[notduncansmith]

The idea that technical people are the only ones who can build something is one of the things that drives me away from most potential business cofounders. There are plenty of tools and free online resources that within a month or so, you should have the skills to hack some kind of prototype together in a reasonable amount of time. Lack of investigation into any of those opportunities signals to me that either a) the person doesn't believe enough in the idea to get their hands dirty, b) they consider themselves somehow above that kind of work, or c) that they're simply "not smart/savvy enough". The first two are obviously bad, and the third is not someone who I feel would be able to push through the fear and uncertainty that comes with starting a business.

To look at it from the other side, I wouldn't approach a potential CEO without bringing some business connections of my own to the table and ideally some seed money, or a potential CMO without some existing marketing efforts.

[mhuffman]

Wow! Where to start with this. Have you considered that some people with a head for business just might not grok programming? And vice-versa? Even if they do, have you considered that an amateurish prototype, that looks and acts like shit, might turn off some viable early-round potential partners?

The second point is even more ridiculous. If you not only develop, but have business connections and seed money, why court a CEO? At that point you simply need a couple of investment partners to fatten out your staff and you are all done!

Every person in a company does not need to be able to do everything in that company -- and shouldn't! That is why people have different responsibilities, strengths, and weaknesses.

It is a million times better to have a well-connected and capable CEO, and a talented CTO than to have both a CEO and CTO that both are ok at business and ok at development.

[jameshush]

I have to agree with @crdb. The CEO of the company I work at has a sociology degree, but bought a book on PHP/MySQL because "nobody wanted to program my stupid ideas so I just had to figure it out." He created the MVP himself by using copy/pasta jQuery soup, in line SQL queries and GoDaddy hosted PHP. He was able to get 100,000 customers though and got a CTO on board to convert the MVP to something scaleable (which I'm working on now too).

The CEO doesn't code anymore, but I had huge respect that he learned enough to get the ball going.

[notduncansmith]

The point is not for one person to, as you said, "be able to do everything in that company". The point is to have an appreciable respect for what others do, and have enough faith in your idea to take a solid crack at the parts you don't have an expert to handle yet. I'm not saying the CEO's MVP implementation has to be anything worth keeping. It can be a shoddy Wordpress mess, or even a very thorough clickable demo if they're afraid to touch code - but they should have something that demonstrates some thought put into the actual application (and that they value the skills I, as a potential CTO, bring to the table).

> If you not only develop, but have business connections and seed money, why court a CEO?

Because it takes more than connections and seed money to be a proper CEO. You need to have a strong sense of product direction, and the ability to steer the company in a successful way - something that a developer who has a few investor relationships and a bit of cash may well indeed lack.

> It is a million times better to have a well-connected and capable CEO, and a talented CTO than to have both a CEO and CTO that both are ok at business and ok at development.

I agree, and I don't recall saying anything to the contrary.

[crdb]

> Have you considered that some people with a head for business just might not grok programming?

Bollocks to that. I was an FX trader who copy/pasted values for excel formula results because I was scared they'd go away if I typed something in another cell.

It took a short while but I taught myself. Programming and technology are rational, a set of facts about the world that are inherently understandable at most levels of abstraction unlike, say, volatility trading on a proprietary basis or private equity.

The cost of being technically incompetent - and by that I do not mean knowing how to follow instructions for how to build a RoR app on a blog, and deploy it on Heroku's free tier (OK, I used bottle.py and JS, but it only took me 3 days) - is incredibly high for a non-connected business founder. There are a lot of people out there with slick talk and "great" "technical" CVs which will impress someone used to navigate in finance-land where the rules are different. These people also happen to be expensive, both in hard cash raised for the company, opportunity cost of launching slower or ruining your reputation, and in the future value of the cash flow you'll inevitably have to outlay to fix the code rot they set in motion before they job hopped yet again. I'm not going to go into what happens when you hire a student "because he's cheap and I just need an MVP", that should be pretty obvious.

When my business friends ask me how to do the technical part, I tell them they have a choice: either they go and read the books I give them (SICP, Codd & Date, etc.) or they trust me entirely, let me hire the CTO, and trust HIM entirely with the technical aspect of the business. Only one took me up on that last offer; they got on well, he trusted the guy, who built the product, they raised USD 600k within a few months, and I just heard that they did 200k USD in revenue last week. Well, a second also did, for an internal team; but they tried to micro-manage the guy against my explicit instructions and he quit 3 months later, letting me know his thoughts on the way out.

I'm not saying become your own CTO. My co-founder solves problems around 30x faster than I do - the ones I can solve, anyway - which we know because I've had to write, badly, some of the codebase for some of our clients (in one case, ~12% of total LoC and 80% of the SQL, although 0% of the Haskell). But being aware of what's going on, being able to help with SQL, HTML and CSS, knowing what dev ops is, figuring out the BI by yourself, being able to talk to clients and write a good functional spec that really separates model and implementation, it doesn't come naturally. You have to study and lay the bases and understand just enough about the field to know how to work with the technical side.

[mhuffman]

I get what you are saying but disagree with your original premise.

It is akin to saying, "It is silly for a programer to not already be a businessman (businesswoman) when seeking a partner, because there are books and websites online and in just a few days he ought to be able to get by in the business world".

It is nice for you that you made an MVP for yourself. Likewise it is nice that you have plenty of business contacts, etc.

However, my point is that it is absurd to think that just a few days of intense study will turn a programmer into an MBA or and MBA into a programmer.

People recognize this and that is why they seek people that are strong where they are weak. So together they are more than individually.

[crdb]

Months, not days (really, this "I want it tomorrow" culture is quite harmful). And yes, I do think developers who become co-founders or C-levels should take some time to familiarize themselves with basic legal and financial concepts as well. Things like optionality and the time value of money, and protective provisions. And basic accounting. And, in our case, international tax and labour laws. Helps when those discussions come up. Helps filter out incompetent but slick sales types (after all, Sturgeon's Law also holds for businessmen).

Nevertheless, it's not black and white. I personally think that being familiar with a little bit from all the fields that you will eventually touch as a founder, is immensely value adding. But if you have a good network in a trustworthy environment, you can get away with not.

[mhuffman]

There is a huge difference between knowing enough on a subject to do a "bullshit test", and what you recommended in your top post, which was for businessmen to go learn to program and make their own MVP. While an admirable goal, that seems ludicrous for most.

Obviously, if you are going to be an entrepreneur, you need to know your business, and that includes the high-points from all divisions, but that is a far cry from your first recommendation.