(2013-07-21) Dewalt Every Entrepreneur Should Learn To Code

Kevin Dewalt thinks Every Entrepreneur Should be Learning Programming. *I started programming computers when I was 12 years-old, more than 30 years ago. Unfortunately for most of my career I didn’t do much programming except for hobby Side Project-s.... When I started my first company in 1999 I raised Venture Funding and hired programmers – I never wrote a single line of code and would have never dreamed I’d be writing software in my 40s. In retrospect, this was a big mistake – I wish I had always kept coding. Fortunately in 2008 I started coding again and plan on doing it forever. Here are some reasons why.

Software is involved in almost every aspect of working at a Start Up. Good luck developing a Growth Hacking marketing strategy without knowing how APIs work. Product teams communicate through software like GitHub. Sales itself is now largely done by software or people powering software. Services like StripeCom are changing how product companies talk and think about accounting and billing. Even HR will become software driven as startups increasingly become virtual and global. The trend is unmistakable: unless you understand how all this stuff works it becomes increasingly hard to work at – much less found – a startup.

I’ve been mostly building the So Helpful MVP myself these past few months – even though I could hire a team to help me... I can take vague concepts gathered from a few months of Customer Development discussions and pull them into a feature without having to communicate to other people what I want. Looking at the code I can see what is – and isn’t easy to build quickly. I see ways to hack things temporarily to see if they are really needed. I get inspiration from the code – seeing things work helps me discover better features I hadn’t considered... The product may be built slower, but the Customer Discovery happens faster.

If you have the passion to be entrepreneur, you will always be making new things. Always... Start learning today and building products will start to look like an opportunity instead of a challenge... There will NEVER be enough programmers because our imagination outstrips our ability to execute. You’ll enjoy entrepreneurship a lot more if you can build stuff without having to look for one every time you’re inspired.

You don’t have to be great – or even good – at it. *

He responds to a commenter who thinks a Founding Team makes more sense with: Go find a few non-coding “creatives” – to use your term – and ask about their search for a technical CoFounder. You’ll hear stories like, “that mythical person doesn’t exist – I looked for 3 months.” It turns out that almost everyone you want as a tech co-founder – and this is NOT usually someone whose job is a “programmer” at a bigger company – wants to do their own startup. They have their own creative ideas and they’re – understandably – more excited about working on them. So unfortunately people who don’t have some general programming skills are being left out of the conversation.