
Ask HN: What do you wish your non-technical cofounder understood? - nixterrimus
What concepts are important to understand?  Things like HTTP, CSS v HTML, git. At a High level what is important to know.
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3pt14159
The importance of quiet, long extended coding sessions, the irrelevance of
meetings longer than 20 mins, the painfulness of some aspects of coding (like
yak shaving), the preference towards email (I can read 500 wpm and listen at
60, plus I can read when I need to, rather then just when you are talking) are
all way more important than understanding CSS vs HTML. You should be trusting
those types of things to the technical guy as he should be trusting you for
content marketing strategy.

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gary4gar
Just 3 things:

1) Things get broken all the time: so instead of playing the blame game &
doing name calling.Expect that things will break & assume there will be bugs.
Focus should be fixing the problem ASAP & _then_ doing an analysis on what
went wrong. so corrective measures can be taken so the same problem does not
reoccur again.

2) 9 Women Can’t Make a Baby in a Month: If you had more capital, could you
finish things faster? NO, look what happened to Color(about 200employees,
IIRC) & compare that to instagram(10-12 people) . In software eng, More
resource does not necessarily mean better product.

3) Don't bother about coding, but test the shit of product to provide honest
constructive feedback. Plus, be the public face of the company. technical
people prefer doing programming rather interacting with random bunch of
strangers.

These are the main three ones, I could think of top of my head. Hope it helps
:)

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thiagofm
Not all technical people prefer doing programming rather interacting with a
"random bunch of strangers".

I'm sure that most of technical co-founders LOVE to tell about what they are
building, just... leave most of business crap out of the way and it's perfect!

Non-technical? Be supportive, that's your role.

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dlikhten
1) Just because your technical co-founder got there requirements, is smart,
and can do this stuff on his/her own, does not mean that you can EVER be hands
off. It is demoralizing AND does not build a close relationship between you
two.

2) Let the tech co-found show stuff to you, even if its code. Try to
understand it or understand the significance. Tiny show-off sessions can go
LONG ways towards morale. Also you can catch problems early this way.

3) Offer help even if being rejected. Again, helps with morale if the tech co-
founder knows hes not in the boat alone, even if he he/she is the only one who
can row.

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gmansoor
In addition to overall technical concepts, its nice if the business person
understand the product development and software release process, and have some
development exposure. Code breaks, build fails, software fails - all these
things happen in the development and could be fixed. Lots of business people
just do not count these factors and that's many fail, not because of the
software, but because partners could not work together.

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hiddenemail7
It's so important for non-technical co-founders to trust their technical co-
founders, and to make a huge effort to communicate as clearly and
unambiguously as possible.

