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.9 is an angel investor. They say they like to be the first money in. Many of the things on this checklist shouldn't even be on your radar until after seed or s

.9 is an angel investor. They say they like to be the first money in. Many of the things on this checklist shouldn't even be on your radar until after seed or series a. Paying thousands of dollars for employees to attend conferences, hiring a chief product officer, thinking about scaling by x100000, worrying about multi cloud, avoiding vendor lock in, unit test coverage, one click deploys...and the list goes on. This is textbook over engineering and the HN crowd is very vulnerable to it. Pre-angel funding you should take every hack and shortcut you can to get something into your users hands. Please ignore this checklist. It is really bad advice. (source: 2 time founder, over $16M raised from VC. I have made many of these mistakes.)

marcinzm 7y ago
Yeah, some of these are really weird. Vendor lock-in, with established long term vendors, is such a tiny risk at this stage that putting effort into avoiding it is going to cost you signification more business wise. Especially odd when there's a whole bunch of other questions noting that building things yourself is not worth it at this stage. Daily 1on1s seem like a massive waste of time and focus that it seems insane to suggest them. If something comes up then your door should be open but expecting things to change day to day seems like you've got much bigger problems.
- Negitivefrags 7y ago
  I disagree so much about the daily 1on1s. You don’t need to pull people from their desk. Just walk around the room and if nothing has changed you will have the following conversation. CTO: Hey, what’s up? Developer: Nothing much, still working on X feature. It’s going okay. CTO: Cool, thanks a lot. It wastes no time at all. Except that quite a lot of the time one of two things can have occurred: 1) The developer is stuck on something but they don’t want to ask because most people would rather struggle for a while first. By asking “What’s up” they will usually volunteer this without it sounding like they need to ask for help and then you can discuss it and usually resolve it or know who they should talk to to resolve it. 2) The developer has gotten distracted by something that seems important to them. If it’s actually important then it’s much better that you know about it rather than not know, and if it’s not then it’s much better that you guide them back to working on what is important before they waste too much time. Seriously, I have gone through periods of doing and not doing this, and the whole organisation moves so much quicker when doing it. Also, if you have to tell everyone something, you will find that telling every single person individually works so much better than telling everyone that thing as a group. When you tell a group of people something nobody in the group will actually hear and understand it. One on one they will ask you a question if they don’t understand but in a group they almost never will. So if there is anything to tell people just walk around and tell each person one by one during this daily process. Zero “Meetings”, daily 1on1s is what it’s all about.
  - AstroJetson 7y ago
    This is known as "Management by Walking Around" My best manager did this. He'd wander by, and ask how it was going. Some days he'd say "tell me one good thing, one bad thing." At least once a day you got face time with him, and once you learned that, you could use it to your advantage. Sometimes I sit in on the daily meeting and don't learn anything, but MBWA, I often get some insight to issues that are going on.
- ma2rten 7y ago
  I think they meant 1:1s with different people, not meeting everyone on your team every day.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  Leading a five person team and going to lunch with a different person every day effectively means that you do 1-on-1 daily (and they get 1-on-1 weekly) with barely any focus overhead.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    I enjoy lunching without my co-workers, much less my boss. I need a bit of me time in the middle of the day.
haolez 7y ago
I think that the best way to read this is that you may lose some points here and there and still get a good score. It’s not an all or nothing scenario. I think this is useful advice and I’ll try to adhere to some of its points in my next startup.
- ivalm 7y ago
  Yup, I got 235 while missing a lot of the expensive "desired" questions.
mattmanser 7y ago
Odd you put one click deploys in there though. It's quite trivial to get setup yourself, even if you are running your own servers/VMs and saves a ton of time (although I prefer it to be a couple of clicks). And once you have it for one project, you can usually adapt the script or process for others.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ben_jones 7y ago
  The problem is you have to maintain it as your infrastructure goes. Pretty soon you should be setting up a staging and test environment, and then you have to deal with segmenting data between environments and it kind of spirals from there. As a general rule of thumb you need to be really cautious not just of the initial work to implement something, but the medium term operational overhead which 1-click deploys falls into. That said I still support 1-click deploys early on. It's just not so easy as adding a githook to trigger a script.
codingdave 7y ago
You are correct. This isn't good founder advice. Or PO advice, or dev advice, etc. But to be fair, it is their money - if they want to decide on investments based on these criteria, that is their business. And they did say they are willing to accept critique of where they are wrong. They also said that this isn't truly part of their due diligence, nor should results be taken seriously.
shapiro92 7y ago
.9 is by far not an early stage investor. German VCs have a very weird notion about what is early stage.

