You will also be able to have an intelligent conversation with a developer.

I get sad whenever I encounter a business person with no technical bullshit filter. Not because I'm judging them, but because if I can bullshit them, any other developer can. Which probably means there's a problem somewhere that will hurt all of us.

I'll make a point to have a cursory understanding of financial statements, market segmentation, and project management if you do the same for the basic building blocks of software applications. Then the two of us will be able to talk about almost anything. OK?

But I think you have a good benchmark there: Do I know it well enough yet to have a good idea of when I'm being bullshitted?

If you learn enough to do a bad job building your prototype, you will learn what you don't know. Right now you don't even know what you don't know.

Also, you can't hire someone for a job you know nothing about. Doing (even a poor) job on your prototype will teach you to evaluate a technical co-founder.

The other is you muddle through, learn a bit and do an OK job pulling together the prototype. Sure it doesn't look exactly right but you can log in, see some records, make some updates and it's all fine in demos and pitches - hell you've even stuck it on the web for friends to poke and prod.

You now think it's all straight forward and you're nearly there. The whole this isn't secure, is held together with sticky tape, updates aren't transactional so when something does go wrong the data is left in a mess, it has no error handling or referential integrity and won't scale beyond half a dozen users which is all it's ever had to put up with as a prototype but you've only been coding for six months so you hardly understand that these problems even exist let alone understand what's involved in solving them.

Personally I really really don't want to be the tech lead who has to then deal with someone who knows way less than they think and is being told that the thing needs to be rewritten and by doing so is not only delivering bad news but is also having to criticise the persons own personal work.

Some CEOs will benefit from this sort of knowledge, others will be damaged by it - there is no simple rule.

Sure, but that's a pretty good test as to whether or not you should work for them.

A good CEO shouldn't have to have every skill used by their organisation and I don't see how coding is any different to accounting, legal, sales or any other skills in this respect.

The mark of a good CEO is to be able to build good teams, be trusting enough to let them do the work they need to and smart enough to see when the wool is being pulled over their eyes.

If you need to be able to code to trust your developers, you've either got the wrong developers or a trust problem, neither of which are likely to be solved by programming.

1) with a greater appreciation of the talent/experience required for good development, a better BS detector arond technical issues, and a stronger understanding of what they don't know OR

2) a false impression that proof-of-concept = product and an over-inflated idea of what they've learned.

I definitely agree that founder #2 here is someone to be avoided. Not because either one of them would be expected to contribute to the actual development, but because founder #2 is showing flaws of perception, ego, etc. that are serious red flags, and will affect their execution of non-development tasks.

- Can raise funding and know funders well

- Have a massive network of people to tap into

- Can cold-call like no-one's business

- Know how to negotiate a deal to the point of paranoia

- Have deep domain experience and connections

- Make plans for the future, but can pivot on a dime

- Can talk enough tech to understand well beyond buzzwords

- Know how to keep themselves and the tech side accountable

- Let the tech side concentrate on what they do best

The people the comment was targeting were "idea people" who I must conclude are useless without any muscle/blood/sweat to turn an idea into a product.

"Real" business people are very good at steps 1 & 2. It's not fair to call them "idea people" if they have useful executional skills to make those things happen.

Hustlers find a way - bottom line.

Though keep in mind that they might not be a good "co-founder" per say since they are likely going to want to own the whole thing as they are paying for development.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/start.html

If you can find a business co-founder with half of the above _plus_ an insane drive to master the remaining half, you'll be better off than most startups.

- Clearly presenting value prop

- Use CustDev framework to test and validate the idea

- Create and manage ad campaigns

- SEO and content marketing

- Conduct user tests

- Getting out of the building

Having a co-founder that focuses on customer development and distribution is super valuable in a startup.

I'm not a programmer, but I'm intimately involved with every piece of UI across our product line as well as our marketing sites.

Some of the UI I design myself, some I work with other designers on, and other bits I give advice, feedback, and guidance on.

