scottndecker

Turn off all social media and organize around shared beliefs/interests

This was foreseeable. We all know it. We all know why. Yet we fail to do anything about it.

Why isn't this a thing on Amazon I can buy?

SDLC is totally different than even 12 months ago. AI reading meeting transcripts, generating user stories/requirements, generating questions, generating engineering/architecture solutions, writing code and creating PRs.

Those changes have allowed us to operate with a team of about 6-9 engineers producing like a team of twice that 5 years ago.

Interesting. Pretty much none of that is true for us. We had achieved strong enough success that were past the stage VCs want to participate in a first round. Partnering with the PE firm gives us a war chest to land grab while the turf is being claimed in our space.

Eisenhower box is immensely helpful. Some amount of intuition. Unblocking the team is always important and urgent.

Staying up to date is hard. HN, LI, the Rundown email, and a private tech execs group on WhatsApp are primary sources.

Great question. That's not been our experience. Right now, we're in growth mode. Hire hire hire. Go faster.

Are we watching product margin and taking action to maximize it? Absolutely. But that's all revolved around technical steps (LLM token caching for example). Our current Product and Engineering headcount is only around 15 so we're already lean. We need to hire more, but we're keeping the bar high. I have no goal for bloating an engineering team just to make it look like we're doing the right thing (hiring). Every hire has to add immense value.

We're living in a time where success as a small team doesn't have to mean the team growing to be so big it's not fun anymore. The best cultures I've been a part of have always revolved around highly skilled small team of people that work their tails off and depend on each other.

Employees have stock options, not stock. Those options are now worth more. Probably can't share too much more detail than that on financial specifics.

Came to us. Some of our founders had previous success and were funding out of their own pocket. We had just turned profitable, but PE money allows a different velocity which we wanted. So when they approached us looking for a solution in our space, we took the meeting. One thing led to another.

Started by a team of 3 three years ago. I knew one of them from my time spent in grad school and living in NH. I joined a year after it formed but before it really took off. Founder #5 type of situation. Significant equity but can't claim I was there from day 0.

Ha, no. Southwest, boarding group 5.

If everyone turned off their lights 100% of the time they left their workstation, they could power those additional data centers for about one second.