I'm curious what you'd be doing for 40-60 hours a week while your partner(s) hack. I'm not being snippy. In fact, I am the least technical of 3 hackers on our team (currently YC08). I do all of the Photoshop work, html, css, JavaScript, light Rails, customer communication, copywriting, analytics, cooking (I'm serious), pitching, etc.

But if I took out the BUILDING stuff (design prototyping and front-end development), I wouldn't be a critical asset to the first 3-6 months of product development. I could certainly keep myself busy, but I wouldn't be critical.

If I were in your shoes, I'd focus on pitching why you are critical. Having ideas and being a user in your target market doesn't cut the mustard IMO. And an early stage team doesn't need a project manager, or detailed spec sheets, or other "manager-y" stuff.

That being said, there are startups that could really benefit from early sales/biz dev efforts. I know of at least one YC08 company that has a founder who is selling the hell out of their offering already (for real dollars). THAT has real value, but it really only applies to certain startups (a UGC site like I think you're after isn't one of 'em).

>> Having ideas and being a user in your target market doesn't cut the mustard IMO. And an early stage team doesn't need a project manager, or detailed spec sheets, or other "manager-y" stuff.

I predict you'll fail with whatever you try to startup AS LONG AS you have this attitude. A founder who used to be a former user and can point to the flaws in everything on the market and came up with a better solution is an IDEAL person to have start something. Their intuition is based on their experience of what people like them (ie, former customers) will PAY MONEY for. That's a business. Hackers hacking all night is not a business. Sorry to burst your bubble.

You can't be more wrong. You only get PRACTICAL, USEFULL business ideas AS a customer/user. That's why 99.99% of programmers who start businesses flop - they're so wrapped up in some tiny aspect of their warped reality and how their awesome code makes a tiny part of it a bit better in ways nobody understands, that they never stop and think that 99.99% of the general population of who they think will be their customers couldn't care less.

That's if they even bother to think about who their customers will be. Most programmers can't think beyond "users" and I'm sorry, but now that we're entering recession times, you'll learn really quick that users does NOT equal same as paying customer.

The sad truth for you is that most successful companies were started by people without the technical skills but who were users of many things, had a "big picture perspective" and thought to themselves, "You know what sucks about the current state of things, this, this and that - someone should make something different like this and this."

Otherwise, from your model, you just have programmers making something most likely nobody will care about. That's not a company, that's code. If you get some users, that may a service, by which I mean of the charity kind. If they pay you, that's a product, though not necessarily a successful company.

HERE - FORGET MY THESIS - imagine instead this scenario - let's say all the "big idea" people went on some Atlas shrugged type of strike. That leaves you programmers in boston, and those in virginia, in New York, S.V, and about a hundred million others in Russia, Eastern Europe, India, China, Netherlands, Ireland, France ...

If the idea people are that irrelevant to starting great companies, and programmers are that all-important, why don't you guys all get together, form some sort of super development virtual company and spit out 50 million uber-companies all based on your awesome code?

I'll bet 50 idea people in various industries will start successful companies that MAKE MONEY for every 1 programmer with a brilliant algorithm to load YouTube videos 2% faster or whatever passes for a great business idea among hackers these days that manages to fool some desperate, inexperienced VC to put money into their project.

FINAL ANALYSIS: Masons build, but building without a good plan leads to well-executed crap. No inspired architect/designer, no beauty, no inspirational "thing" that PAYING customers can wrap their minds around. I've said it before and I'll say it again: just because you get "users" and maybe bought out by Mega-Corp. doesn't mean you've created a successful company. Get people to pay you money for your thing, that's a business. Otherwise, just a delusion that will never survive the next 4 years of economic slowdown. Can't figure out how to make people hand over their money for your "thing"? That's where you need "business idea" people who've honed their intuition from using everything in the market.

"... I knew I would probably get attacked on this post in some way. I am not naive and I do realize my limitations. Additionally, in a business you are looking ideally for individuals who complement yourself in skills (i.e. one business person, one technology person). ..."

Hi Mel, normally I'd be ripping into a "business" founder as well. Well until I was re-reading "Founders at Work" [0] and come across Mitch Kapor. It made for very interesting reading and totally made me re-think non-tech founders. You see Mitch came into developing right at the start of the Apple ][ software building a companion bit of software for VisiCalc called VisiPlot (TIny Troll).

   '... I was totally ignorant how long things took
   I had no background in computer science. I 
   was self-taught -- I was still writing in Basic. I 
   had no management experience; I was in 
   business school ... I was a transcendental 
   meditation teacher and a mental health
   officer ...' [0]

Now Mitch got himself hired as a product manager as a way to finish his product. With limited recognised "professional credentials" he was sidelined by the software publishers he was working for so he went back to finishing product. Now comes the interesting bit. First he recognised good technical people and seized on the fact that the VisiCalc publishers ignored the technical problem of data-exchange and [1]. Mitch also took advantage of the business in-experience of Software Arts by licensing his software at 33% above SA's gross margins. [2]

Then several things happened that played to his advantage mainly through other people severely underestimating his technical & business abilities. A) He was bought out of the royalty agreement for his licensed software (US$1.2M), convinced them his non-compete was not applicable to their product, hired key technical staff to re-build another product with spread sheeting & graphing & releasing the product as a second generation product to the new IBM PC.

