Promoting the Worth of the Non-Technical Founder

Non-technical founders are stigmatised everywhere.

From Silicon Valley to London, if you aren’t technical you aren’t getting in. This is true at Venture capital firms and incubators. It’s made technology an exclusive club which is incredibly hard to infiltrate. Do we really want the potential for innovation to be contingent on whether the founding idea was conceived by a techy or not?

We are constantly hit with the stick that ideas are dime a dozen, there is no value in an idea unless you have the means to implement it, implementation is everything. That there are no new ideas. Everything old is new again, brought into the new world by a reinterpretation of existing technologies. In the same way, Uber is the modern equivalent of Taxi’s the iPod was the next iteration of the CD.

The true voyage of discovery is not in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes. But having new eyes is no longer enough if you don’t have the skills required to implement the ideas you imagine you’re discarded and branded as worthless.

But that is ignorant of the reality of evolution of several huge companies. Of course, the implementation is the essential necessity which marks the birth of a company but the genesis of the idea is the seed. Without it, nothing can germinate and flourish.

Take twitter for example. Developed as a side project in a 2-week hackathon in the final 2 weeks before Odeo was disbanded and the investors I believe the development of twitter would be characterised by being non-technically led. By this I mean that a lot of the product ideas were led by non-technical people, be that Biz or the early adopters (looking at you #, which was a user developed feature.)ways Jack’s but the product was significantly influenced and designed by Biz, who would be considered non-technical. In many was of course money returned, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone developed twitter. The genesis of the idea

And it goes further. It’s far easier for a technical founder to get funding for a terrible product idea than it is for a non-technical founder to get funding for a great idea. If a terrible idea is funded does a technical founder have a better chance of salvaging the project than a non-technical founder has of building a technical team around him to create the product he envisions?

And that, I believe, is the perception which cultivates the stigma attached to non-technical founders. The generally held belief is that the former is true but in reality, like it is a purposeful decision conceived at inception.pivot, the actuality of the believe the contrarian truth is that the latter is. Non-technical founders have a far higher chance of building a great team and leading it to success than a technical founder has of salvaging a project destined to fail from the start. But we have been conned into

But in reality having a ‘Plan B’ Sets You Up for Failure. If you are already conceptualising the possibility for failure you’re not fully committed to the current idea.

The argument though is coloured by the successes of VC-backed companies who have featured technical founders. Like anything in life, when something is forced down our throat by the media it’s hard not to believe the hype. The romanticised story of the isolated technologist who changed the world by leading a product revolution grabs attention. The story about the average man in the street who spotted a problem and built a team to tackle it less so.

Everybody loves a story until is becomes a fallascious conventionally held belief.

I can understand the argument, but a true visionary needn’t be able to code or understand the idiosyncrasies of syntax decisions.

Look at Steve Jobs.

And that’s what worries me about the stigma. It hold’s people back. People are almost laughed out of the room unless they are able to create something. How many great ideas are we missing by our closed-mindedness, by thinking we know better?

Has the next Steve Jobs’ been brushed under the carpet and forgotten about because they don’t have the requisite coding skills?

Stigma is an act of control. It dissuades individuals from realising their worth and non-technical founders have been suppressed. It discriminates against the dreamers and visionaries who have spent their time conceptualising a better world around us.

To flourish and grow we must become more inclusive, that is true in tech and society as a whole. We must embrace the things that challenge us to think and appreciate view points different to our own.

Revolutions can start from anywhere. The tech sector has become far too insular, it must embrace external ideas or die.

And the non-technical founder can provide new eyes, but only if they are first viewed as equals.

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