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This is good advice. Tech doesn't really matter. Yes, things will suck. But don't introduce complexity until you're absolutely sure it needs to be or that it wi

• danjac 6y ago
  I've worked/consulted at quite a few places where the code quality ranged from mediocre to abysmal. These companies were launched pretty much by people with an "X for Idiots" book on their lap or who hired their teenage nephew/best mate from college to do the coding. And yet, these companies did quite well, became quite successful and profitable businesses in their niche - and when they did hit the hard limits of technical debt, they had the money to hire professionals. Unfortunately there are limits to what professionals can do with just-about-working spaghetti code and bizarre database schemas, when you can't just throw away and rewrite software that's powering a growing business that needs more new features than it needs a cleaner codebase, but nonetheless they got much further than many SaaS companies started by developers with well thought out architecture, beautiful code and the latest tech stack. The reason they were successful is that the founders lived and breathed their niche and understood the problems and their customers. They saw opportunities as well as risks and blind alleys. The tech was just a means to that end, not the end in of itself. That said, before people say "the tech doesn't matter", I think that had they the technical skills to match their domain knowledge and connections, they would have been far more successful and would not have hit those hard limits that slowed them down and perhaps prevented them from expanding further and seizing on new opportunities. It's interesting that some of the real "unicorns" of the last few decades have had founders/leaders with strong technical chops - your Gates and Zuckerbergs. They might not have been the best in their field, but they had that relatively rare combo of technical ability and business sense.