There is no way that I could start this business without a programmer on board, but if this company was started solely by hackers it would not be nearly as good.
Interesting bit of prejudice here. What makes a hacker less capable of doing whatever it is that non-hackers do? Is it the thick held-together-with-tape glasses? Maybe the caffeine addiction addled brain?
The neat thing about an all-hacker startup is that hackers can choose NOT to hack part or all of their time when the job calls for it. A non-hacker doesn't have the ability to shift gears during the early days of the product to just work on shipping the damned thing.
I'm a hacker, and have code running on millions of machines world-wide in numerous Open Source projects, but in our startup today, I predominantly do not hack. I still spend about 25% of my time hacking, but it's becoming less every month, as other aspects of the company become more pressing (marketing/evangelism, money management, support, hiring contractors, design, etc.). I happen to have a lot of business experience, as well, and I don't think that J Random Hacker would step right into this kind of position without some study and work, but to imagine that being an all-hacker company would lead to it being "not nearly as good" is funny. Hackers are people, generally smarter than average. Many happen to have other skills and experience outside of hacking.
I'm just picking on you, of course. I'm sure you didn't mean to imply that there are magical skills that disappear when one becomes a hacker, or that the hacker mentality is a form of retardation that dramatically negatively impacts other skills.
Paul Buchheit (AKA paul here at news.yc, AKA GMail creator, AKA "Don't be evil") is positive proof that one can be both a good developer and a good usability guy...first time I met him at YC, I thought, "Hmm, seems nice enough. Pretty smart fellow. But I'm surrounded by folks who are smart and likable, and they're also really driven. What is it about him that helps him build GMail while the rest of us haven't done anything nearly so big?" A few weeks later we were chatting about usability, and he described his interaction with a Bittorrent client...and it all became clear. He's happy to drop the smart on the floor and be a really dumb user who just wants to get something done--the kind that doesn't read documentation and doesn't care one whit about how things are done behind the scenes. It was eye-opening. A few weeks after that at Startup School, Max Levchin described the exact same process (a bit more concretely and perhaps offensively by releasing his inner 13 year old girl). Nonetheless, it's something that everyone building software for users ought to be a thinking about all the time. But again, hackers can think that way two.
pg harps on the same stuff, too. Whether intentionally, or not, his attention span is about that of a four year old, so when he looks over your shoulder and gives an opinion, it is nearly always one of "I don't understand what's happening there", unless you've done everything right...and that's exactly the sort of opinion you need. Your software is never going to be someones sole purpose in life, and you can't expect their undivided attention. They're talking on the phone, eating lunch at their desk, worrying about remembering to pickup the dry cleaning, and trying to figure out where they put that really important email. Some of them will also be really stupid, on top of all of those problems.
Wow, I really disagree. While some programmers aren't especially good at those things, I don't think that there's any reason a top hacker couldn't be good at them. Actually, a good hackers have such a drive to create that they are forced to deal wth design and usability. They may not like business development, but if the drive is there, they'll do it.
I will admit to having poor aesthetic ability, though. I do need a designer to make my interfaces look good. But that's quite different from fundamental issues in usability and design.