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)
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.