I also write the copy on all of our sites, and I'm involved with most of the copy in the apps themselves as well.

I hired DHH as a programmer (and then made him a partner) because those were skills I didn't have. I've done some PHP programming in the past, and I met DHH when he was a PHP programmer, so I was able to evaluate his talent at a very basic level. Beyond that, however, I liked his business mind and general approach to things - they were closely aligned with my own.

I hope this helps explain the dynamic a bit. Let me know if you have any other questions.

BTW, I sincerely meant no disrespect. I've been following 37signals since the homepage was the manifesto (http://37signals.com/manifesto) and am a great admirer of the 37signals' bootstrap business philosophy which I think is a healthy counter-weight to the VC-centric Silicon Valley mindset.

I just wanted to clarify my skills/role for people who were curious.

I think it's crucial that anyone who designs interfaces for the web understands how to design and code in HTML/CSS.

(Everyone in the audience was a developer.)

So what you're saying is ... learn to program, unless you are sharp enough to identify talent and 'bullshit' ... How would one identify this innate ability to know that they didn't need to actually learn how to program then?

> the above advice isn't entirely applicable to his case.

Care to explain why?

I don't buy into everything he's selling (cf. Rework), but I think there's stuff worth picking out of his brain.

I'm not his interlocutor nor his defender. Go read and decide for yourself.

Replies like "wait. what?!" don't actually contribute to the conversation on YC.News and are functionally, pollution.

Also don't use downvotes as an "I disagree" weapon, but rather a way to cull commentary that isn't contributing to the exchange.

Much like your own, actually.

Confer with http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In the "In Comments" section for more info if you haven't reviewed it already.

Thank you.

The fact that they had a functional prototype, regardless of how horrible the technical implementation was, showed me that they were serious and I'd be able to communicate technical aspects to them much easier.

The takeaway is that you don't even need to learn to code to get that far, even WordPress with the right plugins can build a convincing prototype and quickly show a proof of concept to a technical developer that can take it from there.

marknutter is 100% correct. I can't imagine founding a startup that had a non-developer "idea guy."

a little proof that WordPress can be used for an interesting prototype: http://www.notepeep.com

I don't code and with a handful of plugins and a few changes to some PHP I was able to pull off a functioning prototype.

I'm glad to see technical founders out there appreciating the pseudo-technical work the non-coding bunch of us do.

If you're a non-technical founder, and have money, it's perfectly ok for you to hire a developer or a team to implement your idea (full disclosure - I run a company that does that, link in profile) instead of learning how to program yourself. Here's a very good article by Derek Sivers on steps you could take to make that happen: http://sivers.org/how2hire

I'd almost argue that it can be a bad thing - I've lost count of the number of times I've been stitched up by someone with a small level of knowledge who extrapolated incorrectly from it. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing as often as it can be useful and in 6 months that's all you're going to get (actually in six months coming from nothing you're going to know way less than most graduates and how many people consider that a decent skill level?).

Good founders should bring intelligence and an ability to learn quickly to the table, they should be willing to trust the experts they hire, but I think saying that they should be able to program is a very programmer centric view and no more valid than the sales guy saying you should go sell for 6 months, or the account saying you should be a book keeper for 6 months.

Sure these things are useful but it's perfectly possible to be successful without it and I'd suggest that it wouldn't be close to the best use of 6 months.

Why should a business/non-technical founder learn to code? The answer to this is simple: so that you have better ideas. Or, put another way: learning to code gives you the ability to implement your ideas. And implementing your ideas forces you to recognize, after some time, what works and what doesn't.

Hackers who start their own projects tend to have a framework in their heads for figuring out which ideas are good/may work, and which ideas won't. And they know this because they've failed enough times to figure out what isn't good for a project. Whereas most business 'wantrepreneurs' I know don't have that. They don't have that because they've never implemented anything, and so how do they know if their idea's a good one or not?

