Great post. I want to call attention to Will's first comment from Josh Strike, who articulated what I'm thinking pretty well.
(Doesn't seem like I can link to it, so I'm pasting - and truncating, so I encourage you to read his full comment):
Most coders are autodidacts. The ones without a DIY ethos drop out pretty quickly. Frankly, the reason the tech side feels free to give the business side a lot of crap -- other than the fact that you guys make more than we do, in mysterious ways unimaginable to us -- is that the business heads tend to lack that DIY drive to figure it out for themselves. Basically, wasting our time with things they could google, or learn to do, if they were as diligent as we are being (and we, being paid less to do more, feel a right to gripe). But you don't sound like that; actually, you sound like you took the hacker mentality and applied it to business, which is what we'd all like to do. SO, bravo. The fact that you did that is great. Don't rest on your laurels (or your co-founder); keep improving yourself.
[...]
The most important thing to remember if you're going to delegate -- whether it's hammering nails, making pizza dough or writing code -- is that the guy with his hands in the pie has the power to demolish you if you don't understand what he's doing. And lives by the sweat of his balls. So buy him a beer...and never consider anything to be magic. If you do, you've just put yourself in the dangerous position of not being able to fix it when it breaks down.
(Doesn't seem like I can link to it, so I'm pasting - and truncating, so I encourage you to read his full comment):
Most coders are autodidacts. The ones without a DIY ethos drop out pretty quickly. Frankly, the reason the tech side feels free to give the business side a lot of crap -- other than the fact that you guys make more than we do, in mysterious ways unimaginable to us -- is that the business heads tend to lack that DIY drive to figure it out for themselves. Basically, wasting our time with things they could google, or learn to do, if they were as diligent as we are being (and we, being paid less to do more, feel a right to gripe). But you don't sound like that; actually, you sound like you took the hacker mentality and applied it to business, which is what we'd all like to do. SO, bravo. The fact that you did that is great. Don't rest on your laurels (or your co-founder); keep improving yourself.
[...]
The most important thing to remember if you're going to delegate -- whether it's hammering nails, making pizza dough or writing code -- is that the guy with his hands in the pie has the power to demolish you if you don't understand what he's doing. And lives by the sweat of his balls. So buy him a beer...and never consider anything to be magic. If you do, you've just put yourself in the dangerous position of not being able to fix it when it breaks down.