Ask HN: Start-up success as a non-technical?

If you have that, partnering with more technical people is a lot more likely to work, otherwise the only possible posture that works is blind trust, which most people aren't capable of.

However this is coming from the son of a businessman who started reading his Wall Street Journal in 3rd grade, so I've found partnering with business people to be easy (amusingly, in many of the startups I've worked for I've helped the point man procuring office space, since unless you have a background in that area you e.g. have no idea how slow the real estate clock cycle is).

To finish, when you think of the historical hardware and software long term superstars many if not most were founded and lead by at least one person with serious technical chops, perhaps even uber-salesman Larry Ellison of Oracle.

Obvious examples are Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the founders of Google and the Chairman/CEO they picked, Ken Olsen of DEC, H&P of HP and I'm sure I'm forgetting many others.

Tom Watson, Jr., who saved IBM with his massively successful push into computers, is the most famous exception to this pattern ... but seeing that he grew up in the predecessor punched card industry and undoubtedly absorbed a lot of technical stuff including most especially attitudes he's got to be a special case.

As you probably know, the list of technical companies ruined by non-techie leaders is nearly infinite, but it's balanced at least in part by techies not getting the business side of things. Can any of you think of major counterexamples of complete non-techies who massively succeeded over a long term, including retaining their initial key technical people?

Steve Jobs is the only one I can think of off the top of my head (and he fails the retention test, e.g. he burned out the Macintosh development team, didn't he?) but he clearly has unique relevant design talents that make him a special case.

Neither.

1. Find someone who needs something.

2. Start building it.

3. Trust that when you need to learn something, you will.

The education you will receive this way will be way better than any formal education for multiple reasons. First, you will automatically triage your lessons; you will learn what you need, not what someone else (who probably doesn't know) thinks you need. Second, almost all the "data" you will need in this education is easily available and free. Third, for the education you need from other people, you will begin building a network you'll need anyway. And finally, this is exactly what you'll have to do whether or not you get any more formal education, so just skip the unnecessary step and get on with on. From your own self description, you already have way more formal education than you need.

This may not seem intuitive, but believe me, this is the way things get done in the real world of software development. At this point, the creme rises to the challenge regardless of education. Save your money for living expenses and start-up expenses. You'll probably need it. Best wishes!

Your mileage will vary and my information is woefully incomplete, but on the other hand I sure don't think he's in the league of any of the techies I cited, although I'm willing to believe he's significantly more technical than Thomas Watson, Jr. was and perhaps a bit more than Larry Ellison is (don't know much about that aspect of the latter).