Do You Need to be a Programmer to Found a Startup?

Posted: 12 Sep 2012 07:24 PM PDT

Last week I was reading an article on Forbes.com, titled How Good Of A Programmer Does One Need To Be To Found A Startup?. The article became very popular around the web, and here’s a quote from the very first paragraph:

Programming skill per se has nothing at all to do with founding a startup. Steve Jobs (founder of Apple) wasn't a programmer, neither is Nick Swinmurn (founder of Zappos), Scott Kurnit (founder of About.com and Adkeeper), Ben Silbermann (founder of Pinterest) … or even me (founder of half a dozen companies including Gust.) In fact, the great majority of founders are not programmers, and of course the great majority of programmers are not founders.

As you can imagine, according to the author the answer to the question on the title was a big “No”.

In my opinion such conclusion is both wrong and a terrible advice for aspiring tech entrepreneurs.

Sure, it’s possible to found a tech startup without being a programmer/hacker, but that path is a lot harder. In fact I don’t agree at all with the fact that the majority of founders are not programmers. For every tech company you give me where none of the founders was a technical guy I can give you five back where it was.

The author says Steve Jobs wasn’t a programmer. Sure, but his co-founder was just one of the most talented hardware engineers and coders the world has ever seen (Steve Wozniak, for the record).

He also says Nick Swinmurn of Zappos is not a programmer. Sure, but his co-founder, Tony Hsieh, is.

Google. Facebook. Oracle. Amazon. Netscape. Microsoft. Yahoo. Intel. Cisco. Paypal. eBay. Craigslist. Dropbox. Twitter. Mozilla. Zynga. YouTube. Flickr. Foursquare. Evernote. You name it. All companies where at least one of the founders was a coder/hacker/technical guy (in most of the cases all of the founders were).

It’s common sense if you think about it: do you need to be a tech person to found a tech company? Hmmmm… yeah! Sure, there are exceptions, but the rule remains.

Here’s the main reason why tech people have a big advantage: if you don’t understand where technology is and where it’s heading, you won’t even know what is possible to be made, what kind of products people will want/need in the near future and so on. If Bill Gates didn’t understand how computers work do you think he would have the idea to bet on making money writing software? If Jeff Bezos didn’t understand the potential of the Internet and the impact it would have around the world do you think he would have the idea to start selling stuff online (and I am talking about in 1995, when most people didn’t know what a website was).

And here’s the other important reason: most of the time founding a successful startup is an iterative, trial and error process. You probably will miss it a couple of times before launching something that works/people are interested. Now if you are not a coder/hacker you’ll need to hire workers/freelancers to create the stuff for you, and this is a nightmare. It will take a lot of time, money, the results might not be satisfying, and so on.

Bad news: Yeah, in my opinion having technical knowledge greatly improve your odds of founding a successful startup. I know, if you are not a coder but aspires to found a startup I am raining on your parade here, so sorry about that.

Good news: while you need to have the technical skill, you don’t need to be a genius or a world-class programmer. You just need to have enough skills to be able to build a very simple version of your product. One that you’ll be able to launch on the market and test the customers reaction. After that, if things go well, you’ll be able to raise money and to hire expert programmers to help you out.

Acquiring those skills is not hard these days, and in my opinion it can be done relatively fast (1-2 years). I’ll talk about how to do this on a future post, so stay tuned.