Absolutely not mocking it in any way. I absolutely believe in my first paragraph (I even emphasize my agreement), completely non-ironically.
My favorite way I've heard this stated is "Napoleon didn't personally conquer northern Italy."
Now, there is something diferent and special that the blog post we're talking about is referring to, and which basically holds ONLY with software. As opposed to car company, health-care service provider, you name it, software is this thing where if you build the lines of code once, you can use them n times at a marginal cost approaching 0.
In any other business, if you go from having 10 customers to having 1000, you can't just put another couple hundred into the bank account to cover hosting bills while their monthly payments clear.
What this guy is talking about, in my opinion, is the small 2 or 3-person team that, without any money, but only time, Skype, IRC, cheap cloud hosting services (AWS stands out), and standard local and remote software-building tools, can build a complete application without convincing anyone to build it nor paying anyone to build it.
Does every team need a technical co-founder? (someone who can use git or ssh?) I personally don't think so. This guy would probably disagree.
(But, since the whole blog post is about semantics, I will say this. In my experience, people - especially associated with Y-Combinator, who use the term "technical cofonounder" expect it to mean coder. It's weird. Here's something related. The people who use this term use CTO to refer to someone who is really good at setting up the architecture of the stack, the database, the use cases, and committing actual code to create the application from scratch after selecting the language(s) and frameworks to use. To me, none of this says "CTO", since, to me, CTO says "director-level position overseeing technology", and, to me, anyone with the title of CTO would never commit a single line of code and would only use SSH to check up on other people's work - never anything else. But that's not the usage on y-combinator type startups, and this is what this blog post is talking about.)
Said by someone who should read up a bit more on how Napoleon conquered northern Italy. The man was everywhere with his nose in everything. While he didn't literally do every job, he knew how every job was done and was perfectly capable of stepping in when he needed to.
There's a case to be made for that in the world of startup leaders as well.
The parent comment to the comment had said this (about Steve Jobs):
"Pedantic note. He didn't revolutionalize anything. His company may have. He may have been the final say on the design and implementation decisions, but he didn't do it. The engineers did. The researchers did. The programmers did. Just because he's the one standing on the stage during a keynote doesn't mean that he really did anything (I'm not saying he didn't, but I'm saying that just because he takes credit doesn't mean he deserves to take credit)..."
And the full response to this comment (I only quoted half), was:
"Leaders are generally given credit for accomplishments. Napoleon didn't personally conquer northern Italy."
It's an interesting contrast to your statement, because although Napoleon might have been able to set up artillery and weild a sabor, Steve Jobs was not an engineer. (This is what Bill Gates said recently about him). If you really want to get into it, his deepest credentials, very early in adolescence, in engineering, came from having his buddy working the night shift developing for him, and his claiming the results. He literally could not do what he wanted/needed to, and literally had to have his friend help him.
So I don't know about whether Napoleon personally cleaned bores, or knew the intricacies of every job, but it is fair to say that Steve Jobs could not do what he wanted done early on, and for the past few decades certainly couldn't do any of the jobs the engineers were doing.
I think you also completely miss the sweet meaning of "personally", which forms a nice mental image. You say he was perfectly capable of stepping in when he needed to. But obviously, he could not have stepped in for the whole army. Just because he had the ability to do any of the jobs (even if that's true), does that mean he could do every one of the jobs all at once.
In the YC sense of a startup, frequently the "technical cofounder" or CTO can literally go ahead and "step in" for the whole army!
With literally not a single other person having any access to the servers, the "technical cofounder" can keep the operations running and make updates "personally". In this sense, it's pretty preposterous to think of Napoleon "personally" conquering anything.
Someone with the title of CTO in most startups would most definitely be expected to write code. Once a significant development team has been built, (say, more than two other full-time developers, covering at least the relevant programming domain knowledge of the CTO), then the CTO slips into a more managerial role.
(The blogger we're all responding to is basically making the same point for a "technical cofounder" as well, though not going as far as to say they are expected to write code: merely that they should have this ability, i.e. be a "coder".)
My favorite way I've heard this stated is "Napoleon didn't personally conquer northern Italy."
Now, there is something diferent and special that the blog post we're talking about is referring to, and which basically holds ONLY with software. As opposed to car company, health-care service provider, you name it, software is this thing where if you build the lines of code once, you can use them n times at a marginal cost approaching 0.
In any other business, if you go from having 10 customers to having 1000, you can't just put another couple hundred into the bank account to cover hosting bills while their monthly payments clear.
What this guy is talking about, in my opinion, is the small 2 or 3-person team that, without any money, but only time, Skype, IRC, cheap cloud hosting services (AWS stands out), and standard local and remote software-building tools, can build a complete application without convincing anyone to build it nor paying anyone to build it.
Does every team need a technical co-founder? (someone who can use git or ssh?) I personally don't think so. This guy would probably disagree.
(But, since the whole blog post is about semantics, I will say this. In my experience, people - especially associated with Y-Combinator, who use the term "technical cofonounder" expect it to mean coder. It's weird. Here's something related. The people who use this term use CTO to refer to someone who is really good at setting up the architecture of the stack, the database, the use cases, and committing actual code to create the application from scratch after selecting the language(s) and frameworks to use. To me, none of this says "CTO", since, to me, CTO says "director-level position overseeing technology", and, to me, anyone with the title of CTO would never commit a single line of code and would only use SSH to check up on other people's work - never anything else. But that's not the usage on y-combinator type startups, and this is what this blog post is talking about.)