I often get a lot of flak for my bias towards technical founders, while evaluating startups. Most of the times I cannot come up with a convincing answer to this question 'why are you biased towards technical founders'.
Here's my view point - Technical founders (engineers), who are either self taught or college educated, typically have a logical bent of mind. This strong logical and mathematical foundation gives them the ability to tackle almost all aspects of running a startup. What they lack in their fundamentals, they can easily learn and keep learning. This is what makes them very attractive to graduate business schools as well. The very fact that engineers can be very successful MBAs is a testament of this viewpoint.
On the contrary, you don't often find someone with a non-engineering background being able to tackle engineering problems around a startup. Agreed that the rise of web frameworks and the mobile OS ecosystem has blurred the need for such deep rooted logical thinking. That doesn't mean the non-engineers can be very successful in 'building products'.
If I were given a choice to put my odds on two marketing guys starting up a company or two computer science guys starting up the same company, I'd bet my odds on the CS guys - simply because the CS guys can learn the marketing and sales chops much faster than the sales guys can learn the CS chops. While this is debatable, there have to be some really strong points to support that the marketing guys can learn programming and build a product :). I just haven't seen many of them do that. My knowledge is also limited and am still learning.
I've seen my friends who were once engineers build completely unrelated companies - Darter.in and Tapprs.com come to my mind. I haven't seen any photographers who have built software companies :).
So next time, if I come across as strongly opinionated towards tech co-founders, please don't get me wrong.
Here's my view point - Technical founders (engineers), who are either self taught or college educated, typically have a logical bent of mind. This strong logical and mathematical foundation gives them the ability to tackle almost all aspects of running a startup. What they lack in their fundamentals, they can easily learn and keep learning. This is what makes them very attractive to graduate business schools as well. The very fact that engineers can be very successful MBAs is a testament of this viewpoint.
On the contrary, you don't often find someone with a non-engineering background being able to tackle engineering problems around a startup. Agreed that the rise of web frameworks and the mobile OS ecosystem has blurred the need for such deep rooted logical thinking. That doesn't mean the non-engineers can be very successful in 'building products'.
If I were given a choice to put my odds on two marketing guys starting up a company or two computer science guys starting up the same company, I'd bet my odds on the CS guys - simply because the CS guys can learn the marketing and sales chops much faster than the sales guys can learn the CS chops. While this is debatable, there have to be some really strong points to support that the marketing guys can learn programming and build a product :). I just haven't seen many of them do that. My knowledge is also limited and am still learning.
I've seen my friends who were once engineers build completely unrelated companies - Darter.in and Tapprs.com come to my mind. I haven't seen any photographers who have built software companies :).
So next time, if I come across as strongly opinionated towards tech co-founders, please don't get me wrong.
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