[lysecret]

Some early comments criticizing some kind of caricature of a know nothing business guy spewing marketing buzzwords.

OK. I don't deny these people exists, and admittedly, I have a B2B point of view.

But early, cold B2B sales is hell and i have deep admiration for anyone doing it well.

By far the biggest risk of early stage startups is to build something great, that nobody wants. And in my experience the risk of that increases by a good amount with 2 technical founders.

I say this as a technical person as well (as i guess 99.999% of people here are)

[hibikir]

Early B2B sales are definitely hell. I have seen many B2B startup failures up close, and many of them fail because they run out of usable leads, because they just can't convert them. The problem is that figuring out who is going to be a good salesman for your very small startup is far harder than finding early developers. Someone that has done a lot of business sales for a more successful company is using a different skillset, because they have a good brand behind them. Same when you hire from big consultancy: Executives aren't afraid that they are taking a gamble with McKinsey.

I've seen way too many cases where technical cofounders just believe that someone that can use the right buzzwords is as good as any other, and then end up with a defunct sales pipeline. Or you can end up with someone that is great at selling their skills and charisma to technical founders, or even VCs but what you need to convince said people is different than convincing, say, retail executives. The same guy that might be great at raising your seed round, or your series A, might not really be successful at convincing early customers, or knowing what you have to change in your product to be better for said sales. This can fail later too: I have seen companies with a series B, 20+ people in product design and sales, that might not get sales to their name in two years, and then there are major layoffs that don't cut a single salesman, because said sales team's top skill was selling their competence to the executive team.

So it's not that it's easy to be good at sales or product in an early startup, but that interviewing for that is really hard, and that by the time you know whether someone is good or not, your startup is probably in trouble. If this wasn't the case, we'd see far more success in B2B than we see.

[PragmaticPulp]

> Some early comments criticizing some kind of caricature of a know nothing business guy spewing marketing buzzwords.

If these people are also your customers, it's actually extremely valuable to have someone who speaks that language on your sales team.

Obviously they need to have more than just the ability to speak the buzzwords. You need to ensure they're aligned with your goals and not simply trying to talk their way into extracting as much money from your company as possible.

But if you're selling to the B2B buzzword companies, you're going to struggle without someone who can speak the B2B buzzword language.

[erex78]

Agree with your sentiment here - not every non-technical founder is out to get you with MBA jargon. My co-founder is non-technical, but he's a subject matter expert (he's a physician).

I know several non-technical founders of multi-hundred-million / billion dollar startups. Common thread is that these people are really knowledgeable about a particular industry or subject (ie. sewer inspection, restaurant bulk food ordering, mortgage underwriting). The combo of someone who intimately understands the pain points of an industry partnered with a technical founder is a good one.

[abeaclark]

Completely agree. Building tech is only half (maybe less than half?) of the equation.

Bringing on the right business partner is crucial.