It's still extremely helpful if the "business guy" or non technical knows basic coding & design principles. It makes the conversations between founders much more intelligent and the frequency of words like: "how", "you", "what", "think" is probably a lot higher. I'm not going to pretend like I always know what Tom is talking about, but at least I can ask thoughtful questions (and dumb ones too). He'd probably say the same thing about the tasks I handle. And you can do all of these things without being a buzzword spewing suit. For example, I wear sweat pants every day :).

I think it's also helpful if a founder/employee can wear multiple hats. For example, I handle all marketing/SEO/PR/accounting/analytics/writer stuff/affiliates/business deals/VC crap. While Tom handles all bug fixes/main site coding/development/sys admin/design/features/etc. Our biggest weakness is design, but we've managed to get by fine.

/non-technical at TicketStumbler