I never see posts on HN from the perspective of "I'm a technical founder with an idea and a product, and I need a non-technical co-founder who can pitch, market and sell it".
I fall in to this camp, sort of. I'm not looking for a non-tech co-founder, but certainly open to the idea. However, as I meet people, the ones who seem to be capable are generally already doing their own thing. To a large extent, this is probably a similar problem non-tech people face when looking for tech co-founders - the ones who are most likely to be capable are probably already doing something.
I meet a fair number of people who might be non-tech co-founders - they tick some of the boxes. But when discussing things more, then almost inevitably fall short of my own expectations.
This is hard to put in to words, but the ones I've talked to seem more in love with the idea of being in a startup than actually working on one. There's also seemingly little drive to do much more than talk. Generally, also, there's little financial stability in their lives, to be able to deal with no or limited income for several months while ramping up. And based on discussions with some potential co-founders over the past several years, there seems to be little willingness to be at all flexible with their own ideas - they have tended to think of themselves as Steve Jobs, and me more as a Wozniak to be used and thrown out later.
So... again, while I'm open to the idea, I'm not actively looking. Perhaps I should be actively looking, and would weed through the bad fits faster?
No, I don't think most tech people are under any illusions about their ability. But sales, marketing, and ops scale in a much more linear way than tech does. You don't need a ton of marketing ability to make a few sales and get a bit of cash flow coming in. Then you can hire sales and other non technical staff, rather than bringing them in at the cofounder level.
"You don't need a ton of marketing ability to make a few sales and get a bit of cash flow coming in."
"Then you can hire sales and other non technical staff"
Have you ever run a business? This sounds so naive it's probably the exact thing the OP was talking about.
1. The modal amount of revenue for most payment processors is 0 dollars. The majority of all applications developed and deployed never make a single dollar of revenue.
2. 'a bit of cash flow' is 20 dollars / month. It is not easy to make revenue acquisition repeatable (or, more accurately, by far the hardest problem in any business is in finding repeatable acquisition models)
3. You cannot just 'hire a sales guy' and expect the money to flow in. Regular 'sales guys' need a pitch, a sales script, a leads source, a pricing list, in other words, they need to be told exactly what to do and how to do it. Somebody who can develop all of that is the 'non-technical founder' as it is most commonly called on here. It's like expecting to hire 'a programmer' and thinking he can think of a product, code it up and bring it to market. The vast majority can't, because it's a completely different skill set.
If non-technical founders are advised to try to code, technical founders should be advised to try to do sales/marketing/ops too. Just do not put too much expectations in either way: it will probably always be better to find a co-founder, not just to fill in the abilities gap, but also as emotional support / motivator / POV enriching...
Not that I've seen. Most technical people I know are aware that they lack the requisite sales skills.
What I have seen, however, is a moral judgement about the relative merits of what skills the founders bring to the table. Specifically, I have known many technical people who perceive sales and management as of lower value than technical creation. Consequently, they privately scoff at the notion that the person doing the "hobnobbing", "gladhanding", and perceived-to-be-commodity sales activities gaining equivalent equity or compensation as themselves.
Out of their sense of "fairness", some of these people go it alone or hire out rather than seek an equal partner in their endeavors.
I know this sounds highly anecdotal( and it is ), but I've seen it enough that I suspect it's at least somewhat widespread.
I've seen this too, and it hurts all parties. But I can sympathize with the tech guy---sales and management are other words for value extraction. How is a technical person to be sure they're not the extractee (i.e. getting screwed)?
I think the best answer is what mguillemot suggests---a tech cofounder should learn a bit more about the sales/marketing/deal-making side. He can then gain a better understanding of what the sales guy does, how hard it is (or isn't), and he'll be more respected by a career salesman, just as an MBA who knows how to code is much more trustworthy to the average technical person.
Technical people who look down on sales and marketing generally do not realize that just as in coding circles the FizzBuzz test shows a remarkable lack of coding ability in a large population of self-described "programmers", in sales and marketing circles the vast majority of people who self-describe as salesperson or marketer don't have the faintest idea of those respective activities.
To a first approximation, most programmers are barely FizzBuzz material, most sales people are order takers, and most marketers are brand buzzers.
Speaking as a programmer who learned enough sales and marketing to carve out a comfortable niche out in the market, there is a palpable difference between an order taker and a real salesman. It is comparable to say, watching Notch work and watching someone who can't cut FizzBuzz try to implement a stack data structure. I've learned enough sales and marketing to identify the salesmen "rock stars", or even the non-order takers.
A real salesman will hold complex deal variables and details in his head on the same order of complexity as most good programmers will handle in code. He is amazingly good at reading body language and over-the-phone voices, getting at the real concerns of sales objections put up by the customers in an startlingly short amount of time. He'll juggle all these inputs and transmogrify them into a combination that works for the sale, all on the fly in fractions of a second, without it breaking his composure or his speaking delivery. He doesn't look down on the technical people backing him, and instead pumps them for technical information, extracting what he needs to build the business case and relaying it back to the technical staff to make sure he got it right. If you follow him through the day, you'll notice he fills every moment with sales activity; whether he's cold calling or following up, he always has a list of customers to contact and touch in the minutes he has downtime at various points throughout the day, or he's reading up to prep for upcoming deals he anticipates. His day is typically highly structured, and he plans out his activities weeks and months in advance.
There are damn few of these salesmen, just as there are damn few Carmacks. Most of them are tied up pitching large, multi-million and up deals as this kind of talent and work ethic is immediately recognized in sales organizations and promoted or poached away, so I would posit that most programmers have never met such salespeople. When many programmers do meet them, they typically only see the "coal face" side of these sales people, the gladhanding tip-of-the-iceberg part. In much the same way that when a lot of people watch programmers at work, they seem to be "just" sitting and poking at a keyboard now and then.
Here's another reason: if you are a single technical founder working on a great technology, but lacking business skills, you don't even need a co-founder -- the best option for you is to find an angel investor, who will bring cash, but if they're interested and dedicated enough will also provide the missing skills.
There are a few - I think I've seen two or three, including myself... but they tend to be met either by deafening silence or lost roar of people/companies looking for technical people.
