Between 2020 and 2023 I spent three years at NetApp as a senior fullstack IC. The team I joined was...
Your first production incident at seed stage is going to happen. Probably in the first six months. Probably on a...
Between March 2017 and April 2022, I co-founded Caaresys, a radar-based in-cabin monitoring startup for automotive. The product was a...
Most seed-stage startups do too much security or too little. Both end badly. The teams who do too little end...
Around 2017, I joined a small network-security startup as VP R&D. The product scanned a customer’s network, detected every connected...
AI cost is now the second-largest controllable spend at most AI-first startups I work with, after payroll. It is also...
Around 2014, I joined the web team at a web security company as their team lead, and the flagship product...
At seed stage, the most expensive engineering hire is not the one you cannot afford. It is the one you...
Around 2013, Healarium was a small startup building an employee health improvement platform. Gamified goal-tracking for employees, insurance-side dashboards on...
Documentation used to be optional. In 2026 it is the interface. Every engineering team I have worked with in the...
Around 2012, one of our customers at Radvision was a US prison system. They used our software to schedule 15-minute...
Most seed-stage teams have either no tests or the wrong twenty. Very few have the right five. “We will add...
Between 2011 and 2014, I was a Python tech lead at Tikal. My team was four people. On any given...
Most seed-stage teams shipping AI features do not have evals. They have hope. They have a couple of dashboards. They...
In 2009, seven of us co-founded a startup called Ekkli. In the year and a half we existed, we could...
Around 2009, one of our biggest customers stopped going to meetings with our executives. He would fly in, sit down...
AI coding assistants do not write good code in bad codebases. They write more of what is already there, faster....
In 2007, I built my first real piece of QA automation in Java. My manager looked at it and asked...
I once helped ship software for CT scanners with about ten percent of it tested. Not because anyone was careless....
Investors don’t fund mess. Or rather: they fund it, but they price it in. Every piece of unfinished, abandoned, or...
Most code review advice on the internet was written by people working in teams of fifty. Code review at three...
I’m the first person to tell founders to just use Postgres. I’m also the first person to tell them when...
Every seed-stage founder I work with has had the same argument with at least one engineer: which framework, which database,...
Founders ask me how to launch their first AI feature. My honest answer is usually: don’t launch it. At least,...
FinOps for Early-Stage Startups: Stop Burning Cash on Cloud Cloud spend is the second-largest controllable cost for most early-stage startups,...
Technical Debt at Seed Stage: When to Take It On Technical debt has become a dirty term, and I think...
Hiring Your First Engineer as a Non-Technical Founder I get pulled into this conversation more than almost any other. A...
