Ask HN: I'm a non-technical CEO of 20M startup that wants to learn

I read HN daily, and feel a schism between non-technical articles and deeply technical posts. I want to bridge that gap. Where would you recommend I go to find stepping stones that would make the technical posts more accessible?

Since I help run a growth-stage SaaS business, I have a true vested interest in growing my technical knowledge.

Start by taking to your CTO to understand the basic architecture of your product and tech stack, so you know what tech you are using for frontend, backend, db, etc.

Then pick one and take a look at some beginner tutorials for that technology. See what it would take to build a “Hello, world” type product.

I feel like you should be learning from your CTO and other engineers. No-one reasonable expects you to know the technical side in detail, and as the CEO, it’s perfectly reasonable for you to be asking your technical people questions like “what are the 3 most important things we need to think about x”. In fact, ideally when you hire engineers, as well as having your engineers confirm their technical knowledge, you should be picking one or two random things on the job description your company posted and asking them to brief you on it. That way you hopefully get engineers who are both technically able and able to communicate to the non-technical side of the business.

Get in touch if you want to chat.

The primary question is "why"? Where is your company struggling because you aren't technical?

In my mind (as a technical founder), the things a CEO needs to know are at the conceptual / theoretical level rather than the implementation level. I've seen businesses fail because the CEO silos the technical side of house from the "business" side and then doesn't have enough technical knowledge to parse suggestions that aren't aligned with business goals. That problem is better solved by eliminating the silos and aligning incentives rather than gaining technical knowledge, in my opinion.

I created a remote SaaS business for the online coaching space 5 years ago; they were probably hundreds of JavaScript frameworks at the time and most of them are now deprecated.

It's a shame I decided to carefully digest each piece of content about these technologies: I read HN posts, watched Youtube videos, signed up for Coursera Moocs. I eventually made late and bad decisions on tech decisions and this broke our codebase.

One day I searched on Google something and discovered its Knowledge graph feature which links content together. This inspired me to draw mindmaps and cheatsheets on paper of the technological landscape to get a global grasp of it[0]. Each time I read an article or talk with a dev, I can now make the link with the micro and macro ecosystem.[1]

I refer to these mindmaps daily to learn new things (even beyond tech). To push limits, I make a browser extension to smartly organize all my bookmarks.

[0] You can use this site as a boilerplate for your mindmaps and link your Google Searches and what you read to it: https://roadmap.sh/, they have a Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/theroadmap/videos. You might find Fireship useful too (it popularize many tech topics): https://www.youtube.com/c/AngularFirebase/videos

[1] New tools called "second brains" can be used as supports (Notion, RoamResearch). However I prefer using paper or making my own tool.

I hope this helps! (content overloading is such a problem in education)