It's not about having, or being able to develop 'marketing skills'. That's too shallow a sketch of all the tasks a non-technical founder fulfills. I'm an employee of two technical founders that have developed all the skills necessary, but if I see which they are and which tasks they fulfill (all kinds of business administration, HRM, legal, PR, sales, marketing, company strategy and planning, procurement, CRM, etc.) then I would be glad to be able to let a future non-technical co-founder that actually likes a portion of that stuff deal with that. They hardly have time to code anymore :(.

So, in short: a non-technical co-founder fulfills many tasks and likes them. A technical founder would be smart to associate with a non-technical founder, so both can do what they're good at.

Agree. When I go out to start a company (I've started 3 failed companies) I went to my lawyer and accountant, a marketing person from the local business chamber, I asked their advice, and followed it.

For some reason the people on the business/finance end seem to think they can just delegate everything and know how everything works based on whatever they heard in the news. They already decided on using the cloud, thats the hard part! Actually using it is just implementation right?

Let's put it this way. We've all heard of the lone programmer who built something entirely alone and made a million bucks from it. We've never heard of the lone businessman whose idea grew legs and programmed itself to make the guy a million bucks :)

Actually, that's not true at all. I personally am a non-programmer, who've hired people to write my code for me, and built a successful company that now employs many people. I wish I had a technical co-founder, for all the reasons mentioned in this article, but most importantly, that technical solutions would be solved by someone invested in the company and from their domain of knowledge. As it is, I have to come up with solutions and ask my for-hire freelance developer to code it for me. It's been successful, but it could be so much more.

But, this in no way means that a non-programmer can't go it alone. I have, and am now doing it. And in the case of the lone programmer building something entirely alone and making a million dollars, what's to say he wouldn't have made $4 million dollars had he a non-technical co-founder?

I think your line of reasoning is equally as incorrect as you're implying the OP's was.

The only point I'm making is that a non-programmer has to hire someone to do the work or learn how to do it themselves (and thereby become a programmer).

In my experience the latter is a hell of a lot more rare than the programmer learning business skills. Consequently it's far more likely to see a programmer developing a successful business solo than a non-programmer developing a successful business solo, so in my opinion you can't just flip the argument around and say it works both ways.

Note I'm not suggesting that a co-founder isn't important or valuable, simply that the argument cannot be flipped around; I'm personally looking at recruiting an old friend once my product reaches MVP because a co-founder is important for some products.

I'd say it's more about having time to do all the marketing and similar tasks.