The codebase affects the overall outcome of a business venture built on it in the same manner that the car affects the overall outcome of a drive. The more spe

The codebase affects the overall outcome of a business venture built on it in the same manner that the car affects the overall outcome of a drive. The more specific an outcome you're looking for the more factors you'll have to consider. You can loosely think of the relationship between code and companies like the code is "the matrix" and the tangible business world is "the real world". It might help to think of the code as a child being raised in the matrix. The first product market fit stage is the hardest. Here it befits the code to be maximally extensible such that you can most effectively steer it around the market landscape and most effectively capitalize on any discoveries made. But you also need it to work decently enough to have traction. This stage is like parenting a baby that needs to decide its life mission and begin it during the first few years of its life. Its main purpose is self-discovery, but also it needs to be set up to become whatever it discovers it wants to be. Here, luck is the main name of the game. The next stage is growth (farming the land you've staked, becoming the thing you've decided your codebase baby's life is about). Here you need less extensibility and more fidelity. You're clear on what your code needs to do, and you just need to make sure you do it well enough to last long term. But also things get more complicated at the org level. Now a team has to be built out. The codebase must now mature, and that means that it must gain a firmer grasp on its purpose (high fidelity architecture and infrastructure) and learn to interface with the world (be geared towards long-term maintainability). After you exit that stage, you exit the startup stage entirely. Generally, if you're a businessperson and it's available to you, having good engineers (human communication skills above technical skills, understand the holistic function of engineering within the context of the rest of the company) is the best solve to this problem. They will have the vision to assess the field and the communication skills to inform you about it. You will feel the urge to carve the unpredictability of the outcome down with measurements, metrics, and calculations but this is mostly a fool's errand. If you're doing something brand new there is no defined path and it is about pathfinding, not measuring your performance along a path. There are a ton of resources that all give opinion on the best way through this beginning patch of woods, but the true reality is that at the end of the day, getting through woods that no one has ever gotten through is something that can only be mapped in hindsight.