I'll let you in on a dirty little secret. While you find amazing brains at startups, most of those guys spend 80%+ of their time writing non-sexy code. As suc

I'll let you in on a dirty little secret. While you find amazing brains at startups, most of those guys spend 80%+ of their time writing non-sexy code. As such, most startups are looking for people that can crank out well organized, simple code, with outstanding test coverage and thorough documentation. The number of man-hours that are dedicated to the fancy stuff you read about on HN is a very small percentage of the work that's being done. And, unless you are brought in for your very specific expertise (which doesn't sound like it's the case), you won't be getting to do the fancy stuff anyway; though, you'll probably get an opportunity to learn from those who are. Get a lot of sleep, make sure you keep in mind that they are looking for someone who can work within a distributed code base and practice explaining your thinking related to why you decided to do one thing over another. If you do that, you'll be fine.