First Tests at Seed Stage

Most seed-stage teams have either no tests or the wrong twenty. Very few have the right five. “We will add...

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AI Evals at Seed Stage: The Five to Build First

Most seed-stage teams shipping AI features do not have evals. They have hope. They have a couple of dashboards. They...

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Co-Founders Should Be Complementary, Not Equal

In 2009, seven of us co-founded a startup called Ekkli. In the year and a half we existed, we could...

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The Year a Customer Sat Beside Me

Around 2009, one of our biggest customers stopped going to meetings with our executives. He would fly in, sit down...

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AI Coding Assistants Make Bad Codebases Worse

AI coding assistants do not write good code in bad codebases. They write more of what is already there, faster....

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Who’s Going to Maintain This?

In 2007, I built my first real piece of QA automation in Java. My manager looked at it and asked...

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The Deprecation List: What to Kill Before Your Series A

Investors don’t fund mess. Or rather: they fund it, but they price it in. Every piece of unfinished, abandoned, or...

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Code Review at Three Engineers

Most code review advice on the internet was written by people working in teams of fifty. Code review at three...

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When ‘Just Use Postgres’ Stops Being the Answer

I’m the first person to tell founders to just use Postgres. I’m also the first person to tell them when...

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The Five Questions That Decide Your Stack at Seed Stage

Every seed-stage founder I work with has had the same argument with at least one engineer: which framework, which database,...

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Why Your First AI Feature Should Be Invisible

Founders ask me how to launch their first AI feature. My honest answer is usually: don’t launch it. At least,...

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FinOps for Early-Stage Startups: Stop Burning Cash on Cloud

FinOps for Early-Stage Startups: Stop Burning Cash on Cloud Cloud spend is the second-largest controllable cost for most early-stage startups,...

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Hiring Your First Engineer as a Non-Technical Founder

Hiring Your First Engineer as a Non-Technical Founder I get pulled into this conversation more than almost any other. A...

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