[waldopat]

Here's a founder/product perspective. This maps well to the skateboard => scooter => bicycle => motorcycle => rocket ship product metaphor that's often used. Each phase teaches different design patterns, constraints, and failure (and success) modes for different inflection points of a startup's journey.

But here's the reality. What got you technically to PMF may hold you back from your Series A and next steps. Technical debt is just the natural cost of growth, but (here's the kicker) optimizing tech stacks too early can lead to slower execution time. Most startups never reach exponential scale anyways. Put another way, starting with "rocket ship" does not immune the startup from rewrites, refactoring or throw away code.

The real systems and management challenge is building architectures that are intentionally temporary or modular. Simple enough that throwing them away later isn’t traumatic and rebuilds aren’t a sign of failure but success.

[emmawirt]

yeah I really love the 'intentionally temporary' framing, that's actually a way better way to articulate what was I was getting at than how I wrote it. The trauma of throwing things away is real, I see it constantly in DD. People treat migration like an admission of failure when it's usually the opposite, you outgrew something, which is a good problem to have.