When I was 16, I knew how to code, but honestly, I had no idea why I'd ever need to in starting a publication. There were far too many Wordpress templates out there, and plus, it's not like I was starting a tech company ...
But I couldn't be more wrong. These days, every company is a "tech company." I quickly realized that knowing HTML and CSS (and later picking up PHP) allowed me to fix features on-demand instead of hiring developers externally.
Mahbod Maghadam, a cofounder of the popular song annotation site, Genius, and Everipedia, a blockchain-based digital encyclopedia, knows this well. He told me, "Building a startup where the CEO is not technical is a recipe for disaster; both Everipedia and Genius are led by my nerd-genius friends, Sam and Tom. That is how you build a unicorn — there is no other way."
Being technical continues to be an advantage today. The idea is that the founding team should understand product on a deep level, enough to communicate effectively with users and investors, and also fix issues themselves as they arise. And engineers are expensive to hire, so if you know how to code, you'll often save a lot of capital critical to early-stage growth.