Agreed, but I would say it isn't necessarily tautological. I think there are lots of people out there who think that if you want to develop software faster you

Agreed, but I would say it isn't necessarily tautological. I think there are lots of people out there who think that if you want to develop software faster you cut corners on things like testing (to be clear I'm not endorsing TDD, just saying having a reasonable number of tests beats the hell out of none), choosing a dynamically typed language vs a statically typed one, and just generally throwing code over the fence for the sake of moving fast. I think it's true that you will in fact move faster over time (not even a very long time, just like a few months) if you stick to whatever good principles you would have stuck to if you didn't have the time pressure of shipping while at a startup. My read was that this was intentionally vague since it's basically trying to say to the reader that whatever you think is a good idea too do while developing software at a non-startup is also a good idea to do at a startup. If the reader has bad ideas about developing software then clearly there's no helping them :P