This reminds me a lot of a friend of mine who is a brilliant designer and also very technically adept. She couldn't build an operating system, but she could build a responsive website in 1/20th the time I could. Yet she's asked me "Am I not technical? I'm getting interviewed as a non-technical founder". This "hard core" massochim pissing contest really needs to stop. It feels like we've bonded with peers who also felt excluded growing up and we've turned this exclusion into a rite of passage rather than distancing ourselves from it.
Well, playing Devil's advocate, is the "technical" in "technical founder" a description of the person, or of the role?
I mean, if she starts a tech company with someone, what will she be doing all day? It seems to me that designing the company's website, while doubtless a technical task, would only take a small section of her time. If she does non-technical stuff the rest of the time, is she really filling the role of a technical founder?
This isn't a slight at her, just a difference in what we understand the "technical" to mean. I'm not sure I'd consider even Linus Torvalds a "technical founder" if his role involved almost no programming.
99% of technical co-founders couldn't build a working operating system either. It's a very different set of skills from building a web or mobile app, and requires a lot of knowledge of how hardware works - interrupts, memory protection, device drivers, etc.
