Vibe coding is shaking up software development, and it’s causing investors to rethink how important it is for a startup’s founder to have technical skills.
Venture capitalists have historically — but not always — leaned toward backing software startup founders who have coding expertise.
But now that people with non-technical backgrounds can write code by giving AI instructions, dubbed “vibe coding” by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, investors have told Business Insider that other criteria are catching their eye.
They include domain expertise, business acumen, and proficiency with AI tools.
“I’m already getting pings from funds who are looking at founders who have technical affinity but can’t write code, because they use Lovable,” Anton Osika, the founder and CEO of Lovable, a startup that provides a vibe coding platform, told BI. “How effective you are at using AI is now a technical skillset.”
A shift from technical expertise to domain knowledge
Bob Thomas, partner at software VC fund Oxx, told BI that it’s becoming more important for founders to have in-depth knowledge about the vertical they’re operating in and supplement this with a technical product, particularly as businesses become more specialized.
“People are shifting away from backing purely technical founders and focusing on two things that will determine how successful a business will be,” he told BI.
“If you’re an ex-accountant and you’ve worked in that field for 20 years, you have excellent knowledge that you can commercialize. You’ll see a shift from looking from purely technical expertise, to a focus shift on domain knowledge,” he added.
Technical and product-minded founders will always be sought after, said Priya Saiprasad, general partner at Touring Capital — but she added that what investors expect from technical founders will dramatically shift in the vibe coding era.
“Instead of actively coding and building delightful features from scratch, a lot of the technical team’s time will be spent trying to enhance product engagement, stickiness, switching costs, and a consistently evolving return on investment delivered to the end user or buyer,” she told BI.
While early-stage founders may use vibe coding as a starting point to hone their product, investors backing founders at the later stages also want startups with “a level of reliability, scalability, and readiness in terms of how they’re developing their software,” said Zoe Qin, vice president at Dawn Capital.
“When we invest in business software, it’s more about what you’ve developed as a product and how you address a business problem,” she told BI.
The remits of ‘technical’ are changing
In the past, a technical founder often meant someone who could write, review, and implement code. Now, investors are reconsidering what constitutes a “technical” founder.
As AI is increasingly performing front-end aspects of coding, investors are looking for founders with an “architect mindset,” said Yashwanth Hemaraj, general partner at BGV, referring to someone who can see the bigger picture, not necessarily write every line of code.
“In hiring, the shift is happening from old-school programmers to architects. They’re saying ‘here is how everything is connected’ and how everyone needs to interact with each other,” he added.
This means that regardless of what AI tools a startup is using, a founder needs to be able to get to a place where they can fix and modify any bugs quickly.
“That aspect of systems-level thinking and architectural viewpoint is what we look for in founders. Instead of hiring a team of 30-40 people, you can do the same with 10 people,” he said.
Oxx’s Thomas said VCs are actively looking for founders who are more fluent with AI tools, especially at the seed and pre-seed levels.
“At the later stage, founders have achieved product market fit, whereas these early-stage founders can use AI to help establish product-market fit — which also determines how much money they need,” he told BI.
Still, the best technical founders are often good at upskilling and leveraging AI in coding as well, which is becoming a key requisite for investors.
“As of now, we haven’t been grilling CTOs on their AI usage, because that should be evident in the depth and breadth of the product they’ve built,” said Dawn Capital’s Qin. “But we don’t micromanage how they get there.”
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