Editor’s note: The following is the fourth profile in a series of articles about startup founders from non-technical backgrounds who have launched successful venture-backed companies. Read the previous interviews with MagicSchool AI founder Adeel Khan here, Trunk Tools founder Sarah Buchner here, and Tabs founder Ali Hussain here.
By conventional Silicon Valley standards, Ilya Levtov had some of the credentials one might expect of a startup founder: Stanford Business School, experience as a VC on Sand Hill Road, and time working inside a fast-growing venture-backed startup.
One thing he decidedly lacked was a technical background.
“I’ve never written a line of code in my life,” Levtov told Crunchbase News in an interview. Years later, after building Craft, a 12-year-old San Francisco-based supply chain software company that he says now works with 35 federal agencies and generates double-digit millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue, that remains true: “And I still haven’t written a single line of code.”
Over the years, Levtov raised $42 million in funding for Craft. His experience has given him a close-up view of both the disadvantages non-technical founders face, and the reasons Silicon Valley’s preference for technical founders may be too simplistic.
An unlikely route into tech
Levtov’s own route into technology was anything but direct. His family emigrated from the Soviet Union to England when he was a toddler, and with two musician parents, he began playing cello at age four. He later attended a specialist music school in London, studied at the Royal College of Music, and participated in a Columbia-Juilliard exchange while earning an English literature degree from Columbia University.
By graduation, Levtov had decided to keep music as a hobby and pursue business instead. He joined Goldman Sachs, later attended Stanford Business School, and eventually landed at Spot Runner, an ad-tech startup that grew from about 10 employees to roughly 200 during his time there.
“I was just totally bitten by the bug,” he recalls. “And I said, ‘This is what I want to do with my life. I want to build a company one day. Somehow, entrepreneurship is for me.’”
Before becoming a founder, though, Levtov spent time on the other side of the table as a venture capitalist at Venrock. He later left venture for an operating role at video service provider Crunchyroll, and after moving back to Europe, eventually worked at Deutsche Telekom helping Silicon Valley startups including Evernote, Box, Dropbox and Pinterest establish distribution partnerships.
His eventual startup grew out of an unsuccessful attempt to build an enterprise social network.
As part of that project, Levtov’s team created company profiles by collecting information from corporate websites, job pages, management pages and other sources.
Those profiles began showing up prominently in Google searches, convincing him there might be a business there.
The disadvantage of not being technical
But unlike a technical founder, he could not simply build the product himself.
“My first coder was literally a $20 an hour Odesk or Upwork person,” he said.
That dependence slowed everything down.
“For the non-technical founder, it’s just fundamentally a much longer time at the very beginning to get to something because a technical founder basically codes their idea on nights and weekends,” he said.
Instead, Levtov had to hunt down developers, explain his vision, and try to determine whether the result would match it. Once he’d done those things, he then had to find the capital to pay for it.
Still, the business gained traction.
Its company profiles eventually appeared in 100 million search results per month and drew about 2.25 million visitors organically, according to Levtov.
‘I guess that means not me’
When Levtov began raising venture funding in London in 2015 and 2016, he ran into another challenge familiar to non-technical founders: Investors preferred founders who could build the product themselves.
“I decidedly remember this clarity with which I found venture funds whose websites I go to and research. And what did they say? ‘We support technical founders in doing this and that.’ And it really was just this moment [of realizing], ‘oh I guess that means not me, right?’ ” he said.
Even so, Levtov does not describe himself as having been shut out of venture capital. He had Stanford and Venrock on his résumé and eventually secured funding from Downing Ventures in the U.K., and later Uncork Capital after moving back to Silicon Valley.
And he believes the preference for technical founders has some logic behind it.
“They’ve got a direct line between the business concept and the code in which it’s executed,” Levtov said.
His own experience showed him how costly that gap could be. He said there were times he hired the wrong technical person and did not have enough expertise to recognize the problem quickly.
“That is a real disadvantage: This inevitable disconnect, this gap between the non-technical person’s knowledge and, you know, the bare metal, as it were, or the most intrinsic innards of the software code by which this business product is going to live and breathe,” Levtov said.
He believes those mistakes slowed the company’s growth.
Finding the business inside the product
But the company’s eventual breakthrough also illustrated the potential advantage of approaching technology from the business side.
Someone at Lockheed Martin contacted the company and pointed out that its data could help track changes across a sprawling supply chain. The system could pick up signals such as changes in hiring, executive departures and new product offerings.
Lockheed became its first enterprise customer. Then, in 2020, the U.S. Air Force reached out about using the product to monitor 300,000 companies in the defense industrial base. The company closed a five-year, $6.5 million deal 94 days later, according to Levtov.
“We figured out that our company is actually a supply chain company, and we haven’t looked back since then,” he said.
Notably, those customers were not software developers asking for better developer tools. They were, noted Levtov, business users with business problems.
And this is where he believes his own background helped. A non-technical founder may not be able to evaluate code or engineering talent in a way that a technical founder can, he pointed out. But they may be stronger in areas such as understanding customers, managing people, fundraising and building relationships.
AI is further complicating that debate, since software can increasingly be built without traditional coding expertise. But Levtov stops short of arguing that technical founders no longer matter.
“It really just takes both. It takes both sides,” he said. “I think if you can have a technical founder and a non-technical founder, you’re probably in the ideal spot.”
Technical founders may have an edge at the earliest stages, Levtov said. As companies scale, the balance can shift toward skills like hiring, selling, positioning and dealmaking.
At different points in a company’s life, he said, “it’s really about the tech right now,” while at others, “it’s all about the dealmaking, or all about the positioning, or the marketing.”
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- How A Teenage Carpenter Became The Founder Of AI Construction Startup Trunk Tools
- From Humanities To AI: How Ali Hussain Built Fintech Tabs Into A $400M Startup
Illustration: Dom Guzman
