I've always been better with an "idea man" to work with. I'd be careful though with an inexperienced non-technical cofounder, as they tend to not understand the intricacies of implementation. Setbacks will happen, and I have seen non-technical cofounders place a ton of blame on the technical ones when things go wrong. A rift in the relationship could mean the end of the business.

To be fair, "non technical co-founder" could mean anything from GP's pretty great sounding example to "I have an idea for the next Facebook, if you build it for free I'll give you 10%".

I don't see the disagreement with your parent. He has reservations about the age and thus the experience of the person, not if they are already actively raising money and doing sales. You can do these at 30+ as well.

But if you have no technical innovation or your innovation is trivial to clone, then you don't have a startup.

Many startups fail because they're actually not innovative. Nobody needs another database from a tiny company that is just tiny bit better. No matter how good rest of your offering is, bigger does often mean better.

Other fail due to entanglements, especially hardware ones. Their supply chain fails and that's that. No amount of media will help and you cannot afford to hedge this kind of risk.