I have been thinking a lot lately about the people who go on to build successful companies and the one thing that has been standing out as an indicator of success is the technical aptitude of the founder.  In other words, did the founder of the company have a hand in building version 1a of the product. Here is a list i’ve pulled together of successful companies that have had ‘technical’ founders.

Bill Gates

  Larry and Sergey

    Jerry Yang

Jeff Bezos

  Pierre Omidyar

  Niklas Zennstrom

  Craig Newmark

  Farhad Mohit

  Gary Kremen

  Michael Birch

  Mark Zuckerberg

The list goes on…

Of course there’s plenty of examples of successful companies started by non-technical founders (although i’m having a hard time thinking of any off the top of my head).  What is it about having a technical founder that is such a good indicator of success? Well, that’s a post for another day…