As a counterpoint, I interned at Jane Street about a decade ago—when they were much smaller than now—and they also built everything in-house. I'm not just talki

As a counterpoint, I interned at Jane Street about a decade ago—when they were much smaller than now—and they also built everything in-house. I'm not just talking about the trading/finance-specific systems (I didn't interact with those as an intern), but general-purpose internal tools: a code review system, a pub-sub system, custom binary and text protocols, lots of developer tooling, their own build system, their own standard library and async runtime... All with <100 developers total. And you know what? It worked amazingly well. I'm not just talking about scale, but also about how much any single developer seemed to be able to do. Their tools and APIs were tastefully designed, tailored to their own needs and fit together remarkably well. I remember that they were consistently building things with just one or a handful of people that would have taken multiple teams at other organizations I've seen. Looking back, that was a remarkably productive engineering environment because of how much they were willing to do themselves. The key insight is that building something for yourself is qualitatively different from building something for external consumption or using something general-purpose that already exists. You naturally tailor the code and tools to what you need, which is much easier than building something for what you think other people might need—and, surprisingly often, easier than bending a different tool to your own ends. But, perhaps more importantly, you develop a shared mental model of the system you're developing and how it fits in with everything else that you are doing. That shared mental model is, ultimately, worth far more than the code by itself... but it isn't legible to management, so it's hard to foster and preserve without a strong engineering culture backing it up. The other lesson I took away from that experience (and others!) is that the high-level questions people focus on ("buy vs build", "monorepo vs polyrepo"... etc) are nowhere near determinative. Whether or not any given approach works out comes down far more to the little details and nuances of what you're doing and how you're doing it, as well as a healthy dollop of circumstances beyond your immediate control. At the end of the day, if everything else was the same, but the startup you're talking about was using perfectly standard and popular tools, would you expect the outcome to be any different? I've seen far too many Enterprise-grade trash-fires to believe that. If the core dynamics that led to a mess don't change, you can have a "not invented here" mess or an "Enterprise Best Practices" mess or a "buy everything, build nothing" mess—but there's no simple strategic direction that won't get you some kind of mess.