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, a testament to the diverse paths leading to innovation in Silicon Valley. Previous interviews have featured MagicSchool AI founder Adeel Khan, Trunk Tools founder Sarah Buchner, and Tabs founder Ali Hussain, each sharing their unique journeys.

By conventional Silicon Valley standards, Ilya Levtov possessed some of the expected hallmarks of a promising startup founder: an MBA from the prestigious Stanford Business School, valuable experience as a venture capitalist on the famed Sand Hill Road, and a stint working within a rapidly growing, venture-backed startup. These were the credentials that typically open doors in the competitive tech ecosystem.

Yet, one crucial element he decidedly lacked was a technical background, a perceived prerequisite for leading a software company in the heart of innovation.

“I’ve never written a line of code in my life,” Levtov candidly shared with Crunchbase News in a recent interview. More than a decade later, having successfully built Craft, a 12-year-old San Francisco-based supply chain software company that he proudly states now serves 35 federal agencies and generates double-digit millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue, that statement remains unequivocally true: “And I still haven’t written a single line of code.”

Over the course of its journey, Levtov meticulously raised a substantial $42 million in funding for Craft, a significant achievement for any startup, let alone one led by a non-technical founder. His extensive experience has afforded him an intimate, close-up view of both the inherent disadvantages non-technical founders often confront and, crucially, the compelling reasons why Silicon Valley’s deeply ingrained preference for technical founders might be an overly simplistic, and perhaps even outdated, perspective. His story challenges the dogma, proving that vision, business acumen, and relentless execution can trump the ability to write code.

An Unlikely Route into Tech: From Cello to Code-Free SaaS

Levtov’s personal odyssey into the demanding world of technology was anything but a direct or predictable path. His family, seeking new opportunities, emigrated from the Soviet Union to England when he was merely a toddler. With both parents being accomplished musicians, Levtov naturally began playing the cello at the tender age of four, immersing himself in a world of classical music and artistic expression. This early passion led him to attend a specialist music school in London, honing his craft, and later to study at the Royal College of Music. His academic pursuits also included a unique Columbia-Juilliard exchange program while he earned an English literature degree from Columbia University, a stark contrast to the computer science degrees typically celebrated in tech circles.

By the time he reached graduation, Levtov made a pivotal decision: to relegate music to a cherished hobby and instead embark on a career in business. This led him to a challenging role at Goldman Sachs, a formative experience in the cutthroat world of finance. Following his time there, he pursued further education at Stanford Business School, where he honed his strategic thinking and entrepreneurial instincts. Eventually, he landed at Spot Runner, an early ad-tech startup that experienced explosive growth, expanding from a lean team of about 10 employees to roughly 200 during his tenure.

“I was just totally bitten by the bug,” he vividly recalls, describing the intoxicating energy of the startup environment. “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.’” The thrill of creation, the rapid pace, and the potential for impact had irrevocably captured his imagination.

Before stepping into the shoes of a founder, however, Levtov spent valuable time gaining perspective from the other side of the table, working as a venture capitalist at Venrock. This experience provided him with crucial insights into how investors evaluate opportunities and what makes a company attractive for funding. He later transitioned from venture capital to an operating role at video service provider Crunchyroll, further expanding his operational expertise. After relocating back to Europe, he took on a role at Deutsche Telekom, where he played a key part in helping prominent Silicon Valley startups like Evernote, Box, Dropbox, and Pinterest establish crucial distribution partnerships, giving him a front-row seat to the challenges and strategies of scaling tech companies.

His eventual startup, Craft, serendipitously grew out of an initially unsuccessful attempt to build an enterprise social network. During this earlier project, Levtov’s team developed a methodology to create comprehensive company profiles by meticulously collecting and synthesizing information from a myriad of public sources: corporate websites, job postings, management team pages, and other publicly available data points.

Remarkably, these detailed company profiles began appearing prominently in Google searches, unexpectedly generating significant organic traffic. This unforeseen outcome served as a powerful signal, convincing Levtov that there might be a viable, even compelling, business opportunity hidden within this data collection and organization.

The Disadvantage of Not Being Technical: A Slower, More Costly Path

The path from idea to product, however, was fundamentally different for Levtov compared to a technical founder. Unlike someone who could simply write the code themselves, he was entirely reliant on external talent.

“My first coder was literally a $20 an hour Odesk or Upwork person,” he recounted, highlighting the humble and often challenging beginnings. This immediate and complete dependence on external technical resources inherently slowed down every aspect of development.

“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 explained. The ability of a technical founder to rapidly prototype, iterate, and self-correct offers a significant speed advantage that non-technical founders simply do not possess.

Instead, Levtov found himself in the arduous position of having to painstakingly hunt down suitable developers, articulate his often-complex vision in a language they could understand, and then attempt to assess whether the resulting code would truly align with his initial concept. This iterative process of explanation, implementation, testing, and feedback created significant bottlenecks. Only after navigating these technical hurdles could he then focus on the equally challenging task of securing the necessary capital to fund the development and growth of his nascent company.

Despite these inherent disadvantages, the core business concept gained undeniable traction. Craft’s meticulously curated company profiles eventually appeared in an astounding 100 million search results per month and attracted approximately 2.25 million organic visitors, according to Levtov. This organic growth was a powerful indicator of market interest and the intrinsic value of the data they were compiling.

