Which one of these have the highest odds of success?

Great question! I think at the start a better understanding of sales will lead to success quicker.

However, in the long term, if the product is highly technical, it will be difficult and expensive to continue.

If both have the same business idea, the sales/marketing person has a higher chance of success, assuming the the sales person can get the idea implemented and the developer can find some marketing person. It is not too difficult to improve the tech, but it is much harder to find a competent sales person for your business.

A startup always needs a sales or marketing guy to start.

simply because 'bullshit' is a skill that is not for everyone :)

But a developer is a safer way to riches because there are more available paths..

This is the same argument in corporate ladder. The ones move up usually aren't the technical guy. It's usually the guys who figured they exhausted their technical talents and needs to explore elsewhere.

I am the rare technical guy who just want to expand beyond my ability but that's very rare.

It's a guess due to having no data, but I'd bet on #2.

I'm guessing success is defined by success as an entrepreneur. And IMHO the failure modes here are more to do with building something nobody wants, or building something that doesn't address a large enough painpoint, and therefore cannot be monetized effectively. It's about building the RIGHT thing... and all things being equal, a person in sales/marketing may have more of a customer focus and not a product focus, and this is a stronger starting point.

This isn't to say many developers won't be wildly successful - they may have incredible customer insight, may have incredible focus on customer problems, etc.

But all things being equal, I'd bet on #2 in a vacuum. 99% of businesses won't involve tech that will make or break the company. Products can be built... its about building the right product.

Salesperson. I am a developer myself and had to learn the hard way that just dev skills will not get me far by myself. I have known plenty of developers with good ideas that would not get to release anything because they didn't know how to even create analytics and convert them into more sales. And plenty of Salespeople that have sh#te ideas that would make them plenty of money just because they know how to market their product (even if they don't have any of it ready to begin with). Nevertheless, if you have both... You have the winner combo

Sales person.

They don't need each other. A salesperson can leverage countless affiliate opportunities. Find some people and sell them what they want with a commission. On the other hand a developer without sales skills wouldn't bother to develop a affiliation program for their product. Even if they do they couldn't find a way to get noticed by marketers.

Not sure which persona is more likely to succeed. I however believe it's easier for a technical person to adopt sales/marketing skills than than vice versa.
There are obviously personality issues and natural tendencies that factor into how easy/successful one can be while playing either role. For example, a developer who is naturally introverted and is comfortable spending large blocks of time coding by himself/herself may find it difficult to engage in the day-to-day people-interaction (written or spoken) that a sales or marketing person has to be involved with. I'm sure it works the other way as well.

Okay, let me roll out the first hand grenade - this isn't even close - the marketer with no technical skills has a massively higher advantage here. Marketing is communicating, and being able to communicate with a TAM about an idea for a problem solution they face gets you to PMF faster, and farther before a line of code is ever written. A marketer can build expectation, generate an interested user base, create a launch and growth plan etc. to get the solution poised to go out the door better. Lots of devs build the base level solution in a vacuum and even if its great they wait until they are finished to begin the marketing (which should have started before anything). I could go on and on, and you can certainly find some dev here who is at 10k MRR who will argue against it even as that dev is unaware they could have been at 50k MRR with the right marketing partner from day one. Devs get caught in their own "tweak and feature" loop when left in a vacuum until they punch themselves out with magical thinking, waiting for magical virality.

You want success? Use indie hackers like "Tinder for devs" looking to go on a date with a SaaS marketer. Expect the date to be awkward as the ones and zeros person tries to find common ground with the message and positioning driven person but all you need is a common language so you are on the same page, you don't need or want massive overlap.

I am thinking the latter would be easier to start with

I don't know tbh I feel like person 1 would say person 2 and person 2 would say person 1.

For me I'm definitely more of a person 1 (obviously it's a spectrum) so I'm always thinking if the marketing and sales side was as easy as the developer side all my products would be $1b businesses (exaggerating obviously).

But can see from the other side how having no technical skills would make actually building a quality product difficult and extremely frustrating because you either have to fork out $$$$$$ for learn and try and hack to gether a sub par product.

Sales always man, that skill is in demand since beggining of times!

I vote for option 2) for sure. I am option number 1) so you can trust me I know how hard it can be.

I don't know about #2. As a developer you can succeed without any sales or marketing skills if you know how to innovate.

Interesting point that you put marketing and sales together, where often people have only one of these skills.
If you want to create a successful startup you will also need skill 3, 4 and 5. That's why I favor 1: (deep) tech is hard to learn on the fly, and everything else has to be learned and is at least possible to learn when required.