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by bherms 5559 days ago
I'll give you that... It certainly depends on the person and past experience and I did generalize a bit based on my experience with technical co-founders I've known and worked with. When I said a "really good" tech co-founder, I kind of implicitly meant someone easily capable of or already possessing some of the skills necessary. I look at myself or some of my successful friends and all of them are tech co-founders who learned the business stuff pretty easily and have been successful. In cases like that, if some mba grad tried to sell them on "oh, i'm a business guy" (which has happened quite often), they'd always get told to fuck off.
1 comments

I look at myself or some of my successful friends and all of them are tech co-founders who learned the business stuff pretty easily and have been successful. In cases like that, if some mba grad tried to sell them on "oh, i'm a business guy" (which has happened quite often), they'd always get told to fuck off.

Sure, just having an MBA doesn't mean one is a good "business guy." And, to be fair, different types of businesses do have different needs. For example, it's implicit in my diatribe above that I'm referring to the kind of business that sales to other big businesses, using a direct sales model. And maybe in some other kinds of businesses it's easier for somebody who's a techie by trade to just step in and learn the business side of what they're trying to do.

Of course, once you go down that path, one could ask if you're still "a techie" or if you're now some kind of weird hybrid thing... ;-)

Anyway, in either case, I also agree that the kind of person who has nothing but "an idea" and no ability to execute in some regard (whether it be the business "side" or the techie "side") is of pretty limited value.