
Vikrum Nijjar: Engineer #1 at Firebase and Founder of Gold Fig Labs (YC S19) - katm
https://blog.ycombinator.com/vikrum-nijjar-engineer-1-at-firebase-and-founder-of-gold-fig-labs-yc-s19/
======
leetrout
> standing in as SRE for 24×7 hour shifts… for over a year.

1\. Should that be 7x24 since it is followed by hour?

2\. Hero worship is toxic. It like the ultra thin models used for advertising.
This just perpetuates unhealthy attitudes toward work.

Edit: changed phrasing of 1

~~~
yowlingcat
Agreed, this is not just disturbing but embarrassing. Really, they couldn't
hire an SRE to cover like, half a shift, enough to sleep? 24x7 shifts for over
a year? So you're cofounding a company, making horrible and unsustainable
decisions as a leader to the point that you're probably sabotaging it and
someone is giving you the platform to by proxy advise others to do the same?

How is someone supposed to come to a conclusion that such companies are
successful in spite of and not because of such environments? What a backwards
way to build an organization.

~~~
vikrum
In the extremely early days of a startup one doesn't have much optionality.
With only three people at the company it really did not make any sense to hire
a full time SRE for a pre PMF startup. I'm glad we made those trade offs back
in 2011-2012 so that Firebase could be here today to be backed by a dedicated
Google SRE team.

~~~
yowlingcat
Don't mince words. In the extremely early days of YOUR startup, YOU didn't
FEEL like you had much optionality. That is in no way universal. You very much
do have optionality. You can quantify how much it costs to hire someone part
time or full-time. You can quantify the risks of burning yourself out, or your
manager can. Your firm had the optionality, you just chose to go in a very
specific direction.

What I'm saying is that your firm survived in spite of, not because of this
frankly amateurish decision.

------
ticktockten
Will copy the office hours on Friday! I love the focus on fixing tooling and
enabling others.

Checking out Gold Fig Labs now :).

------
ignoramous
Some of things that caught my eye:

> _We also knew Scala would help us attract good candidates, which it did._

Paul Graham wrote abt how one must _beat the averages_ to be successful in a
high risk world of startups [0].

> _James and Andrew [the co-founders of Firebase] really treated me like a
> peer. At no point did I feel like Firebase was not mine._

Sam Altman has repeatedly said that culture is important and the way great
companies are built is by making the first 10 or 40 employees feel like they
are a part of the founding team.

> _James and Andrew [the co-founders of Firebase] really treated me like a
> peer. At no point did I feel like Firebase was not mine._

This is super nice! Steve Huffman once said adding chat on the frontpage
drastically changed hipmunk's understanding of the users of the site as the
support was one-click away and they could act on user's frustration the very
minute they were inconvenienced.

> _At one point, we had a tweet posted on our wall, “Please marry me,
> Firebase!”_

As Paul Buchheit would say, in the early days of the startup, make things a
100 people would _love_ than things that a 1000 might _like_. u/rahulvohra had
a great piece echoing similar sentiment abt _HCX_ (high expectations customer)
and how Superhuman found PMF by focusing on a smaller segment of their most
demanding user base [1].

> _Our highest order bit was to hire kind people. Obviously we wanted people
> with the right skills and ability to communicate...even on the toughest
> days, we still took time to take lunch together, walk around SoMa, and
> enjoyed every step along the journey._

Sam Altman repeatedly stresses on importance of hiring based on shared values
and aptitude rather than a skill set in the early days of a startup. I guess,
successful YC (?) companies all fit a similar pattern.

> _The company was actually working on chat APIs, and then realized that their
> real-time infrastructure was more useful than the chat tools themselves. We
> pivoted to Firebase a few months after demo day._

This is one of the _right_ ways to pivot. My favourite pivot story is of a
startup that failed to raise money on demo-day, went back to work, tried hard
but couldn't make it work, spoke to more users, realised they needed to build
something complementary to what they were currently building, they built that
and flew past $1 billion in evaluation in 2yrs after another pivot [4]. Like
Michael Sibel says, if you've found a burning problem a set of users need
solving, don't change the users or the problem in search of PMF, change the
solution.

> _Extremely high-concentrated messaging, like Kevin Hale telling us to focus
> on the one thing that’s important to our company right now._

Focusing on one to three things to do really improves velocity and helps with
_momentum_ , keeps everyone motivated to build. Breaking milestones into small
one or three tasks that can be accomplished every week, you'd find that so
much work gets done and importantly the momentum keeps of having done things
keeps you moving forward. This hack is something that startupschool drills
into you. Also see, producer vs consumer [2].

> _And Gustav telling us, “You should launch this thing and you should be
> embarrassed.”_

This has all kinds of nuances and caveats. For instance, Emmett Shear talks
abt how if you're in the business of backing-up data (say, dropbox), you
mustn't launch something that loses customer data as that would be fatal. So,
you might need to get creative: Dropbox's MVP (or Minimumal Remarkable Product
as Emmett calls it) was really a landing page with a video describing how
Dropbox would work and its benefits to the end users with a sign-up form to
get early access. They only launched when they were sure the product did
backups really well.

> _And we really didn’t know what was possible in us until we had people
> pushing us, people who wanted us to be as great as they thought we could
> be._

I met a YC alum recently and they said YC really changes your perspective on
what's possible. That they were asked to think in terms of _what 'd your goals
for the company and product be if you had unlimited capital_. And it really
changed how they ran the company even though they didn't have the capital at
the time.

> _...at some point we were concerned that what we were building was too
> niche... We thought maybe it might be just DevOps managers or the security
> teams. Turns out, just about every developer has been in that situation._

And that's a huge market. A lot of disruptive tech starts out looking like a
toy/niche [3].

Congratulations, Vikrum. All the best.

\---

[0] [http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

[1] [https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-
engine...](https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-
find-product-market-fit/)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555581](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555581)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21315942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21315942)

[4] [https://www.youtube-
nocookie.com/embed/L325PVEvm7Q?t=20m50s](https://www.youtube-
nocookie.com/embed/L325PVEvm7Q?t=20m50s)

