"Does every pair of founders consist of a Jobs and a Woz?"
I think our school system is very much designed around this idea of "give a man a fish and you'll feed him for a day, teach a man HOW to fish and you'll feed him for the rest of his life."
Almost everything we learn in school is a HOW question. Hacking is a HOW question. To the extent that school focuses on WHAT questions, it's busy work like memorizing the places and dates of historic battles. WHO, WHY, WHEN, and WHERE are barely touched touched on at all, and that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of questions that don't fit into this paradigm.
But there are other questions that aren't how questions. They aren't taught in school, which leads some to believe that they aren't important or don't require intelligence or that they don't even exist.
Success in a startup is partly a HOW question, but it's more than just that. After all, the point isn't knowing how to manipulate tools, but rather making something people want.
I think the reason why MBAs (deservedly) get a bad rap is because they don't know how to answer the HOW questions, but they also don't know how to answer any other questions either.
So I'd say it's not really an answer of one hacker and one non-hacker, but rather that both put together cover the full range of human thought.
Well, my point was more that I could think of a number of examples where one guy did the vast majority of the talking, and no examples (in my very limited knowledge) where the two founders were close to equal.
I think our school system is very much designed around this idea of "give a man a fish and you'll feed him for a day, teach a man HOW to fish and you'll feed him for the rest of his life."
Almost everything we learn in school is a HOW question. Hacking is a HOW question. To the extent that school focuses on WHAT questions, it's busy work like memorizing the places and dates of historic battles. WHO, WHY, WHEN, and WHERE are barely touched touched on at all, and that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of questions that don't fit into this paradigm.
But there are other questions that aren't how questions. They aren't taught in school, which leads some to believe that they aren't important or don't require intelligence or that they don't even exist.
Success in a startup is partly a HOW question, but it's more than just that. After all, the point isn't knowing how to manipulate tools, but rather making something people want.
I think the reason why MBAs (deservedly) get a bad rap is because they don't know how to answer the HOW questions, but they also don't know how to answer any other questions either.
So I'd say it's not really an answer of one hacker and one non-hacker, but rather that both put together cover the full range of human thought.