I disagree. I've worked at a couple of startups founded or co-founded by a guy with no hands on technical experience and he was great. He came up with the ideas, found the right people (or sometimes the other way around) and then let them do what they did best, with only gentle prodding to keep everything going in the right direction.

What he had was a good high level understanding of the relevant fields, plenty of experience starting and running companies, a vast contact network, an amazing knack for raising money and was very good at getting out there and selling our product.

Am I correct in assuming the following characteristics? The guy you are talking about:

* Trusts you to do your job, and assumes you are pulling your weight in whatever way you see fit. (contrast: "We need your ass in the chair 08:00-16:00 so we know you're working.")

* Trusts you to do your job, and accepts your technical decisions even if he doesn't fully understand them. (contrast: "I just don't see exactly why GitHub would be better than our existing Team Foundation license, so we won't switch.")

I guess the distinction I'm trying to put is that there's a distinction between "non-technical" and "non-programmer". I can't program, but I know all the technically pertinent details of my product that any VC or customer is going to care about. To some extent, I think it frankly works better that way than if I was doing the coding, because I know what's really important in the product, and won't miss the forest for the trees.

You don't need to know how to code to be able to handle the technical responsibilities of actually running a tech startup. You just need to know the technology itself.