours of early-stage work to do. Not that a biz guy couldn't keep himself busy-- I just think it'd be with non-critical work in the early days.

Doubtless someone will say that a good biz guy would find critical work to fill up that 10 hours per day with, but I've yet to hear someone tell me what they'd fill it with.

Am I missing something? Pick the 20 best YC startups. Rewind to day 1. Add a business guy. What would he do? I can think of a very few startups where a biz guy would be handy (like SnapTalent), but...