[jonahbenton]

I'm with the people asking "why."

There is almost no real reason for a business side founder to "grok" a hacker mindset. If hackers/developers are the business' customer, then the business owner just needs to find ones to talk to.

Forgive the directness but what I hear in the way the question above is framed is that there is actually some communication misalignment between the tech founder- who considers himself to have a "hacker mindset"- and the business founder, and the "hacker mindset" is a crutch the tech founder is using to protect against some fear or concern being probed by the business founder.

If that is the case, the solution is to drop the defensiveness and just talk about it, not point to some resource as though it is an authority that business people have to worship offering tenets for them to adhere to. A new business only has a chance to succeed if the founders succeed in building a relationship that permits each other to fail and recover, and where they grok each others' mindsets, not some caricature that Eric Raymond made up.

Happy to be completely wrong.

Cheers.

[Myrmornis]

I don't think I agree with this. I think what the poster is looking for is how to help the more businessy founder understand the engineers that (s)he's necessarily going to be hiring and working with. That strikes me as a perfectly sensible and worthwhile goal and one that will probably help their start up have a healthy culture in its early months/years.

[jonahbenton]

Yeah, could be, but if that were the problem, my guess is that the question would be different. How do I help my business founder understand what to look for and value when hiring, etc.

The issue is that OP question is an answer to the real question, which goes unasked.

Cheers.

[omniscient_oce]

How do you even define a 'hacker mindset' anyway. It seems too hard to really pin down a definition so I'm not sure it's worth the time anyway.