Let’s say you’ve never programmed in Python or Ruby or any of those suitable languages. But I at least know what programming is and have some experience doing it—granted, just Pascal, Java, and Visual Basic. I think it’s totally, totally worth getting some background especially with shit like Heroku and I’m sure there’s some Python equivalent now. For 99% of web-based startups, you’re going to need a technical lead on the founding team and that’s the requirement, so if you are a non-technical founder and you have some programming aptitude, it’s totally worth picking up some chops in the way of programming.
— Alexis Ohanian in Startups Open Sourced (by Jared Tame)
