The difficulty with the business person is identifying actual skill. I've seen way to many startups where the business side was basically floundering, and the end result was technical firings and business hires, but no acknowledgement or punishment for the existing product and business staff.

The places I've seen with actual success involved at least one founder capable of both, and that therefore had the taste to to realize when people coming up with ideas and taking meetings were just not meeting the high bar required. Because having ideas that don't work is easy, and so is having meetings that don't get you close to making sales. It looks like work is being done, but, if anything, it's making sure the company is spending time building the wrong things.

I'd much rather work with business aware developers, who are interested in knowing more about the business, than with total business specialists. Finding business-only people that have interest in learning how things would get done, and therefore have any idea of how difficult their ideas are to implement, is in my experience way too hard, as the barrier of peering into code is way too high.

This presupposes a business major is any better at understanding customer needs than an engineer. Given that most startups fail, I'd be willing to infer that neither the typical non-technical founder nor the typical technical founder is particularly good at this.

it's not "a business major", but "a business major who deeply understands a customers need". just any old business major won't do.

> This presupposes a business major is any better at understanding customer needs than an engineer.

You can still derive advantage from specialization even if one party has an absolute advantage in both activities.

I would argue that it’s not just about solving a customer problem, it’s solving it at a cost enough customers are willing to pay for.

There’s lots of solutions in the market for problems I have, but most are above the cost I’m willing to pay for. As long as you have a large enough market willing to pay you can sustain it but often the solutions are just too costly in general to be sustainable.

And that critical part of bringing a useful solution at a cost the market will bear to sustain is the hard engineering part. I find problems people have daily that I can think of solutions to, but they’re often going to be too costly to be of any value to create a solution for and I often find them too unique for scaling to help any. I work in research environments, so YMMV.

In the past I worked with an ideas person, but their ideas were often quickly discounted by some basic engineering thoughts about how reasonable solutions could be built. If you have an engineering background and ideas, you can often iterate through viable ideas much faster, quickly discounting unviable ideas vs the other way around (having to do a lot of practical homework to explore practicality of an idea is more time costly).

There is absolutely domain value in understanding unique problems and seeing opportunity, no doubt, but viable solutions need to exist. If you think you’re the first person who saw and identified an opportunity, it’s a great time to look and ask around because chances are you’re often not the first to market. Often solutions or businesses don’t exist for the very point I raise: people couldn’t find cost effective solutions to make it worth pursuing.

> An accountant maybe doesn’t add much, but a business major who deeply understands a customers need can be more valuable than any engineer.

1000%. I'm a solo tech founder and raised $3M. There isn't a day where I wished I didn't have a business or growth person with me on this journey. The tech pieces are easy.

In my last startup, I built a parental filter which worked over VPN, could decrypt internet traffic (itself not a trivial feat), and then used small LLM's to remove portions of web pages that violated filters, without blocking the page itself. Highly technical, and I was always pushing for lower latency or better fault tolerance.

Unfortunately nobody cared, including the original customers I was talking to, and so I spent my days stapling flyers to polls and talking to parents trying to learn what their actual problems were. Every small startup I've been a part of looked like this. Companies live and die over whether they can find market fit, not whether the product could be built.

Some valuable customer problems turn out to be very tricky to solve, even when you understand exactly the requirements.

Or as Henry Ford said, "if I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have told me unlimited clean energy, teleportation, immortality, and affordable housing."

In my experience, engineering CAN be the hard part, but almost always in situations where the business requirement is unclear or non-sensical to begin with.

For example, business ideas in the form of: "Use {X} to solve {Problem that literally can NOT be solved with X}"

And yet the saying goes 'Ideas are cheap, execution is everything.'