What about "what role needs to be done the most at the time?"
>sometimes I'm legitimately better at the strategy half too
Technical people should be eager for more business responsibilities than ever before starting a business.
If it's an "engineering company" ideally you would have two founders each having outstanding technical abilities, and far exceeding anything a non-technical alternative could bring to the table from a business or sales aspect. To begin with if you want to start a business, you need to be the kind of engineer that wants to build sales in some way or another. On the front lines and/or in the background.
And to be real one of you is going to have to go full-time into sales & marketing to pursue some type of cash flow until things get rolling in some way. At least.
Then you can more sensibly consider having the non-tech MBA type come in under the top engineer who has been successfully selling already. And that's the beginning of a chain-of-command where an "engineer" is never hired or fired by anything other than an "engineer". And there's always an engineer (sharp in business, not lacking anything needed) at the top of any non-tech hierarchy by design.
Non-engineering companies where the non-tech-types dominate the hierarchy, can still have decent opportunities for the engineers they hire to work on projects under them. But there may not be as much room for upward movement or appreciation for outstanding skill up and down the line. Might also be more often found involved with financial irregularity, or more commonly non-fair dealing even with some of their own people sometimes.
The blue-sky utopian version of this for the Business side is a company shaped like a big Inside Sales Funnel, with all Engineering work implemented in off-shored cost-centres paid piecemeal at contract rates.
Steam had a flat-management structure and Engineering driven leadership from its outset. I'm not sure there's many other that can survive the VC landscape where customer focused design is seen as something between over-engineering and altruism.
What about "what role needs to be done the most at the time?"
>sometimes I'm legitimately better at the strategy half too
Technical people should be eager for more business responsibilities than ever before starting a business.
If it's an "engineering company" ideally you would have two founders each having outstanding technical abilities, and far exceeding anything a non-technical alternative could bring to the table from a business or sales aspect. To begin with if you want to start a business, you need to be the kind of engineer that wants to build sales in some way or another. On the front lines and/or in the background.
And to be real one of you is going to have to go full-time into sales & marketing to pursue some type of cash flow until things get rolling in some way. At least.
Then you can more sensibly consider having the non-tech MBA type come in under the top engineer who has been successfully selling already. And that's the beginning of a chain-of-command where an "engineer" is never hired or fired by anything other than an "engineer". And there's always an engineer (sharp in business, not lacking anything needed) at the top of any non-tech hierarchy by design.
Non-engineering companies where the non-tech-types dominate the hierarchy, can still have decent opportunities for the engineers they hire to work on projects under them. But there may not be as much room for upward movement or appreciation for outstanding skill up and down the line. Might also be more often found involved with financial irregularity, or more commonly non-fair dealing even with some of their own people sometimes.