4 Engineering Mistakes That Kill Startups

From chasing shiny tech to scaling too soon, beware these common missteps that can endanger your company

In 2016, I gave technical advice to a first-time CEO and entrepreneur building a seed-funded food delivery marketplace. In my view, every tech choice the company had made under his direction was wrong.

He believed in “empowering the engineer” and let the company’s first engineer choose the framework (Scala/Play) because it was what that engineer wanted to use — not because it made sense for the company, the company’s use case, or its recruiting pool. Much of the early technical work had been outsourced. The company’s product road map was also wildly optimistic (building web and mobile concurrently) despite the fact that most of the business was still unvalidated. It was a recipe for disaster.

Startup engineering is different from any other type of software engineering. It demands short- and medium-term productivity, relative to the “right way” of building systems. It values engineers who are able to iterate quickly and are comfortable with hacky code. It rewards pragmatism in technology choices versus picking the most hyped — or most stable — technology.