I think not.
It’s counterintuitive to ignore your strengths as a founder (ie: sales, marketing, etc)
The founders I speak with who want to learn to code assume it will help them understand their developers more. This is slightly true, but it’s an opportunity cost against time spent selling/promoting the product.
Products fail more due to poor PMF, not because founders can’t code.
Hiring developers who can communicate is a bigger force multiplier. (a hard requirement for me)
A technical project manager is even more ideal for providing the buffer between the founder and developers.
Curious how non-technical people on the fence of learning to code feel about this topic.
(if it’s a passion you seek, that is a different argument. code away)
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I’m a developer working with business and from my experience, the most helpful knowledge a founder can have is domain knowledge. I mean you have to understand the business because the developers don’t know all the specifics of your field, but they can choose a tech solution based on all your needs.
It’s good if founders have some technical people on their side to communicate effectively with a development team, but it’s not necessary. If you want to start coding before developing a product, you must invest a lot of time in learning instead of doing business. I believe that everyone should do their own thing.
No
Get a technical cofounder
Do you guys think code is necessary now that chatgpt is out?
Most people are not even really computer savvy beyond the basics…Probably never exposed to Linux or any CLI stuff… the average person would be unable to navigate that sort of thing. So Expecting them to on top of that know how to code and have a comp sci foundation, while running their business and whatever their forte is, is not practical
Learn to code for what purpose? It’s useful to understand how it works and what’s involved.
You don’t just learn to code. You aren’t likely to teach some non-technical person to code to the point where they can contribute to a project. People who are good at code have spent tens of thousands of hours honing their craft. It can be very frustrating and time consuming. It requires extreme focus and concentration.
It’s also something to be said about “markers time” vs “managers time” (from Paul G.)
Coding takes up 4-5hr blocks of focus. As an owner of the company you need to communicate all day, which is operating in 1hr blocks.
Even the best devs who went to leadership I know struggle trying to balance (we all go through the motions of giving up the IDE 😅) and eventually realize it’s not worth the context shifting and mental strain.
My POV: Coding is an incredibly important life skill, gives you so much power of creation and control over what you want to create, makes everything (including various business challenges) easier if you know how to write some basic JavaScript or PHP connection between services, pulling sales data from a SQL table, merging sales data with visitor data in two different SQL tables, etc.
So powerful. I learned how to do it on YouTube when I was really young, like 8. Best life skill I have ever acquired.
My cofounder is non-technical but he understands how our system works. How Stripe emits events, how our database ingests data, etc. it helps him in understanding our product better.
I would say this is ok, as long as he’s not in there trying to read all of stripe dev docs and making a pull-request based on something he just learned.
This gets back to know how to talk to technical people. A couple of boxes and arrows can go a long way in getting someone not technical up to speed.
Naaahh, even experienced coders are usually shit at building an product from scratch.
By the time you can hold your weight, it’s already too late.
Play your strengh, time is the most critical asset of a company you can’t waste it learning a skill that is impossible learn from zero to master in a 2 years.
It’s always nice to understand things because it makes discussions sooo much easier but you don’t need to code.
Anyway after a year with your cofounder don’t worry, you’ll understand a lot about code and requirements because your tech founder will be annoying you constantly about that:
This works like this [proceeds to monologue for 30 minutes], We can’t do this, we can’t do that, we’d rather do it like this, we’d rather do it like that, this is easy, this is hard, this is easy, this is expensive, technical debt …
“Off course I know him, he’s me”
even experienced coders are usually shit at building an product from scratch.
Facts!
They know how to engineer in circles. but can’t ship a product to save their life. It’s also a mark of maturity.
For some people, coding is the goal.
For the mature, it’s a means to an end, shipping a product is the goal.
how does someone like myself who does not know any code but wants to have a business in the software/AI space get to a point of being able to code a software good enough for even trial? I feel like it would take multiple years right? is it possible to just get to a basic understanding and even know some technical things but not know everything and still be a founder?
get to a point of being able to code a software good enough for even trial?
Can you expand on this more? Trial as in seeing if you would like it?
Learning to get good will take years and you’ll soon learn that good is highly subjective. I aim for shipped product more than “good code” nowadays. It’s something to be said about “founders code”, the code that ain’t sexy but raised a few millions to bring in devs to make it better and eventually exit.
I would still suggest finding a technical co-pilot if you want to take it serious as a founder. Lean on what you’re good at, you’ll need to triple down on that instead IMO.
Or… you can omit the founder title and do side projects for the love of it. If something comes from it, turn it into a business. But I would suggest removing capitalist intent to allow yourself to learn stress free.
On a personal note, I use to be deep into playing Starcraft II. Going to work and working in a scrum environment didn’t feel too different, it was gamified. At times I would drop Starcraft just to do a side-project for the sake of showing friends, this is where I did my best work. I sold one idea (just the codebase) a few months after getting bored by it.
If you want to chat more about it, feel free to shoot me a DM!
I’m just curious how long it would take to learn enough code to even have a shipped pilot. I wouldnt mind having a technical founder as well but I am just unsure I will find anyone who has the same passion as me in the area I am trying to go. I will definitely shoot you a dm though thank you!