Half a Semester
You don't have to feel qualified to become capable.
A note to the KOHO team · Published alongside the CTO announcement · August 17, 2026
You don’t have to feel qualified to become capable.
I have half a semester of computer science to my name.
That’s the entire formal education behind the new title. One partial semester, twenty-some years ago, and then a long trail of books, screencasts, library chairs, and nights at a terminal, teaching myself what school never got the chance to. I was a kid obsessed with computers. Everything after that was motivation, hard work, determination, and curiosity, compounding quietly while nobody was issuing certificates for it.
Almost every chapter of my career was something I had never done before, usually arriving the moment the organization needed it and rarely waiting until I felt ready. I spent my early years in customer-facing engineering, shipping things people actually used and finding out immediately, in front of a customer, whether they worked. Platform engineering came next, and it turned into the one seat I never really left, because every time I thought I had settled into it, the job widened again. An infrastructure team under me owned PCI compliance from early on, so security was in the room from month one, just not yet mine to run personally. Eighteen months in, I added it to my own plate and started owning compliance directly instead of watching it from the org chart. AI came after that. I built a generative AI team from nothing and started working alongside our risk function on anti-money-laundering tooling, teaching myself the discipline at a dead run and then turning around and bringing a whole organization up to speed with me. A year later the same appetite built a classic AI and MLOps platform, real infrastructure for running models instead of ad hoc scripts. Then Data Science outright, underwriting models included, credit risk logic I had no background in either. I took all of it on. Happily, and a little terrified. That mix was the closest thing I had to a compass: if something excited me and scared me at the same time, it was probably the natural place to grow.
Here’s the part I’ve never said out loud, and the reason this is an essay instead of a two-line announcement. At no point in any of it did I believe I’d actually get here. Not to this title, not to the one before it, not to most of the rooms in between. The whole way I felt like I didn’t know enough, like I wasn’t good enough, like I was one hard question away from being found out. It was scary and I felt stupid at every step.
And the feeling was wrong every single time. Not softened by hindsight. Wrong. Feeling unqualified told me nothing about what I could learn, and it never once predicted what I could do. Capability showed up anyway, one uncomfortable stretch at a time, and it never asked how I felt first. So if I could hand one sentence to the kid in the library, and to anyone standing where he stood: you don’t have to feel qualified to become capable. Regardless of where you start. Regardless of how your brain works, or how easily any of this comes to you. Hard work, determination, people who back you, and a stubborn belief in yourself do the real lifting.
About the people who back you: for me that starts with Katie, my wife, who I met when I was seven years old. She has believed in me since long before there was a career to believe in. For years she was the only one of us who did. Every leap in this essay had her as the co-signer, and most of the gumption was hers, on loan. I don’t take those leaps without her, which makes marrying her the single best decision in this whole story.
01 · The gap that turned out to be an edge
The missing credential did a second thing, and this one took me far longer to see. For years it made me doubt my own read. I assumed the formally trained people in the room were seeing something I couldn’t, so whenever my instincts disagreed with the standard playbook, I treated mine as the error. In practice it kept going the other way. The outside perspective caught what the playbook missed, again and again, and some of the best outcomes of my career trace straight back to a call I almost talked myself out of.
I want to keep this separate from the first message, on purpose. That one says your starting point doesn’t cap you. This one says more: an unconventional path can actively pay. The gap in my résumé turned out to be an edge in my thinking, and I spent years treating the edge like a liability. If your path here was strange, your perspective is part of your value. Spend it.
02 · What I owe you
The feedback I’m proudest of after twenty years of leading engineers is about how people feel doing the work. That on my teams, people have done the best work of their careers, because they were trusted, because they knew someone had their back, because they were believed in before they’d finished proving anything. That’s the job as I understand it, and it comes from a simple place: nobody who works with me should ever have to feel the way I did. If I’ve built anything on purpose over two decades, it’s rooms where the scary stretch is safe to take.
So, KOHO team, this piece is really for you. I wrote once that a finished goal doesn’t leave a void, it leaves a blank page. A title is a finished goal too, and I can already feel its gravity pulling toward polish and protection. We’re going the other way. Certainty may never show up, for me or for you, and I’ve stopped waiting for it. Credentials are receipts for a road already travelled. Invest instead in curiosity, in growth, in the stretch assignment that scares you a little. Take the thing you’ve never done.
I’m grateful to the people who bet on me before I would have bet on myself. You know who you are. Let’s fill the page.
— DK