Why the notion here that to be an entrepreneur, you have to be a hacker.

It's not that you have to be a hacker, it's that you should be able to justify yourself with contributions.

The "YC Way" rejects idea men in favor of people who get things done.

To paraphrase Linus, "Talk is cheap, show us results."

By the way, if you picked up a framework and built a business on it, you're close enough to being a hacker.

IMO this site is for hackers, hacker entrepreneurs and hackers who want to be entrepreneurs, not for entrepreneurs in general. There are many paths and this is just one of them.

why this ridiculous idea that to be an Internet entrepreneur, you should love programming

Empirical evidence.

Programmers or hackers don't build companies. Yes, they build a product or a service - the best ones can create magic. But it stops there. You need smart enterprising people who understand the bigger picture and the ecosystem, how different pieces of the puzzle fit together, how to make money out of all that stuff that's been built. You need the idea men, and the executioners. It's so wrong I believe to make programming or hacking skills/smarts/history the most important qualifying criteria for being accepted to YC, or the most important indicator of potential success.

"Programmers or hackers don't build companies."

You should drop a line to Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, Bill Joy, Dean Kamen, Ray Kurzweil, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates to let them know about that. I don't think they've gotten the memo.

[For purposes of congruency in this thread, I had Woz in here as well as he was a founder at Apple, but removed him from my list.]

It's true that you need additional skills to grow a successful company, but without the product/technical skills, you can't start recruit or sustain a company. A technical company is primarily a function of its people and its products. As companies mature, more adults that aren't as product focused come in and think it's entirely about brand, marketing, sales, etc. It's true that those things that bring in the money, but once your focus shifts toward those areas, you'll inevitably turn into a EBay, Yahoo, or Apple (pre-Jobs). When Jobs came back, he said the only thing he did was shift the company's focus toward "product" not marketing or sales.

I've had many non-technical friends that have had a "great" idea and wanted to recruit programmers. It's never worked. It's best if you have the skills yourself.

A lot of people were surprised that Amazon not Google dominates cloud computing or that it branched out to the Kindle. Amazon has always had a technical culture focused on great user experiences. It's not a surprise at all when you take a look at it from that standpoint.

It's true that you need additional skills to grow a successful company, but without the product/technical skills, you can't start recruit or sustain a company. A technical company is primarily a function of its people and its products. As companies mature, more adults that aren't as product focused come in and think it's entirely about brand, marketing, sales, etc. It's true that those things that bring in the money, but once your focus shifts toward those areas, you'll inevitably turn into a EBay, Yahoo, or Apple (pre-Jobs). When Jobs came back, he said the only thing he did was shift the company's focus toward "product" not marketing or sales.

I've had many non-technical friends that have had a "great" idea and wanted to recruit programmers. It's never worked. It's best if you have the skills yourself.

A lot of people were surprised that Amazon not Google dominates cloud computing or that it branched out to the Kindle. Amazon has always had a technical culture focused on great user experiences. It's not a surprise at all when you take a look at it from that standpoint.

Bezos & Gates are brilliant businessmen. Woz is a superb engineer, a genius of an engineer, but Jobs truly built the Apple that is today. Brin & Page were highly capable and smart researchers and scientists, not programmers or "hackers" as the term goes here.

You're still not getting my point. Nevermind.

I get your point, I'm just disagreeing with it.

If you want to startup in a lightweight / agile fashion, why have an "idea guy" when you can have someone who can execute AND code?

Beyond that, I think that in high-tech it's far more common to have a company founded by a hacker than it is an MBA. I don't have concrete numbers on that, so it's purely my opinion.

I'm an idea guy, I'm also a coder. I can write code, that works. But I'm by no means a hacker. I'm not an MBA type, will never be. Once you're done writing some code, the prototype, something that works decently well - and to do that you don't need to be a nerdy hacker - you need skills that go far beyond the bits/bytes and if-else loopy world of programming.

It's really not that difficult to build a web product or service these days.

I realized my own folly - I certainly haven't built a profitable company or a popular product yet. I'm in the process but far from it yet. So I should stop commenting on what it takes to build one :)

That word executioner, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Yea, I realized that :D

It's true that you need additional skills to grow a successful company, but without the product/technical skills, you can't start recruit or sustain a company. A technical company is primarily a function of its people and its products. As companies mature, more adults that aren't as product focused come in and think it's entirely about brand, marketing, sales, etc. It's true that those things that bring in the money, but once your focus shifts toward those areas, you'll inevitably turn into a EBay, Yahoo, or Apple (pre-Jobs). When Jobs came back, he said the only thing he did was shift the company's focus toward "product" not marketing or sales.

I've had many non-technical friends that have had a "great" idea and wanted to recruit programmers. It's never worked. It's best if you have the skills yourself.

A lot of people were surprised that Amazon not Google dominates cloud computing or that it branched out to the Kindle. Amazon has always had a technical culture focused on great user experiences. It's not a surprise at all when you take a look at it from that standpoint.

Don't forget John Walker, Autodesk.

I wish I could explain my point better.

Google suggests it's safe to start with hackers.

What do you think should be the most important qualifying criteria?

I like the term "software developer" because it's vague about what you actually do: I mean, you could be doing software construction, project management or you could be the owner of the company -- one can be a "web developer" much like a "real estate developer."

Much of my extended family works in the construction business, where there are career paths that go between being an employee and being an owner: you might start out as a teenager putting in fenceposts and nailing shingles onto roofs, then you're working for a big contractor doing roadwork, then you and your brother buy a bulldozer and start digging foundations, putting in sidewalks and curbs and clearing snow at the mall. At some point you might end up owning a few rental properties, and if you make it big you might become the guy who does $20M contracts for roadwork...

Of course there are different paths: I worked for a startup founder who was an MBA -- we pitched an idea to venture capitalists, had it turned down, switched to a plan b we could do on a shoestring. We executed that successfully. I moved on to other things, but he sold the business at a profit a few years later.

Part of the reason is because YC concentrates on web companies. From their website: "Though we fund all types of computer startups, we're especially interested in web-based applications. We've been thinking about that problem longer than anyone else, and by now can visualize much of the space of possibilities."

"I don't particularly enjoy programming - certainly not to the extent that I could have orgasms doing it"

How many people do you know who get orgasms from programming? This kind of subtle condescension ensures that no halfway decent hacker would want to work with you.

As someone asked earlier, if we can have ideas and execute, why do we need (someone like) you, who (with due respect) have no credentials (in terms of having built succesful businesses/ have non technical demonstrated skills) but do have "ideas"?

If you think non hackers (like you) can create a successful technical product company, by all means do show us - build such a company , and then tell us how you did it so we can all learn from your experience and benefit from it.

My point is this - the barrier to entry and delivering a decent web product/service has come down a lot over the years. With frameworks such as RoR, countless online articles that literally spoon feed ready made solutions to common problems, stumbling blocks, and an above average intelligence, one can build a good enough web service these days.

Sure, building something state of the art requires true "hacking" skills and genuine creativity and intelligence - but how often do you really see such web companies these days? Most ideas are simple, some downright silly, and only a few that are products of intelligent hacking. Do you agree?

I suspect (ok, I know from current experience) that it helps, when you have just a small team (or a lonely solo adventure, in my case) and you're living on ramen, to have at least one founder who is enthusiastic enough about the technology side to actually make progress even in a perfect storm of morale-killing events.