There is something called "Mandukya Upanishads" which explain the four stages of AUM_, which some chant during meditation. I found the explanations of these concepts by a monk named "Sarvapriyananda" very useful. Search his name and the word "mandukya" on youtube for the explanation of what these four stages are.

For this very reason sometime back I created a slack group(https://tinyurl.com/tefogroup) for technical founders and aspiring technical founders to meetup online, try some projects together, get to know each other and seek advice from other experienced founders before actually doing a startup. It helps in the long run if the relationship is built organically.

There is also "Negative Income Tax" policy that tries to solve the same problem that Universal Basic Income is trying to solve.

Isn't that a very small sample to decide whether there is a demand for the project?

If the startups are just CRUD apps then are those defensible businesses? As per my understanding most successful software businesses have something in their tech stack that cannot be easily replicated.

Technology is not the only “moat” there is. A photo sharing app is ultimately CRUD but it’s pretty hard to take down Instagram.

maybe another way of framing it is that not all startups are software businesses, maybe they provide some other service that just happens to depend upon some software, and perhaps a bunch of other things

It's not true.

Think of Dropbox or Instagram or even Amazon

What's there which technologically can't be replicated given enough money?

It's the userbase/network effect which can't be reflected if given

But they all had technical founders/co-founders? Thats what I think OP's question was related to?