Founders who can't code

You're missing the point here, I think, which is that if a founder (not the same thing as a CEO necessarily...) puts a few months into learning the basics of coding and attempting to build a rough prototype, they may end up:

1) with a greater appreciation of the talent/experience required for good development, a better BS detector arond technical issues, and a stronger understanding of what they don't know OR

2) a false impression that proof-of-concept = product and an over-inflated idea of what they've learned.

I definitely agree that founder #2 here is someone to be avoided. Not because either one of them would be expected to contribute to the actual development, but because founder #2 is showing flaws of perception, ego, etc. that are serious red flags, and will affect their execution of non-development tasks.

I don't know any developers so I have to learn to code myself. I also have not business related experience so that's a double whammy. But I can generate good ideas like a mofo.

While building my prototype I mostly feel like I have no idea what I'm doing but slowly and surely my site's starting to function, grow and work. Its amazing what persistence can accomplish.

I realize I'll have to find a technical co-founder eventually though. I won't be able to hack together a smoothly running and awesome site on my own. I also have no idea where to look for a technical co-founder and how to approach them. Interesting times ahead.

I did this as well - I quit my job, started reading Ruby books and wrote the Alpha version of Pikimal.com. I did this because I'd been the CMO at another start-up where I'd really not understood the dev process well enough and had thought that it had real costs so I have a pretty good sense of the benefits.

We're pretty busy, so let me cut to the chase:

The good: I'm credible to our tech folks. I understand when to slow down to integrate a library, and I'm more than willing to find time to re-factor. I learned that pair programming can be awesome, that bringing on new people slows you down, and a lot of other things that probably seem obvious to technical folks but are non-intuitive when you imagine software as assembling widgets.

The bad: Ultimately, we gave up 3-5 months that we could have been hiring, fund-raising, and building software. On balance, I think that this was good for me and bad for this start-up.

The ugly: As soon as I'd hired people, I think that we should have thrown out most of the code I'd written. We kept it because it worked and was fairly fast, but I'd made A LOT of newbie mistakes that have slowed things down.

So, tl;dr? I'd suggest learning to code but I'm not sure that you should do it for your current start-up. At the very least launch something more sophisticated than a CRUD app and THEN get started on your small biz.