[cperciva]

The best sort of manager acts like an administrative assistant. When managing creative people like developers, you don't need to "manage" them in order to get them to create; their natural state is creating things, and this only changes when some obstacle gets in the way. A good manager makes sure that obstacles -- needing to get paid, getting approval to travel to a conference, purchasing a new computer, finding people to test code, irritating users with bug reports which are too vague to be useful -- don't intrude on the developer's time.

The best thing you can do to make yourself attractive as a non-coding co-founder (short of learning to code) is to say "I'll take care of all the non-coding muck so that you can focus on doing what you do best".

[wccrawford]

I agree. And if you've found someone that needs to be prodded into coding, they aren't a good coder. That's your first warning.

Also, anything that annoys a developer is an obstacle. If you make it difficult to take vacation time, for example, that's an obstacle. Many companies seem to think 'Oh, everyone is that way' and that it makes it okay somehow. If there's something in the contract and you make it hard for the developer to get it, you're going wrong. Part of honoring your contract should be making sure it isn't difficult for the developer to collect on what they are promised.

[cperciva]

Part of honoring your contract should be making sure it isn't difficult for the developer to collect on what they are promised.

Also, keep in mind that when they're not writing code, developers often have about as much attention span as a five year old on crack. You might think that filling out a couple pages of paperwork in order to get the company to pay conference registration fees is perfectly reasonable, but it will irritate the hell out of many developers.