Now I really must have glossed over this bit the first time. I didn't realise Mitch was a non-technical. He was completely underestimated and written off by people with "technical". So what did Mitch really do that stood out?

- created product

- recognised that change (new hardware) brings opportunity

- could read people better than given credit

- recognising technical weakness & hiring well

- killer business instinct

So don't let the negative replies curb your determination. Now 2 questions. Are you still at school or have contact with places where people learn to get a co-founder? Is the fact that best friends (potential co-founders) are normally of the same sex a key factor in finding a co-founder?

[0] Jessica Livingston, Founders at work, Ch6 Mitch Kapor, pp 90-93

[1] Ibid, p91. In the Apple ][ there was not enough memory to save data b/w applications and Mitch saw the potential key technology enabling seamless data transfer via floppies.

[2] Ibid p92.

I did not mean to attack, sorry if you took it that way. Just trying to give you honest feedback.

"What is wrong with 1 non-programmer + 1 hacker sharing equity equally?"

Nothing if you can find someone to do it. Great deal for you.

No one is accusing you of "twiddling my thumbs". Your mere presence here suggests otherwise.

I'm only suggesting that in the earliest stages, 90% (or more) of the work that has to be done is hacking, pure and simple. This would be like me opening a hair salon and splitting equity with someone who knows how to cut hair. Sure, there's lots of other stuff to do, but the main thing that needs to get done is hair cutting.

Maybe with advanced tools, outsourcing, and some quick learning, you can prove me wrong. I sense from your posts you're the kind of person you can.

Again, I hope you find your match and find great success. Keep us posted. (And someday, come back and let me know how wrong I was.)

Thanks :) Didn't mean to sound defensive. I posted expecting responses similar to yours. Initially I was naive but a little networking in the tech community solved that pretty quickly.

Don't take this the wrong way ... but I've had an inside perspective on how investors (who actually write checks, not blog articles about how cool they are) think. You'd be shocked to discover what little value they place on your code. And investors are not even the most important part of starting a business - customers are. They could care even less than investors do. If coding was that all-important, why doesn't every hacker code their way to multi-million dollar success stories? IF ONLY STARTING A BUSINESS was as easy as you say. I've been and am in a similar position, have come across COUNTLESS "hackers" with their own pet project, and coming up now a little over a year after they've all turned me down, amazingly, nobody cares about their excellent code - just like a year ago, and probably a year from now. Yes, product development is important. But alone it gets you nowhere. You need communication skills, ability to motivate during hard times, ability to redirect hostility and stress found at many startups, ability to sense people's needs (for example, most people I've ever met that write more checks than blogs about themselves as investors usually have manic-depressive natures and are looking for the "high" of being involved in something cool/worthwile/humanitarian/state-of-the-art). You need awesome design skills, ability present information in ways that make sense to non-technical users. You need ability to document work processes that keep everybody current and on-track. You need to be able to follow massive amounts of information to figure out who is likely to enter your space and where your space might branch off 6 months / a year etc. You need the ability to quickly figure out countless people and pitch them on their secret desires, not your startup. You need to be able to respond to massive, systematic changes in the market that can render your entire business model useless and be able to quickly figure out a whole new business from scratch that can still be built with dwindling resources. You need to be able to write countless business plans at a moment's notice in case you get interest from who knows where who knows when. You need to be able to figure out how to cheaply or freely market to your customers while overcoming a decade's worth of internet-enabled skepticism. TELL ME, who the hell is doing all of these things and countless more things I forgot to mention while you're busy coding? Or do you plan on doing these things "after you're done" coding? If so, how can you compete with a startup that has people doing all these things WHILE their programmers code?

"Great deal for you." If someone does years of market research, comes up with a clever way to make money and beat potential competitors and figures out a way to get money to finance the project, you think it's a "great deal for them" if they get 50% of a company they start while a hacker hacks, as if though the hacker is doing them a favor? Do you have any idea how many 1-person hacker companies trying to sell their "product" (ie, code) with no users to a larger company I have come across while looking for programmers for my startup effort? As much as you may hate hearing this, remember all those snobby ivy-league MBAs during the dot-com bust that thought they were a gift to the rest of us, you know, the ones hackers hate? You've replaced them. You're the next version of them, and 10 years from now I guarantee you as the dollar falls and your value to the market is reduced exponentially as more and more eastern-european/chinese/indians are graduating with PHDs and work histories for major overseas companies starting from even high school all the way through their grad programs, I guarantee you you will be replaced by another class that will recall, "Remember the days a decade ago when programmers thought they were God's gift to the world just because they could do what a billion foreigners with better educations can do just as well, or better these days?" Hubris cometh before the fall, amigo, and you U.S. based programming gurus have cornered the market on it.