More large tech company's started out without a business person than without a technical person. I suspect a large part of this is the importance of a BS detector when delegating things. Or as PG said, The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. http://paulgraham.com/avg.html

It's not that you can't build a good website with C++ or an Oracle back end, it's if your company desides to use them your probably also making a lot of other stupid decisions.

PS: (During the Bubble, Oracle used to run ads saying that Yahoo ran on Oracle software. I found this hard to believe, so I asked around. It turned out the Yahoo accounting department used Oracle.) http://paulgraham.com/vwfaq.html