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Comment by zaidf | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know why this comment struck me as odd … maybe it’s because the only people I know who identify themselves specifically as “nontechnical cofounders” are women.

This means that you seriously need to go meet more founders. There are probably as many non-tech founders who are men as tech founders. These founders(such as Alexis from reddit) have filled the role in a very similar manner as Jessica describes.

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Sure, but I think her point stands. They don't identify themselves as a nontechnical cofounder: they're the business guy, the money guy, the sales guy or the industry guy. Using a negative to describe one's own role comes across as very self-deprecating.

Alexis has a record of identifying himself as the non-technical founder. So do many, many other founders. Just do a google on this query to see founders describing themselves as non-technical: non-technical founder site:news.ycombinator.com

Adding to zaidf, more examples: http://www.quora.com/Non-Technical-Co-Founders/How-do-I-prov...

From what I remember, those describe themselves as ‘the business guy’ or ‘the marketing guy’ but give advice, mainly about the attitude to have to fellow ‘non-technical co-founders’, assuming often openly that they do have a needed skill-set, that happens not to be code.

The precise word that is used to describe your role in specific situations matters a lot less than knowing what it encompasses in whole. No one is saying anywhere that you should go out of your way to tell investors that your duties include cleaning the toilet and ordering food. No, to investors you are in charge of keeping lights on; in a meeting to discuss a partnership you assume charge of user growth; when it's time for lunch you assume charge of being the pizza boy/girl.

> The precise word that is used to describe your role in specific situations matters a lot less

The main point made by people studying career imbalance between genders seems to be that it tends to do at a statistical level.

What I remember about Alexis saying was that he was the non-technical founder, and pretty much did I kind of weird stuff all the time like coming up with an mascot for the site. You can take pride in it and it shows if you do.

I've heard and seen times all kinds of founders, non-technical and technical ones, saying that their role is fetching pizza on launch day, fixing the toilet, answering the phone, calling angry customers or doing what ever job is required.

It's the job of the founder, and it's humbling not demeaning. You come up and build the initial product, you take care of the business, you grow the team and in the end if there isn't anyone else to do something, you do it yourself if needs taking care of.

This is simply baseless.

I'm very proudly the non-technical founder of reddit, which I've always been very frank about. I've got citations galore. Drafting the blog post right now.

http://alexisohanian.com/on-being-a-proud-non-technical-foun...

Also, I think male founders sometimes also have to do 15 meetings a day to raise money, it is not an ordeal only female founders go through.

Yeah, I tell people all of the time that I am a non-technical founder. I often do it to explain to other non-technical founders what they can be doing prior to finding a co-founder, because we had achieved a ton before we ever did.

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