Foundational Engineering Strategy

Early-stage startups often make architectural choices that optimize for the first 3 months but cripple the company at year 2. We advise founders on building pragmatic, boring technology that scales.

The single biggest mistake we see is premature microservices adoption. A monolithic architecture deployed to PaaS (like Heroku or Render) is almost always the correct choice until you have more than 15 engineers.

Key Advisory Areas

  • Stack Selection: Choosing boring, proven technologies (Postgres, Rails/Django/Laravel) over hype-driven stacks.
  • The First Hires: How to hire generalist product engineers rather than specialized architects.
  • Equity & Comp: Benchmarking early engineering compensation packages.