‘I Guess That Means Not Me’: Facing VC Bias

When Levtov embarked on the journey of raising venture funding in London between 2015 and 2016, he encountered another significant challenge, one intimately familiar to many non-technical founders: the pervasive investor preference for founders who possess the ability to build the product themselves. This bias, though often unstated, was clear in the venture capital landscape.

“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 recalled, a moment of stark realization about the prevailing industry norms. The explicit language on investor websites often served as an unspoken barrier.

Even so, Levtov does not characterize his experience as having been entirely shut out of venture capital. His robust resume, featuring the reputable Stanford and Venrock, undoubtedly provided him with a significant advantage, opening doors that might have remained closed to others. He eventually secured initial funding from Downing Ventures in the U.K., and later, after relocating back to the vibrant ecosystem of Silicon Valley, he successfully raised capital from Uncork Capital. This demonstrated that while the path might be harder, it is not impossible for non-technical founders with strong credentials and a compelling vision.

Levtov also concedes that the preference for technical founders, from an investor’s perspective, does carry a certain logical foundation.

“They’ve got a direct line between the business concept and the code in which it’s executed,” Levtov acknowledged. This direct connection minimizes communication overhead, accelerates development, and allows for rapid iteration—all highly valued traits in early-stage startups.

His own experiences vividly illustrated how costly that disconnect could be. He admitted there were instances where he hired the wrong technical person, and due to his own lack of deep technical expertise, he was unable to recognize the problem quickly enough, leading to wasted time and resources.

“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 elaborated. This fundamental gap, he believes, ultimately slowed the company’s growth and necessitated a steeper learning curve for him as a leader.

Finding the Business Inside the Product: A Supply Chain Revelation

However, the company’s eventual breakthrough also served to illustrate a potential, often overlooked, advantage of approaching technology from a deeply business-centric perspective. It wasn’t a technical innovation that catalyzed Craft’s pivot, but a market insight.

A representative from Lockheed Martin, a colossal defense contractor, proactively contacted Craft. They pointed out that Craft’s meticulously collected and structured data could be invaluable for tracking subtle, yet critical, changes across their vast and intricate supply chain. The system had the unique ability to pick up on various signals: shifts in hiring patterns, executive departures, and the announcement of new product offerings—all of which could be early indicators of potential risks or opportunities within their supplier network.

Lockheed Martin consequently became Craft’s very first enterprise customer, a crucial validation of their data’s utility beyond its original intent. The pivotal moment arrived in 2020 when the U.S. Air Force reached out, expressing interest in leveraging Craft’s product to monitor an astounding 300,000 companies within the defense industrial base. This was a monumental opportunity. Levtov proudly stated that Craft successfully closed a five-year, $6.5 million deal with the Air Force a mere 94 days later, a testament to the urgency of the problem and the immediate value Craft provided.

“We figured out that our company is actually a supply chain company, and we haven’t looked back since then,” he declared, describing the “aha!” moment that fundamentally redefined Craft’s mission and market focus. This strategic pivot, driven by customer need rather than internal technical development, proved to be the company’s turning point.

Crucially, these transformative customers—Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Air Force—were not software developers seeking better developer tools. They were, as Levtov astutely noted, business users grappling with complex, real-world business problems. Their needs were not about code efficiency but about strategic intelligence and operational resilience.

And this is precisely where Levtov believes his own non-technical background provided a distinct advantage. While a non-technical founder may struggle to evaluate code or engineering talent with the same discerning eye as a technical counterpart, they often possess superior strengths in other critical areas. These include an innate ability to deeply understand customer needs, exceptional skills in managing people, a honed capability for fundraising, and a natural talent for building strategic relationships and forging impactful deals. Their focus is often externally oriented, towards the market and its problems, rather than solely on internal technical execution.

The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence are further complicating and enriching this long-standing debate. With the proliferation of no-code and low-code platforms, software can increasingly be built without the need for traditional, deep coding expertise. However, Levtov stops short of proclaiming that technical founders are becoming obsolete. He recognizes the nuances.

“It really just takes both. It takes both sides,” he concluded, emphasizing the synergistic power of complementary skills. “I think if you can have a technical founder and a non-technical founder, you’re probably in the ideal spot.” This ideal co-founder dynamic allows a company to benefit from both deep technical insight and robust business acumen.

Technical founders may indeed hold a significant edge at the very earliest stages of a company’s life, when rapid prototyping and core product development are paramount. However, as companies mature and begin to scale, the balance of essential skills can shift considerably, moving towards competencies like strategic hiring, effective selling, astute market positioning, and complex dealmaking.

At different junctures in a company’s evolutionary journey, he observed, “it’s really about the tech right now,” while at other crucial phases, “it’s all about the dealmaking, or all about the positioning, or the marketing.” Levtov’s story is a powerful reminder that while code is the foundation, a compelling vision, market understanding, and relentless leadership are equally, if not more, critical ingredients for building a successful software company, even for someone who has never written a single line of code.

Related Crunchbase query:

Related reading:

Illustration: Dom Guzman

Stay up to date with recent funding rounds, acquisitions, and more with the Crunchbase Daily.