If you live in Richmond, you know one thing for sure: we love being ranked on national lists. It doesn’t matter the publication - Outdoors Magazine, CraftBeer.com, whatever – it doesn’t matter what it is, we love it. So when Richmond was recently named “Top 10 Upcoming Startup Cities” - predictably the Richmond startup community freaked out. My LinkedIn is ALL links to that article, and Facebook and Twitter blew up as well.

But you probably knew that if you’re reading this - what you may not know is that Pat Hull, the author of that article is actually FROM Richmond, and that’s the only reason he included Richmond on the list. You may also not know that Richmond has one of the most troubled startup pasts of any reasonably progressive city in America - our inbred snakiness has led to a culture of mocking startups that fail, one of the worst things a city trying to build an ecosystem can...

(Written in 2011)
As the non-technical co-founder of thecityswig.com, I realized that no matter how hard I worked, when the product at it’s core needed fixing or changing, there was nothing I could do to push the company forward. Sure I could go out and talk to more users, offer customer service, attempt to make sales leads, but ultimately when all of those things were relying on updates to the service, I was a founder who at his core could not help my own company.

So about 6 months ago I made a decision: I would never be a non-technical co-founder again. I was going to learn to code. I started building a simple website, doing lessons on Codecademy, and finally trying challenges on r/dailyprogrammer. I do this about 1-2 hours a day, more when I’m really into it.

1 problem: this shit is HARD! My programmer friends seem to love writing code and learning new coding techniques, and while I...