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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> worth anyone technical's time to build skills in strategy, marketing, finance, etc.

This leads to jack-of-all-trades types. Good non-technical folk exist. They’re just not easy to find for obvious reasons (same as good technical founders who can see the forest for the trees).

A good technical founder dilutes their comparative advantage e.g. negotiating with suppliers and prioritising payments ahead of a close.

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It can, to be sure, and it's not ideal. But the perception that technical co-founders typically get gypped hard is very warranted. This is a thing where you can often still get a reasonably good result with a technical co-founder, not as good as were he solely focused on product/tech stuff, but enough that his individual outcome may be higher than letting the biz guys run it.

Obviously good biz guys somewhat mitigate this but finding those is easier said than done.

> the perception that technical co-founders typically get gypped hard is very warranted

I’d love to see the data. Most start-ups fail. For any given category of founder, there are therefore more stories of disasters than successes.

I don't think there are any good data on this, just my observations. Not everything has to be derived from data, though.

I mean YC literally has a video on how not to get screwed as a technical founder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcfVjd_oV1I

Yes, but that’s also because it’s YC

“Jack of all trades, master of none, is usually better than master of one”

Sort of the dividing line between small business and a startup.

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