When the first thing you do is dive into code, you are dooming
yourself to either designing an unmaintainable system, or to reinvent
existing tools poorly. This may be acceptable in an academic or
research setting, but in a startup, it's downright foolish. You may be
able to deploy your system faster if you code it all yourself, but it
will be a monkey on your back for its entire lifetime.
Functionality is an asset, but code is a liability.