I built my second startup without writing code

I started my first startup at 56. Innowayt, co-founded with Vikas Khanduri in 2017, bootstrapped, connecting travel businesses across 38 countries. We exited in March 2024. NAMA is my second startup, and it is different in one way I did not expect: this time, I cannot code, and it does not stop me.

AI writes the code. I supply the judgment. Day to day, that looks like this: I describe a problem from the business side, in the language of travel, not technology. What comes back gets reviewed not as a coder reviews it, but as a customer who knows exactly what correct looks like.

That turns out to be the scarce skill. The bottleneck in building software was never typing speed. It is knowing what to build, and being able to say precisely why a thing is wrong. A travel quote has a hundred places to be quietly wrong: the wrong season's rate, a markup applied twice, a hotel name that does not match its voucher. I can catch those. That is my job now.

It is not magic, and I want to be honest about the limits. It does not know the customer. It does not feel the difference between a mistake that is awkward and one that costs someone a holiday. That judgment is still my job, on every single deploy.

Second startup, new toolchain, same job as the last thirty-one years: know your domain better than anyone else in the room.