No: Either business-focused engineers, or enough money so that every 5 folks who aren't ("scale!" "this adds velocity!" "10% faster!") can add up to 1 developer

No: Either business-focused engineers, or enough money so that every 5 folks who aren't ("scale!" "this adds velocity!" "10% faster!") can add up to 1 developer who is. The new business is the risk-taking endeavor. The job of the team is to derisk, taking the blue-sky concept to something the market will consume. That's so hard and requires so much listening/iterating/etc. that it makes most engineering cycles not spent on meeting customers in the middle (or helping finding alternate customers/offerings) is eating the seed corn. Most startups should assume "default dead" until the $5M/yr point. There is an interesting question of how to do deep tech. ("10X cheaper spaceflight", not "Tensorflow for AIOps"). That's more capital intensive, and in turn, different kinds of business critical milestones. "We need to do X, Y, Z so we can get $5M gov contract Y and the next round." That deal does _not_ hinge on whether you've upgraded from React 3 to 4 and have a much more approachable graphql orm.