It's interesting to note that you don't have to learn to program to get this framework in your head. Learning to program is simply the most efficient (and cheapest!) way of doing it. Prominent counter-examples come to mind: Steve Jobs never really learned to code, but he grew up in the valley, and chose to mix around with hackers (Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers points out that as a teenager Jobs approached the CEO of HP to ask for parts). So it's probably safe to assume Jobs absorbed such a framework by osmosis - spend enough time around people who make product and you begin to see for yourself what works, and what doesn't.

Jason Fried has also been brought up in this HN thread. And I suspect that it's no different for him: Fried is no programmer (though he's a web designer). But he was willing to pay people to implement his ideas. He paid DHH, after all, to build Basecamp. And that's another hack - you don't need programming ability to learn the framework - in this particular case all you need is implementation (which you can pay for). And if the project fails, you learn from it. Either way you gain things to add to your internal framework. (Derek Sivers also springs to mind - he hired contract programmers to build CDBaby, if I'm not mistaken).

Gaining that framework for sussing out ideas is likely to be the most important reason a non-technical founder should learn to code. Because it's going to help in so many little ways - you learn to detect technical bullshit, you gain a feel for what features to implement when and why, you attract better programming talent - because how else are you able to attract co-founders if you reek of incompetence and/or naivety?

This mental framework you elude to might be described in another way... perhaps as 'optimal manifestation frequency'. Someone working in OMF is able to create reality (ie- code, design, deals, etc) at the highest levels of human capacity. Doesn't necessarily matter their particular area of expertise. People in their 'wave of impact' will know what to do.

(/end quantum nerd talk)

Re: #2—Let's reverse this, specifically for marketing.

Developers (and pretty much anyone) who know a little marketing can be harder to work with than those that believe they don't understand it. They over-rely on cliches and stereotypes without realizing it.

And what about the scenario where you end up with a person with limited technical knowledge micro-managing a tech worker? Not a good thing.

Re: #1—I find creating mock-ups shows functionality more accurately and in much, much less time than creating working prototypes.

I'm a business/marketing guy who loves coding. I usually avoid it because it's incredibly time-consuming to do even half-assed well, and you can re-use little of what you learn when it's just a one-off experience to creating something to show. (I realize that if you are always learning and creating things, your experience builds in more reusable ways.)

Any business/idea guy worth his/her salt will have more than one great idea. This is why I am learning how to code; so I don't have to go through all the trouble to get a technical cofounder every time I come up with an idea I really like. This way I can build a prototype and be a lot more credible when I approach people to work with me.

This very same pattern is the same in many other industries, not just software. But I couldn't agree more. Know your domain knowledge.

We're pretty busy, so let me cut to the chase:

The good: I'm credible to our tech folks. I understand when to slow down to integrate a library, and I'm more than willing to find time to re-factor. I learned that pair programming can be awesome, that bringing on new people slows you down, and a lot of other things that probably seem obvious to technical folks but are non-intuitive when you imagine software as assembling widgets.

The bad: Ultimately, we gave up 3-5 months that we could have been hiring, fund-raising, and building software. On balance, I think that this was good for me and bad for this start-up.

The ugly: As soon as I'd hired people, I think that we should have thrown out most of the code I'd written. We kept it because it worked and was fairly fast, but I'd made A LOT of newbie mistakes that have slowed things down.

So, tl;dr? I'd suggest learning to code but I'm not sure that you should do it for your current start-up. At the very least launch something more sophisticated than a CRUD app and THEN get started on your small biz.

And frankly, I can only code for so long before getting bored, and losing interest. But when I'm marketing, brainstorming partnerships, and discussing potential leads with a company -- i'm in my element, and loving it. I never get tired of it.

There's nothing wrong with what you enjoy doing - it's very valuable to have someone good at it - but there is a difference between a good sales/marketing guy and a good founder, just like there's a difference between a good programmer and a good founder.

