Any early stage startup where there's so much polarization between geeks and suits at the outset is in trouble. Basically geeks need to learn to sell and suits need to learn to code. I could elaborate on this in a longer post. But I have to go back to working on some new channel capacity ideas. Stay tuned.
Honestly the suits don't need to code, but they do need to be comfortable discussing software and the limits/possibilities of technology.
Similarly, the geeks don't need to know all the aspects of selling, but they do need to know how to tell a customer that their product is awesome and all the advantages it has and why it's silly to not have use it.
In just about every business relationship I have with a vendor, there are two people talking to me. A sales guy who doesn't work on the product, and an engineer who does. The sales guy sells me the product, and the engineer gets me to buy it. It's far from standard to have suits get their hands dirty.
My experience is similar but with a key difference.
The sales team often consists of a sales guy who has barely seen the product (as you said) and a "systems engineer" who should not be confused for a developer. The engineers are often technically skilled members of the sales team that are experts at deploying the product and using it in customer environments. That said, they often have development skills (from previous experience) but they are certainly not getting their hands dirty with code in this role.
The "suit" co-founder of a start-up should be playing the role of a systems engineer and the account exec rolled into one because the "technical" co-founder rarely has the right personality/sales experience to be involved in sales.
Obviously, if you do manage to find a technical co-founder who has the systems engineer skills then you can change up the roles a bit but, in my experience, such people are incredibly rare (even in successful start-ups).
You can't generate an electromagnetic field just from software!! At some point you need a physical medium to accomplish that. In the case you point out he uses the DAC hardware on a graphics card to generate electric signals, controlled by software. Not really sure what you meant.
That's like saying "you can't calculate pi just from software". We're willing to presume the presence of some type of general-purpose hardware when we talk about software.
Some of his projects require only the use of commodity hardware of the type sold at Walmart. That's categorically different than something that requires a custom built software defined radio transceiver.
