+1!

When discussions about interviewing and hiring come up, I always like to remember that these things are strategies, and false negatives are simply a cost of doing business. While I'm sure we can find of some great businesspeople with good ideas who didn't teach themselves some simple programming, a strategy of only working with those who did is probably still an excellent filter that will get rid of far more false positives than trip over false engatives.

Absolutely correct. As a developer, I am willing to work with idea guys as long as they can show their previous work. Success or failure, it doesn't matter as long as they hustled enough to get something done. Just like I am willing to show my technical skills with a portfolio, projects etc.

agreed, and take it a bit further - a developer who is unwilling or unable to teach themselves the basics of business - delivering on time, understanding customer development, financial terms/concepts/ramifications, etc - has no business in a web startup.

I don't think its always a matter of unwilling as at times being unable.

When I was in university, I was a TA/Tutor and found that even upper level CS students have trouble coding. There are many cases where the students understood the upper-level concepts behind say networking, or DFA minimization but couldn't produce simple Fizzbizz level code.

The problem wasn't apparantly with their intelligence (as they could annunciate and expand on the concepts they were taught in class), or their rationality (they made it through the Discrete Math weedout), or even their determination (they worked hours upon hours outside of class)....

So now I'm one of those who believes that sometimes no matter how hard you try, there's a switch that won't go off to make one a 'coder'.

That said, I think a business guy should at least try to learn coding if his idea demands doing a lot of it to start with.

Personally I don't want non-programmers coding. It's a waste of both of our times. I want them to be excellent at whatever else they're bringing to the table. If content deals are necessary, I don't want to have to worry about that, I want the idea guy to lock those up for me so that I can just implement it. I want them to help our product go viral on twitter, or get prominently placed in app stores. Those are two things I hate having to do working solo projects.