Seeking advice from programmers for non-programmers
mdakin: Your choice of the word "cog" to represent a programmer and "gear" to represent a team indicates you might be internally (to your mind) objectifying the people involved with your potential projects.  I could see such an internal objectification causing various problems with your interactions with the "cogs/gear" in various ways during a project.  You can quickly lose someone's respect if he learns that you think of him as a replaceable part of a soulless machine.A problem for "business types" is that they are trained to think of people as "human resources."  This is probably a bad idea on any scale of team/organization.  But it's an absolutely horrible idea w.r.t. the small-scale teams of which startup companies are made.