Simplicity over Scalability

Engineers building a new thing: don't focus on scale - focus on simplicity.

I get it. When I was a startup CTO (10 years ago!), I wanted to be sure we weren't caught flat footed by huge spikes in demand and could scale up easily.

I made technical and trade off decisions that made it harder for the rest of the team to operate in service of being able to scale to the moon.

We didn't end up needing to scale much at all. Whoops.

There's a time to apply engineering discipline to scale, but it's not when you're doing rapid iteration to find your first sparks of product market fit or new product expansion.

Most of my career has been spent fighting or helping fight problems created by too much complexity because of over-engineering or premature design for scale.

Simple, mature tech with lots of easy bolt ons for the rest of your team to use are your friend when in explore mode. They can scale more than you think.