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Comment by tipjoy | Hacker News Reader

You mention the necessity to have 2-3 cofounders, as does Paul in his "why to not not start a startup." In a 2-person startup, do you think both people need to be software developers? I'm an interaction designer, and so although I do the HTML and CSS, my real contribution to the team is my focus on the personas, the design, and the user experience, while my partner focuses on the implementation. So far, things have been moving along at a nice clip, but I'd like to hear your take on this issue. (Note I didn't use the term 'hackers' because although I don't code, I would consider myself someone who works to "design beautiful software.")

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Not all the founders have to be hackers. You just need at least one person who can hack, and at least one person who can deal with people (including investors and customers).

Three kinds of design ability are needed: product design (what does it do?); software design (how does it do it?); and graphic design (what does the site look like?). Somehow between them the founders have to cover the first two. Graphic designers can be hired, though it's better if the founders can do that too.

The ideal configuration would of course be a group where all the founders had all these skills. Haven't seen that yet, though.

I think that's actually great. That was more or less Reddit's situation as I understand it. There's so much non-hacking stuff to do that I honestly think each group should have someone who feels no compulsion to write code, freeing the hacker(s) from distraction.

My ideal candidate, were I doing the funding, would be a group consisting of two hackers and one non-hacker. Maybe I'm biased though because that's what we have.

I'm in a very similar situation, I'd like to think we complement the hardcore hacker pretty well (especially since I also love the business side of things).

If I recall correctly, PG did say that every team should ideally have a developer, a designer, and someone good at both to be a "sweeper."

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