I believe that it's just as valuable (i'm not going to say 'if not more')

I guess that's why proven coders and proven commission salespeople (and proven accountants) can always find jobs, while "big picture" folks are left unemployed, wondering why companies can't see their brilliance. Or, if they're lucky, they sue Zuckerberg because he was able to do make an actual product which never got past the great-idea-over-beer phase for them.

(Ducks...)

Specifically, it's much more true in consumer than B2B. In B2B, biz dev is building partnerships, channels, distribution, obtaining resources you need at prices you can afford, all that good stuff. It's the absolute engine of your business.

If you're writing a B2C app, doesn't matter about the platform, then what biz is there to dev? In a similar sense, you need marketers, not salesmen, because your problem is getting a call-to-action out to your potential market as effectively and efficiently as possible. You can't do that door-to-door at scale.

But if you're doing enterprise software, the converse is true. You need biz dev to shape your proposition, and you need a sales force to go and hammer down doors and melt the copper in the phonelines.

Different problems, different solutions, different solvers, that's all.

We spent months and months building a business plan, doing market research, talking about our IP, our proprietary processes, etc. When talking to all the investors we met while in the Notre Dame McCloskey Business Competition, we were basically informed the business plan wasn't worth the paper it was printed on, we had no IP, and the reason investors won't sign an NDA on your idea is that an idea isn't worth shit. When I actually started building something, when we got the land needed for the other part of our business, and when we had substance (not just words); that's when they listened, offered us money, and things started to work out.

Edit: reading your other replies, it doesn't really sound like we're disagreeing.

I'm learning a lot of mechanical engineering stuff from my co-founders that's critical to understanding why our product will or won't work.

As far as passion is concerned, you should be passionate about the whole thing - from start to finish! I want to know the why, how, and what behind my products.

I appreciate your reply, and I agree with you.

That is what I thought too before writing. Let me tell you you don't understand it, my friend.

Edit: That was not a smart comment from me. Let me rephrase it. If you can read and understand it, then writing it should be less hard for you.

That's because it's not all fun and games. It's hard work, and the most important part of an internet startup.

I do front-end development, and I can read backend code, I just can't write it!

The people at the top have to be willing to do whatever it takes, whether they're "passionate" about it or not.

Do these sweeping generalizations do any good? No doubt, it helps to know at least some coding in this business, but isn't that just common sense? And even if someone disagreed with that sentiment, would they take this to heart anyway?

This is one thing that bothers me about HN. There is a lot of advice here that seems to be just that. I love checking out people's work, the sharing of actual trials and tribulations, and learning about developments in the industry; but you know what they say about opinions and assholes... everybody has them.

Also, I can feel with business types who say it doesn't make sense for them to learn coding. In a way I am in a similar situation, as I am constantly extremely hampered by my lack of design skills. Should I try to become a designer? I admit to trying now and them (decided today to go through the inkscape tutorials, bought the occasional book on design), but honestly, odds are very low that I'll be able to compete with real designers. And the graphics design takes away much needed time from coding.

So you could have built a crappy prototype, true. However, while Twitter is an exciting startup, a Twitter clone is not (anymore).

Granted, you might be able to build the occasional CRUD prototype for something that could become an interesting startup. I doubt it is true for all kinds of startups, though.

Over the past year, we had many 'business' persons who offered to help out, and while that was awesome, what we really needed was qualified technical people. For a 'business' person, one can usually get an unpaid college intern and not have to sacrifice any shares in the company.

Also, I think as functional person you are somewhat "over the barrel" if your developers dont perform, and can do nothing except complain. I do believe it's better overall if you can build your own product. At the end of the day, we decided to educate our own team in Ruby/Rails rather than bring in outside developers. I think this was a smart decision, and also a more cost effective solution.

I definitely suggest other start ups do the same.

My take on it is simple: I passed this article along to my co-founder as a token of appreciation. See, he started along the way without any coding experience. He taught himself (with some pushes in the right direction) how to program, design, and even do some database stuff. He's decent at it, but that isn't necessarily what matters. What matters is now I have someone to discuss things with, someone who understands at least the basics (and has basic experience) with different design stuff. That's not only helpful for productivity, but morale as well.

