A quick shout out to Chris B and Adam G, friends of Venture Geek and founders of the Afghan Music Project, for their recent coverage about where some of the money they raised is going. If you like things like human rights, Democracy, and/or interesting music, consider buying the album.
As an MBA interested in entrepreneurship who used to build web applications for a living I am often asked by non-technical folks how they can find good engineers to start a company with. It’s a tough problem, especially these days.
Sean Corfield links to a nice summary of how to recognize good programmers when you aren’t one. The article isn’t a magic bullet, but it does a nice job talking about the culture of software development that one should look for when hiring.
Starting a software-driven business as a non-engineer is an uphill climb in most cases — if you aren’t someone making substantial contribution to product development in the early days of a company chances are you are overhead, even as a founder. Great engineers tend to want to work with other great engineers, so seeding your technology team with greatness if you don’t have it yourself is doubly rough.