This is interesting advice because every company I've come across that has been successful enough to get past the early startup phase has by and large ignored all of this.
The companies I've seen succeed were 100% focused on shipping their product to customers. Not 90% focused on customers and 10% focused on code quality, but 100% focused. They'd rather have to spend 30 engineer-days a few years from now fixing an issue if they get to that point than spend 3 hours getting it right upfront.
As an engineer that goes against every instinct I have, it really seems like spending a couple hours upfront must be a better use of time. It seems like it should be possible to spend 10% of your time setting yourself up well for the future, that's still just a rounding error of your time. And then if you do survive another few years, you'll have a huge leg up on other series B or C stage competitors if you're not hindered by a lot of tech debt at that point.
But from a capitalist perspective, it's probably not so crazy. If you are working with a $200,000 seed round in the beginning, and an engineer costs $80,000 a year, 3 hours of their time costs $115 which is 0.06% of your funds. And more importantly, that $200k is maybe enough for a year of runway, so 3 hours is 0.14% of the time you have to live given a 40-hour a week year (or 0.07% of an 80 hour a week year). Every bit of that starts to add up. Whereas by the time you're a later-stage company and you've raised, say, $40 million dollars and are paying engineers $150k, 30 engineer-days of work is $17,300 but that's only 0.04% of the money you've raised plus your runway is now approaching infinity if you're close to profitable.
I'm still kind of playing devil's advocate here, my instinct really wants to believe that a better balance than what I've seen is possible. One huge missing factor is that people have a strong tendency to ignore spread out costs like the time wasted fixing bugs that pop up later whereas the upfront cost of writing a bunch of tests is more visible. But it has been interesting for me to consider that maybe most founders really are acting pretty reasonably, even though it originally seems pretty careless and lazy to let your startup build up a ton of tech debt early on.
Engineering is a multiplier in this case - so early investments, not necessarily in code beauty, but in picking the right architecture for the job, pays back compounding dividends and reduces funding needed. Whatsapp had a handful of engineers able to handle millions of users. Funding is not promised, its debt. Use every lever you've got and you'll need less of it.
There are compounding gains from making "the right choice all else equal." This is one of those semi-mythical 10x engineer super-powers. Or it might just be experience. But technical choices need to be made and making slightly better ones will pay off even in the short term. The technical changes should just optimize for rapid change rather than stability or scale.
The companies I've seen succeed were 100% focused on shipping their product to customers. Not 90% focused on customers and 10% focused on code quality, but 100% focused. They'd rather have to spend 30 engineer-days a few years from now fixing an issue if they get to that point than spend 3 hours getting it right upfront.
As an engineer that goes against every instinct I have, it really seems like spending a couple hours upfront must be a better use of time. It seems like it should be possible to spend 10% of your time setting yourself up well for the future, that's still just a rounding error of your time. And then if you do survive another few years, you'll have a huge leg up on other series B or C stage competitors if you're not hindered by a lot of tech debt at that point.
But from a capitalist perspective, it's probably not so crazy. If you are working with a $200,000 seed round in the beginning, and an engineer costs $80,000 a year, 3 hours of their time costs $115 which is 0.06% of your funds. And more importantly, that $200k is maybe enough for a year of runway, so 3 hours is 0.14% of the time you have to live given a 40-hour a week year (or 0.07% of an 80 hour a week year). Every bit of that starts to add up. Whereas by the time you're a later-stage company and you've raised, say, $40 million dollars and are paying engineers $150k, 30 engineer-days of work is $17,300 but that's only 0.04% of the money you've raised plus your runway is now approaching infinity if you're close to profitable.
I'm still kind of playing devil's advocate here, my instinct really wants to believe that a better balance than what I've seen is possible. One huge missing factor is that people have a strong tendency to ignore spread out costs like the time wasted fixing bugs that pop up later whereas the upfront cost of writing a bunch of tests is more visible. But it has been interesting for me to consider that maybe most founders really are acting pretty reasonably, even though it originally seems pretty careless and lazy to let your startup build up a ton of tech debt early on.