I never said that I was a great hacker and I didn’t say that my ideas were great. At best I said that I had ideas that were just as good as those of a “business type.” The bottleneck here is not in ideas, but in time/resources to execute. That’s the reason I have yet to get any of my projects significantly off the ground- I just don’t have the time or money to do it.

Therefore, if the bottleneck is time, adding more ideas only makes the problem worse. I was advocating a position wherein a hacker who has ideas (and not all do) should only work on those, because (theoretically) they have a higher chance of success with their own ideas.

I never said that business types should come into play after a product is generating revenue. I said quite the opposite- in my example, I chose Apple, who clearly wasn’t making any money before Jobs came around. Woz just had a toy computer he was geeking out over with some people. I made very clear that it was Jobs that came in and allowed Apple to make any money at all. The point, here, is that Woz had the idea to make the computer, and Jobs had the idea to make the money.

Business types are incredibly valuable to a startup, but I think their benefit on product development (especially in the early stages) is generally overstated. That’s not to say they don’t have other benefits (and they do), but in the narrow scope of coming up with software startup business ideas and the initial execution of them, they really aren’t much help at all.