1. The job of an employee at a for-profit company is to create business value. This is often lost on engineers and other technically focused startup employees. Working on a project that you consider interesting or of technical merit is a waste of time if it's not creating business value.
The wrinkle here is that it's not always obvious what projects will create business value. Unfortunately, if you're not in an organization with deep pockets and a long time horizon for projects to succeed, it's almost always a better business decision to work on projects that have a direct link to creating business value.
2. Using a technology because [insert large successful company or startup here] uses it well at scale is almost always the wrong decision for a startup. What works for Google, Meta, Uber, etc. will likely not work for your startup until you reach a certain critical level of scale.
3. Headcount is vanity metric. If a company is proud that they have a large team, you should probably run. Employees cost money and employee salaries count toward OPEX vs. CAPEX. What matters is revenue per employee, but many startups are pre-revenue.
4. Scaling your organization or technical stack before you have product market fit is a waste of time. Silicon Valley history is littered with dead startups you've never heard of that burned through their runway building over-engineered systems designed to scale to meet the demand of users that never came. The same is true of startups that built out massive sales departments before they had a product that people wanted to buy.
The wrinkle here is that it's not always obvious what projects will create business value. Unfortunately, if you're not in an organization with deep pockets and a long time horizon for projects to succeed, it's almost always a better business decision to work on projects that have a direct link to creating business value.
2. Using a technology because [insert large successful company or startup here] uses it well at scale is almost always the wrong decision for a startup. What works for Google, Meta, Uber, etc. will likely not work for your startup until you reach a certain critical level of scale.
3. Headcount is vanity metric. If a company is proud that they have a large team, you should probably run. Employees cost money and employee salaries count toward OPEX vs. CAPEX. What matters is revenue per employee, but many startups are pre-revenue.
4. Scaling your organization or technical stack before you have product market fit is a waste of time. Silicon Valley history is littered with dead startups you've never heard of that burned through their runway building over-engineered systems designed to scale to meet the demand of users that never came. The same is true of startups that built out massive sales departments before they had a product that people wanted to buy.