I would say no because the founders would be managers who would have to direct things. The programmers they hire probably will not be 100% behind the project.
Non-programmer founders for a software startup can be seen as middlemen. Why should VCs pay a middleman when they can find any old programmer themselves to implement the idea?
Because not everything that you do in a software business is coding. Would you rather spend all your energy on coding and getting that thing to work or would you rather code a few hours and then try to sell your product and do team management for the rest of the time?
VCs won't go around looking for programmers to hire to implement their 'great' idea! Have you ever heard of a VC that said no to giving money to a company and then went and looked for a team to implement that idea? I'd also argue that they like it better if there is a business person in the team.
I agree with you, but I think you can curve the difficulty level a bit if a non-hacker founder will devote some of his time to learn how to hack himself. Then he can have the choice of choosing the technologies he wants for his startup.
I don't know if all founders must be hackers, I've knew a few hackers with a lot of experience in programing but with no idea of web design.
I really think Usability and Design matters.
Also a startup needs to be changing fast in code and design, so maybe you need both of them.
I guess so, what I really want to say is that at least the founder in question should at least give some effort to try to understand what we the hackers know so that they can have some sort of common point to agree || disagree on. :-)
Non-programmer founders for a software startup can be seen as middlemen. Why should VCs pay a middleman when they can find any old programmer themselves to implement the idea?