So, let me quote a bit of this submission, add some facts, and then take this to its logical conclusion.
>The current meme going around Silicon Valley and startup land is that any founder needs to be a technical founder and be able to program. Don’t look for a technical co-founder, be a technical co-founder. Even more, every employee at an internet startup needs to be able to program...For those who are all-in on these ideas, I would like to raise the bar and say: don’t look for a UX co-founder, be a UX co-founder. Don’t look for a UX guy, be a UX guy.
So much for the quote, and the amount the author wants to raise the bar by. Fair enough.
But why not raise the bar to the top?
Instagram had 13 employees when it sold for a cool billion. (Thanks, Gabriel Weinberg. http://www.gabrielweinberg.om/blog/2012/04/how-many-employee...)
So, why not raise the bar to the top: single founder, no employees.
Let's say there is no aspect of founding your business that you can't get down to 30 hours per week by that role. If you are ready to commit up to 120 hours in an exceptional week (7 hours of sleep every day, but otherwise get up and work), in what way should you not be ready to fill up to four cofounders' roles?
Raise the bar? Why not do it all?
Here is one recipe.
Role 1: (30 hours) Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, 8-6. This is business development, including networking, scoping out employees, liaising, negotiating terms, finding a scalable business model, doing market and product research, finding competitors and seeing what features they have, talking to users. While the company is very small, you also do customer service. You don't necessarily have to have business experience, but you should have been involved in a small company that expanded greatly or closed a round while you were on board.
Role 2: (30 hours) This is pure uninterrupted coding, Monday, Saturday, and Sunday, 8-6. You should be a full-stack developer well-versed in databases, cloud services (e.g. amazon), front-end and back-end languages, version control, etc. Role out the features that you yourself scope out above and below (role 1 and role 3), or from actual mockups in photoshop that you design Wednesdays or occasionally (see role 3) tweaked betwen 7-11PM the night before. Liaise with talent that business development (you on Tuesdays, Thursays, and Fridays) throws your way. Work from mockups you yourself create (Wednesdays and some late evenings). Of course, you have 10 years worth of coding experience and are an expert in Git, Python, PHP, Javascript, databases, etc, and hopefully a couple of fully coded Android and iOS apps that you have done by yourself.
Role 3: UX and UI. Wednesday, all-day. (Meaning 7-7, though this is creative work and does not have constrained output, can include showing work to others, etc). This includes a break, thinking deeply about what you're really doing, looking at other web sites, and then laying out in photoshop the UX and UI that you will be coding up during the rest of the week. You are, of course, an expert in photoshop and all aspects of UX and UI design and should have a professional-quality portfolio that extends from logos currently being seen by hundreds of millions of people to animations and Cannes-festival shorts, though this can be a relatively short stint in your career due to the low amount of money that you were making. However, you should be confident in your portfolio, and be very quick and competent in Photoshop so that you can execute your vision as a visual 'spec' to code from later. Besides the 12-15 hours (loose, it does involve creative work) that Wednesday comprises, every day between 7 PM and 11 PM you should be prepared to add to this creative output, which adds another up to 18 hours. Your entertainment in these evenings should also be creative and related to your output. Whether that means watching documentories on art, or reading such books, the point is that this is 'fun' for you and your lifestyle in the evenings is somehow related to UI/UX and the types of questions that come with it.
Role 4: This is the most flexible role: it consists of counting money. The accounting role should be able to performed quickly from 11 PM to midnight every day when you don't have much money coming in (7 hours in a week), and extend up to 2:30 AM or 3-3:15 AM every day - another 17.5 to 23 hours - when you do. This extends into the hardest and most awake and alert "all-nighter" period that a coder may think is best reserved for coding. Not so. To truly grow on sales, you should devote your greatest attention with the most quiet and fewest distractions to the bedrock of your business, which is counting money. You should be very at ease with numbers, have a deep understanding of accounting, to the point of nearly having a degree in the matter, and should definitely have handled all aspects of a business's books in the past (short of being an in-house accountant). This is where having run your own business, any business, by yourself, including being a freelancer who had to invoice themselves, will truly help you. However, when there aren't many accounts and there isn't much money coming in nor accounts payable, nor a current round underway or end of the month or quarter there may not be much to do here. Get some rest.
Role 5: (And you thought I could only fit 4 roles in here!) In the morning before 7 or 8, other than Wednesdays, when you're focusing on design from first thing in the mroning, you can answer various quick emails, including non-actionable customer emails, review any news or feeds - like hackernews, have breakfast and generally start your day. Ideally, on normal days you sleep from midnight to seven, and do various quick things like this from 7 to 8, when you start your role of the day. You should be sociable and love getting a bit of time every morning to do this stuff! It hardly feels like a role, just something to break up the chore of boring stuff that you do all day every day.
Why not. Anyone who meets the criteria of the roles above should be able to get a business off the ground as a sole founder and get a very far way along as a sole employee.
As the business expands, you can get help with the accounting (to get more sleep), then help with the programming - especially after all the initial architecutre is set up and major features have been planned and begun to be roled out - a very professional designer just as you yourself are, and finally you will be left to meet with VC's all day to sell the company that you built up all by yourself.
It is, after all, the logical conclusion to the present submission :) Note: I have only proved the above possible, not tried it myself...