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> 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. |
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.