So, yeah, maybe learning to code isn't a requirement for a guy who can do everything nickpinkston listed. But, as the technical guy, it sure as hell makes my life better. So here's to you, jonesy!

As a corollary, be weary of AI. If you are solving a problem with AI that you don't understand, assume the AI won't work.

On another note, maybe the real advice should just be "pick an easier project." I have a technical background but consider myself a hybrid business/hacker going forward. My current project is highly technical; I don't think I'd consider taking on a co-founder who didn't have some tech background.

We haven't completely weened off outsourced web development, but I can now see a path to get there, and it all started by learning how to become more self-sufficient.

If it is challenging, you get too deep into code, things take too long, get discouraged, etc.. Or settle for some gimmick that you can execute within a reasonable timeframe.

It's a good theory, but it assumes that non-technical people will try ideas that are minor improvements over existing ideas, like twitter, groupon clones. But they may also read up on magic new tech and come up with ideas based on that, not knowing how hard they'll be to prototype.

I started with Python, using a combo of MIT OCW, Learn Python the Hard Way, and How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. I then started going through an online course on dynamic websites that touches on HTML, CSS, PHP, XML, MySQL, Ajax, and Javascript. I've been using w3schools.com and the online manuals to learn more about these.

Does this make any sense? Should I try to learn more Python? If so, which resources should I use? Are these all worth my time? Am I missing anything?

Best thing for me was to escape the textbook-like examples (quadratic equations, rock paper scissors) and actually [attempt to] build real things. Once you have cursory Python knowledge, pick up "Practicel Django Projects" -- you'll build a working CMS by page 28 and feel really good about yourself. By the end of that book I was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable I was writing other programs, even if I am slow as hell and have a reference book open in my lap.

While building my prototype I mostly feel like I have no idea what I'm doing but slowly and surely my site's starting to function, grow and work. Its amazing what persistence can accomplish.

I realize I'll have to find a technical co-founder eventually though. I won't be able to hack together a smoothly running and awesome site on my own. I also have no idea where to look for a technical co-founder and how to approach them. Interesting times ahead.

Whatever other skill set you have above all learn to write, if you can write you can express yourself, you can create a business plan, write a blog and write marketing copy and grow your idea on the cheap.

Sean http://seanclark.com

I haven't touched code in 15 years, but I understand web technologies, constraints, possibilities, etc. People love our product and UI. I own the product roadmap and UI direction - have since the beginning. I write the specs, I do the wireframes, I refine UI, etc.

Why would I learn to code? What impact does it have on my business? I have 10 engineers who are extraordinary.

Every time I see this argument, I cringe.

Been hacking away for a 1-2 months so far with a friend who is a developer. It's totally worth it.

I'm in the same situation as you. Maybe you lack the business man part?

And there is no way they can get a co-fonder that way, anyways.

If you really can't do that, at least put in the time to create a detailed spec.

It is better to learn the task yourself, before hiring the person on that task. I believe this mantra works in most situations in a start up.

now we can all be single founders.

If your primary skillset is in business, marketing, or sales, stick with that. Don't deviate from your specialization.

If you're founding a startup, then a business guy needs to be able to clearly and quickly communicate with the developer(s).

now speed this proces up a 100 times faster and you've got a programmer in the 'zone' with a 5 page requirement list for a fairly complex project. It won't end very well unless you have very short communication lines for the entire duration of the project (or the programmer is reading your mind)

Yes it's important to create the best possible working environment for a programmer and give them the best information, but in this example the founder / CEO / visionary is actually the scarce resource and the aim should be to get him working as effectively as possible. Six months of his time to learn to program is a huge and expensive (in opportunity terms) commitment when part of that should be picked up by the programmer spending time filling in the gaps.

It's not how you get the most out of the programmer that matters, it's how you get the most out of the whole team and sometimes that's going to involve individuals having to work in ways which are to them non-optimal.