It depends on a combination of factors: background education, personal inclinations, innate abilities, and so on.
I'd say it's not too late, but it takes time. You can trade your existing experience against the native wit/speed of the youngsters, but it still takes time to learn to program.
Especially to learn to program for someone else, by which I mean robust and comprehensive enough to be used by people you don't know, in ways you'll have difficulty imagining.
So it depends a lot on both you and your ideas. Are you willing to work as hard as a founder has to, but on someone else's ideas? I would recommend starting to learn to program, but floating your ideas to some experienced developers as well with the intent of finding someone to work with. If you can do all the business stuff, and are mildly technical, and they can do all the deep technical, and appreciate the business stuff, then you can have a formidable partnership.
No. In fact if I had to guess I'd say two founders - one business and one technical might be the median YC company. Even if not, it doesn't seem like a big outlier given the founders I've met.
Having no technical founders is different. I believe that's happened only once in YC, and the founders were teaching themselves to be technical people at the time.
Comments
It depends on a combination of factors: background education, personal inclinations, innate abilities, and so on.
I'd say it's not too late, but it takes time. You can trade your existing experience against the native wit/speed of the youngsters, but it still takes time to learn to program.
Especially to learn to program for someone else, by which I mean robust and comprehensive enough to be used by people you don't know, in ways you'll have difficulty imagining.
So it depends a lot on both you and your ideas. Are you willing to work as hard as a founder has to, but on someone else's ideas? I would recommend starting to learn to program, but floating your ideas to some experienced developers as well with the intent of finding someone to work with. If you can do all the business stuff, and are mildly technical, and they can do all the deep technical, and appreciate the business stuff, then you can have a formidable partnership.
After all, PG recommends having a co-founder ...
Doesn't pg recommends all technical co-founders?
No. In fact if I had to guess I'd say two founders - one business and one technical might be the median YC company. Even if not, it doesn't seem like a big outlier given the founders I've met.
Having no technical founders is different. I believe that's happened only once in YC, and the founders were teaching themselves to be technical people at the time.