Chapter I

Note from a Founder

Most of the difficulty in building something is not the building. It is deciding what the thing is, while everyone waits, with too little information and no way back.

The name is codeyevsky, a joke about Dostoevsky that never got retired. It has proved more accurate than intended: his subject was motive, and motive is most of what founding work turns out to be about. Code is the easy half. The hard half is knowing which problem deserves the next six months.

Software is where that judgement gets tested quickly. A system either holds under load or it does not, and conviction has no vote. That is the appeal. It argues back, and it wins whenever it is right.

What matters in a team, then, is a hard problem and people who disagree well. Title, stack and city have all turned out to be negotiable.

As co-founder and CTO of two companies, an Emergent Ventures grantee, and six years into the work, I can say coding was never the job. Solving problems was.