You need both to do something great. And there’s thousands of Woz’s out there whose names we don’t know because they never met their Jobs.
There's an obsession with trying to discredit people like Jobs (and their contributions), particularly among the hacker news crowd. Fundamentally it's because most hackers don't understand leadership, marketing, sales, etc.
In this thread you'll see people claim Elon Musk is non-technical. That's bordering on belligerent. A person would have to have avoided the dozens of YouTube interviews where he demonstrates his technical understanding to an elaborate degree. Musk is as technical as Bill Gates was in his post coding days at Microsoft (which spanned the bulk of his time at Microsoft) and I've never seen anyone on HN claim Gates as being non-technical. How it works is simple: I dislike this person, therefore I shall tear them down; I'm unable to be objective about the subject, so I shall be emotional and irrational instead.
He comes across as a guy who really wants to seem deep and cerebral, but his takes are pretty surface level compared to other tech CEOs. He couldn’t even give a high level explanation of Twitter’s “crazy” tech stack without having a meltdown.
And that's a really common case.
It is absolutely true that you need both technical and non-technical people to make a business work. There are lots of jobs to be done, hats to be worn, and they are all valuable - many are necessary.
The issue is that our society and economy massively overvalues two roles in particular: those who bring the capital and those who carry the title executive. It's not that those roles don't contribute, they do. But they currently get the vast majority of the generated wealth, credit, and recognition (which then translates into more opportunities to access more capital and thus into an exponential feedback loop).
Woz was critical to early Apple. He was not involved in its modern iteration. Also, plenty of important and influential people are unknown in the popular imagination.
The point is that this is a general problem that falls out of the structure of our economy and business enterprises. And it's one that's fixable with a little societal refactoring (changing the laws around business structures and how they're formed).
