Learn enough code to build a crappy prototype of your idea in a week.
Two years ago, I became obsessed with startups. I was in school at the time, and constantly had a notebook out sketching my web-app ideas. It was entertaining at first, but soon I realized that in order to make progress I had to build the damn things and put them in front of users. So I did what most people do in that situation - began looking for a technical cofounder. I started trying to meet as many programmers as possible.
I got lucky and met a hacker that liked my idea, so we started working together and he suggested I code the HTML and CSS for the front-end of our rails app (it was to be a publishing platform for authors). I resisted at first but quickly realized that I'd lose all credibility if I was unwilling to dabble in a little simple code. So I went through some tutorials and found that coding actually wasn't too hard. Every time I reached an obstacle, an hour or two of googling usually yiel