[golateef]

Technical teams are strongly preferred by Silicon Valley angel investors right now. I think part of the reason for that is that the current generation of those angels came of age in the 90s when highly technical teams were required to build anything that worked. That's the model they know.

However, these days technology has diffused and become componentized in a way that makes it much easier to build products that customers will buy using contractors. That's not to say that using contractors is easy - I only tried it because I have several years of experience managing outsourced technical teams. I think the strong bias for technical founding teams may shift or moderate in the future.

That said, I continue to look for a technical co-founder because I believe that technology decisions will need to be made day-to-day as my start-up matures. Fundamentally, I think that outsourcing only gets you so far.