READY TO BE A CO-FOUNDER?

The person who understands software business the best tends to be your programmer. She's the only one who can visualize the whole application before it's built and know what each user is going to experience. They're constantly balancing a million variables only they can see -- how will this algorithm perform? Is it worth the 5 hours to align the logo on the homepage? How will this user interface's flow feel when it's completed?

Mark Zuckerberg, Sony's Akio Morita, Bill Gates weren't geniuses -- they just did the work to make it happen. If you're busy associating entrepreneurs to geniuses it's all over. You have to be ready to challenge your premises, learn, digest information wherever you can. Attributing stuff to some kind of "genius magic" is selling yourself short.

The "programmers are hirable commodity" mentality is what results in the awful user experiences. It's why credit cards machines are slow, traffic lights are inefficient, and bank websites are awful.

In today's software marketplace, it wont do. You're competing with companies run by programmers. People who have the vision of the entire ecosystem and aren't just leveraging that -- they're pushing the envelope higher.

You can't architect a building by hiring an artist through his pencil -- all you'll get are lines. You must hire an artist and let him choose the pencil.

And you better have a damn good reason for him to not architect the building on his own.