marcinzm 7y ago

Yeah, some of these are really weird. Vendor lock-in, with established long term vendors, is such a tiny risk at this stage that putting effort into avoiding it is going to cost you signification more business wise. Especially odd when there's a whole bunch of other questions noting that building things yourself is not worth it at this stage. Daily 1on1s seem like a massive waste of time and focus that it seems insane to suggest them. If something comes up then your door should be open but expecting things to change day to day seems like you've got much bigger problems.

Negitivefrags 7y ago
I disagree so much about the daily 1on1s. You don’t need to pull people from their desk. Just walk around the room and if nothing has changed you will have the following conversation. CTO: Hey, what’s up? Developer: Nothing much, still working on X feature. It’s going okay. CTO: Cool, thanks a lot. It wastes no time at all. Except that quite a lot of the time one of two things can have occurred: 1) The developer is stuck on something but they don’t want to ask because most people would rather struggle for a while first. By asking “What’s up” they will usually volunteer this without it sounding like they need to ask for help and then you can discuss it and usually resolve it or know who they should talk to to resolve it. 2) The developer has gotten distracted by something that seems important to them. If it’s actually important then it’s much better that you know about it rather than not know, and if it’s not then it’s much better that you guide them back to working on what is important before they waste too much time. Seriously, I have gone through periods of doing and not doing this, and the whole organisation moves so much quicker when doing it. Also, if you have to tell everyone something, you will find that telling every single person individually works so much better than telling everyone that thing as a group. When you tell a group of people something nobody in the group will actually hear and understand it. One on one they will ask you a question if they don’t understand but in a group they almost never will. So if there is anything to tell people just walk around and tell each person one by one during this daily process. Zero “Meetings”, daily 1on1s is what it’s all about.
- AstroJetson 7y ago
  This is known as "Management by Walking Around" My best manager did this. He'd wander by, and ask how it was going. Some days he'd say "tell me one good thing, one bad thing." At least once a day you got face time with him, and once you learned that, you could use it to your advantage. Sometimes I sit in on the daily meeting and don't learn anything, but MBWA, I often get some insight to issues that are going on.
ma2rten 7y ago
I think they meant 1:1s with different people, not meeting everyone on your team every day.
PeterisP 7y ago
Leading a five person team and going to lunch with a different person every day effectively means that you do 1-on-1 daily (and they get 1-on-1 weekly) with barely any focus overhead.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  I enjoy lunching without my co-workers, much less my boss. I need a bit of me time in the middle of the day.

haolez 7y ago

I think that the best way to read this is that you may lose some points here and there and still get a good score. It’s not an all or nothing scenario. I think this is useful advice and I’ll try to adhere to some of its points in my next startup.

ivalm 7y ago
Yup, I got 235 while missing a lot of the expensive "desired" questions.

mattmanser 7y ago

Odd you put one click deploys in there though. It's quite trivial to get setup yourself, even if you are running your own servers/VMs and saves a ton of time (although I prefer it to be a couple of clicks). And once you have it for one project, you can usually adapt the script or process for others.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ben_jones 7y ago
The problem is you have to maintain it as your infrastructure goes. Pretty soon you should be setting up a staging and test environment, and then you have to deal with segmenting data between environments and it kind of spirals from there. As a general rule of thumb you need to be really cautious not just of the initial work to implement something, but the medium term operational overhead which 1-click deploys falls into. That said I still support 1-click deploys early on. It's just not so easy as adding a githook to trigger a script.

codingdave 7y ago

You are correct. This isn't good founder advice. Or PO advice, or dev advice, etc. But to be fair, it is their money - if they want to decide on investments based on these criteria, that is their business. And they did say they are willing to accept critique of where they are wrong. They also said that this isn't truly part of their due diligence, nor should results be taken seriously.

shapiro92 7y ago

.9 is by far not an early stage investor. German VCs have a very weird notion about what is early stage.