This hurts.

Stay small and build knowledge. Spend very little and do projects until you have a great team and you know a lot and no funding problems before you try to catch the big fish.

Fuck VC culture. It kills your business

Hits way close to home

But as the “founding engineer” from this story, I made a lot of product level calls to avoid the layering of “urgent easy features” that would cost x100 in support down the road.

I also heavily protected my team against crunch and was the only one affected on the rare occasions it was required.

Learning how to say no constructively is a core engineering skill in startups.