[carguy1983]

> great businesspeople are undervalued

Nitpick: by definition, great businesspeople have lots of money (value).

You should say that business people with an unknown track record are possibly undervalued.

Which is really not saying anything at all, other than it's hard to tell the future.

[jonnathanson]

Actually, my point was more about businesspeople in general vis-a-vis the startup scene. Technical people may indeed undervalue the importance of business people (and, in many cases, vice versa).

The nitpick offers an interesting perspective, and it's well received, but I think it's orthogonal to my point.

In general, I think there's a common misunderstanding between these two camps, especially w/r/t their intersection in the software industry. Just as it's not fair for a businessperson to assume that all technical co-founders are interchangeable ("He's just a skill set"), it's not fair for technical co-founders to assume all business co-founders are worthless ("He's just a rolodex").

[tomkarlo]

Net worth is one way, but not the only way, to evaluate the quality of a "businessperson" any more than "patents" are the only way to assess technical contributors. (And I note that the concept of a "business person" is about as generalized as the concept of an "engineer" -- it's the kind of grouping that's so broad as to be useless.)

There are lots of good "business people" who have spent much of their careers as employees rather than owners. They did their job, they got paid, but even if they were stellar, they probably weren't paid an order of magnitude more than their peers. (As there are many fantastic engineers without patents and/or high profile products.) This may be why they're trying to do a startup rather than switch to a new job.

Try working a few times for some not-so-great business people and you'll learn that the good ones are often undervalued.