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Comment by christonog | Hacker News Reader

Dan, I can't speak to all your questions, but I'll try to help out where I can. in my experience the easiest way for a techincal person to respect a "business type" is for the business guy to know a thing or two about coding and software development. This doesn't mean knowing how to build Twitter over a weekend, but you do need to know what they're going through.

With that being said, the best way to pitch an idea to a technical person (again from what I read and experience) is to build something (even tiny) yourself. It's sort of like asking a programming question: doing all of your research and going through the problem before saying "I'm stuck, please help" generates a better response.

This is the process I'm going through now. I don't have a technical background, but I'm trying my damn hardest to build something before I take the time to con some hacker to help me with building out he product :-).

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While I truly applaud you for trying to build at least something yourself, I have to ask why you think you need to do that? I, as a programmer, wouldn't expect you to build a prototype. What I _would_ expect is a very detailed list of use cases that shows you've thought this through.

Sure, that's not something you can simply show in a five minute conversation, but mockups are great for this purpose.

As I explained with gdp, I believe you need to know some bit of the technical side of things to succeed in a tech. start-up. To me it just makes sense. I have tried the mock up approach, with not so great results. So right now I'm trying a different approach.

I love solving problems, and I like making things. In my learning I've come to enjoy doing this through coding, but I know that my skills currently won't fly in scaling a startup.

I have enormous respect for business people who have no technical knowledge, and behave accordingly.

Conversely, if you know that you know nothing about parts of what I do, then why do you feel it's necessary to have input into it?

I think knowing your own strengths and weaknesses and allowing others to employ their own strengths is just as valuable a skill as actually learning a bunch of technical stuff.

>I have enormous respect for business people who have no technical knowledge, and behave accordingly.

Conversely, if you know that you know nothing about parts of what I do, then why do you feel it's necessary to have input into it?

I agree, I think this ties back to what icey mentioned in his/her parent comment.

I definitely know my strength doesn't lie within the technical side of things, but I do know that a proven model of success for a technology start-up is for the founders to have some sort of technical background. You need to be able to understand the problems that happen which can hamper the growth of the business. That is why learning how to code is important to me.

I think you're on the right path... Getting a technical background is important to get a feel of the problems that your engineers face and as long as you know that they know better than you and let them decide the technical choices, it's going to work well... And, learning how to code is a great way to learn that things are sometimes much more complicated than they seem :-)

On the other side, I believe that when you look for a programmer you should look for someone who has a little interest in business and tries to learn... Having both founders trying to understand what the other does goes a long way to having good communication.

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