Working as a developer reveals the spectrum between sloppy work and over-engineered "gold plating." Learning to judge the appropriate level of quality based on context (e.g., five internal users vs. 10,000 public users) is a vital skill for founders operating with finite time and resources.
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A "10x developer" isn't just a brilliant coder but a skilled person in an environment with zero organizational friction. By giving them total ownership, clarity, and trust to make decisions, you remove the blockers that bog down average developers in large companies, unlocking 10x productivity.
Before hiring for a critical function, founders should do the job themselves, even if they aren't experts. The goal isn't mastery, but to deeply understand the role's challenges. This experience is crucial for setting a high hiring bar and being able to accurately assess if a candidate will truly up-level the team.
For a founder coding their own product, every minute spent trying a new, unproven tool is a direct opportunity cost against shipping features. This contrasts with developers in larger companies who may have downtime to experiment as a hobby or part of their job.
Since startups lack infinite time and money, an investor's key diligence question is whether the team can learn and iterate fast enough to find a valuable solution before resources run out. This 'learning velocity' is more important than initial traction or a perfect starting plan.
A critical career inflection point is moving from solely executing tasks (writing code) to influencing strategic decisions about what problems to solve. True value and impact come from being in the room where decisions are made, not just being the person who implements them.
Building your own product forces you to confront technical realities like database migrations and architectural trade-offs. This firsthand experience provides deep empathy for engineering challenges, which in turn builds crucial credibility and improves collaboration with development teams.
In fast-paced environments like AI, the opportunity cost of lengthy internal debates over good-enough options is enormous. A founder mindset prioritizes rapid execution and learning over achieving perfect consensus, creating a significant competitive advantage through speed.
A teenage job as a courier with vague instructions and no GPS taught the host to problem-solve without escalating every issue. This directly mirrors the founder's reality of needing to make progress without perfect clarity, treating it as a feature, not a bug, of the role.
A technical CEO shouldn't ship production code. Their most effective use of coding skills is to build quick demos. This proves a feature's feasibility and can effectively challenge engineering estimates, demonstrating that a project can be completed faster than originally projected.
Non-technical creators using AI coding tools often fail due to unrealistic expectations of instant success. The key is a mindset shift: understanding that building quality software is an iterative process of prompting, testing, and debugging, not a one-shot command that works in five prompts.
