

Ask HN: any successful start-ups started by non-technical founders? - pennyfiller

Please let us know which companies are successful today that were started by non-technical founders.
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cperciva
It's a bit of a stretch, but you could put Jeff Bezos into this category. He's
obviously a very smart and generally technically-inclined guy, but I don't
think he was ever particularly involved in the technical side of Amazon.com.

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hga
More than a bit of a stretch; from Wikipedia:

" _Bezos showed intense and varied scientific interests at an early age. He
rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room and
maintain his privacy. He converted his parents' garage into a laboratory for
his science projects. [...] While in high school, he attended the Student
Science Training Program at the University of Florida.... He entered Princeton
University, planning to study physics, but soon returned to his love of
computers and graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in
computer science and electrical engineering._ "

His first set of jobs were also in CS, networking, etc.

I think it's no accident that Amazon is the leading cloud computing provider.

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cperciva
Hence my comment about him being obviously technically inclined. He has the
skills of both a technical guy and a business guy; my point was that with
Amazon he was playing the non-technical role, in spite of his technical
qualifications.

~~~
hga
Well ... we're getting to the point of quibbling; I just wanted to show he was
more than "generally technically-inclined".

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SingAlong
Hmm... yes Sridhar Vembu of Zoho. He wasn't a single founder though. He also
acted as their offshore marketing guy in the beginning.

Atleast thats what I know from the recent Mixergy podcast

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jgamman
Sam Morgan - NZer who created an EBay type site for himself back in the day by
hiring a coder to build it. Sold it a couple years ago for $750M or so.

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startupcomment
I think what you are seeking is technology start-ups founded by non-technical
founders -- not just start-ups in general.

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ig1
Wikipedia, Xing

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pascalchristian
digg, Myspace

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adora
Gilt Groupe

