All Founders Need to Be Technical

The startup world moves at such a fast paste that it loves to (and often needs to) use shorthand. A unicorn is a $1B startup in a space that will allow it to grow to $10B and a growthhacking ninja brings up a lot of symbolic connotations. And don’t get me even started with UX. There are so many layers of meaning to that accronym that you really need to dig deep just to get some basic understanding of what’s being said. The same goes for the elusive technical co-founder. Right now that usually refers to someone who’s writing the code.

As a small-business veteran who’s made a huge commitment to building an enterprise tech startup and who’s struggling with code I strongly believe that all founders have to be technical, which does not mean they all have to code.

So what do I mean by that?

Marketing is becoming a very process-driven, data-heavy discipline with plenty of automation and tons of analytics. Enterprise sales has also become very technical, with the best sales people knowing plenty of tools, workflows and techniques necessary to close deals. This isn’t soft and fuzzy stuff. A liberal arts background to craft the message isn’t enough. There are specific methodologies that follow a very specific process and involve serious data. A marketing and sales co-founder needs to really know the new way of generating traffic, marketing automation, procuring leads and selling to users using process-driven methodologies. Telemarketing and glad-handing aren’t going to cut it any more. Glengarry Glen Ross has left the building.

What about founders who provide domain experience? Most of the time that’s very technical knowledge about products, customers, pricing, competitors and everything else. Their knowledge should be data-heavy and very specific. It too is technical.

The same thing applies to experienced co-founders who are serial entrepreneurs and who have gone through the legal-and-funding gauntlet repeatedly (preferably successfully). Negotiating term-sheets, digging deep into vesting agreements and raising capital can be done in a very technical manner, using data, inbound and outbound online marketing techniques and requires plenty of very hard-core knowledge. I wouldn’t call someone who can raise a big round and have all of the right paperwork in place a non-technical co-founder.

There is no place on a startup team for people who are just interested in the ride, the startup life as it’s called, who know more about an industry than the mechanics of that industry; who care more about doing a startup than about solving a customer’s core pain point.

So all startup co-founders should have deep knowledge of their space and have the tools in place to make the company a success, be it Java, knowledge of the law or deep domain experience. All founders need to be technical.