[andy99]

I don't think it's about the audience, but the company type. If someone is starting (random example) a food company based on their superior hot-sauce recipe and existing retail relationships, they probably don't need a technical co-founder. If someone is starting a company that "uses AI" to craft and target hot sauce recommendations, but doens't really know what that means and assumes they can get a shop to code them an app, that's going to be a problem. I think the latter case is what this is usually about. Many (most) business owners don't have technical co-founders and are fine, not so in tech.

[OkayPhysicist]

In your first hot-sauce recipe example, that person IS the technical founder. Just technical in the field relevant to the business, which happens to not be tech.

The scenario in tech is more often comparable to some dude saying "I want to make a business selling the greatest hot sauce ever" and then having to go looking for someone who actually knows anything about hot sauce.

[notahacker]

I think the idea that the person with the specialised knowledge of how to make hot sauce is the technical founder is an interesting point, but I think in YC/HN contexts it's usually considered to mean "engineer"; even in cases like accounting software where the founder who doesn't write software's specialised knowledge of the field is at least as critical as their partner's ability to convert that to code, the latter founder is the only "technical" one. Although tbh I don't think accountants or lawyers get offended by the insinuation they're the "non-technical founder".