Why I Started Coding
No, it wasn’t because Obama urged that everyone should code. Nor was it Zuck or Gates who inspired me. It was a simple need of the hour — to take back control.
I run Tushky.com. Tushky was an online marketplace for real-world leisure experiences, backed by 500 Startups (Batch 6, 2013). We started with no CTO or a dedicated tech team. We just took the “leap of faith” without planning or thinking too much — which had its upside and its downside. When we started in September 2011, the initial understanding was that the business was tech-enabled and operations-intensive, needing only basic tech support. Over time, we realized that apart from operations, the business needed a strong tech team to build the product.
But getting developers on board turned out to be a brutal affair. Either it was too costly, or the developers acted too pricey. Made some wrong hires, who we had to fire. Made some good hires, who we had to let go due to their demands. In all, lost a lot of time and money. And in December 2013, we were back to square one with no developers on board.
That didn’t hurt me, actually. What really pinched was the fact that I felt out of control. I am an above-average product guy — maybe even better, but hey, let’s stay humble. I understand UX, feature clusters, feature needs very well. And not being able to translate those ideas into functional features just because of the whims and fancies of some developers was too much for me to digest.
The breaking point came when a developer vanished without sharing the documentation or the access keys. I cannot remember any other moment when I felt so helpless and out of control. That very moment, I decided — enough of this — and took it upon myself to code and build my product. And I cannot be happier.
I fixed a lot of long-pending bugs, improved some features, and recently built a complete new web tool for our sellers. All in 12 weeks. Wish I was smarter.
I feel much more liberated and at peace, knowing that I can handle every segment of Tushky — be it Sales, Marketing, Operations, or Tech — without any external help. And I feel this reason alone is strong enough for at least one founding member of every tech startup to learn to code. That one member can be CTO, developer, whatever. But at least one member should know how to code and build the product without depending on external factors.
I am well aware of the arguments made against this philosophy, and I cannot take more pity on those folks. The usual counter-arguments are:
- You’re a CEO, you have more important things to do
- You’re a CEO, you should delegate
- Focus on your strengths
Unless you have reached or crossed the expansion stage, you have nothing more important than controlling how the product is shaping up.
That conviction never left me. If anything, it deepened. At Zopdev, where we are building agentic cloud infrastructure, the instinct is the same: a founder who cannot read the system cannot steer it. The problems have grown more abstract — distributed systems, provisioning pipelines, AI agents managing infrastructure state — but the principle is unchanged. You have to be able to look at what the machine is doing and understand it, not just trust that it is doing something. Systems thinking is not a skill you hire for at the early stage. It is something you build into yourself, one frustrating debugging session at a time. That developer who vanished without sharing the access keys did me an accidental favor.