Lessons of a startup engineer - Todd Wolfson

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2021-07-08 20:00:08

After recently returning to work, it has become clear that knowledge I've picked up over the years, isn't knowledge shared by my similarly aged yet new to startup peers. For reference, here's my LinkedIn profile.

e.g. 1 person at a 3 person startup is 1/3 the company, whereas at a 10,000 person company it's 1/10,000 (handwaving over hierarchy details).

In practice, this most frequently cascades from a person's forward velocity being interrupted, into team and company velocity being impacted.

Scenario (Underdog.io): You launched by using a Google Forms to intake customers and manage everything via email. Once a month, 2 users try to sign-up concurrently which leads to an error page. What do you do?

a. Focus time elsewhere - People will try again and it's infrequent enough b. Revisit when it's once a day - It's painful and upsetting but we can tolerate it for a little longer c. Unacceptable - Move to a formal database like PostgreSQL d. Something else

What we did: We weighed out the options (e.g. time/effort vs value) and decided to go with (c) Move to a formal database. We wanted a stellar experience for our users and treating them poorly wasn't inline with that.

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