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There's no point of spending a lot of money on a professional developer until you have validated that your business idea has any potential. That's especially true in most early startup where money is really scarce.
And even if you don't plan to be a technical founder, it's quite a good idea to at least could program a little bit. It will make it much easier to communicate with developers and understand technical issues.
Now, if you want to make the next "To Do" app, a dev can be fine, but if you want to do something useful, you will need a biz guy.
I mean, this thinking from the dev side is exactly why companies today are full of crappy products (SAP, Windows, etc.).
My point is that this is stupid, really stupid. There are tons of problems in the business world and they are tackled with old software from the '90 (Windows, Office, SAP, etc.). Web technologies have not even touched the corporate world.
Devs will never get the potential behind business problems because they hardly know about them. They need business people, they really do. And the business world needs them, because things are getting crazy, mining data with Excel...
Programming is not the only thing that constitutes "getting your hands dirty," i.e. the "real work", and that anyone who thinks this is completely overlooking the importance of business principles.
If you want to be an awesome business guy, learn how to code so you can talk with your devs more effectively. But for the sake of your project don't try to replace them :-)
The other thing is that in tech startups, being the "crunch the number and shit slides" guy can be quite frustrating. Knowing how to put up a prototype yourself is pretty satisfying!
