Almost every startup that has succeeded was utterly unscalable at first in tons of technical and business ways. Then they fixed it as they scaled. Over-optimizing early has probably killed far more projects and companies than the opposite.
That’s not a bold assumption it’s the predicate for this entire sidebar. The commenter at the top said some things can’t be done in quadratic time and have to be done anyway, and I took exception.
>> unless a more optimal solution does not exist
Dropping into the middle of a conversation and ignoring the context so you can treat the participants like they are confused or stupid is very bad manners. I’m not grumpy at you I’m grumpy that this is the eleventeenth time this has happened.
> Almost every startup
Almost every startup fails. Do you model your behavior on people who fail >90% of the time? Maybe you, and perhaps by extension we, need to reflect on that.
> Then we fixed it as we scaled
Yes, because you picked a problem that can be architected to run in reasonable time. You elected to do it later. You trusted that you could delay it and turned out to be right.
>> unless a more optimal solution does not exist
When the devs discover the entire premise is unsustainable or nobody knows how to make it sustainable after banging their heads against it, they quickly find someplace else to be and everyone wonders what went wrong. There was a table of ex employees who knew exactly what went wrong but it was impolitic to say. Don’t want the VCs to wake up.
That's a pretty bold assumption.
Almost every startup that has succeeded was utterly unscalable at first in tons of technical and business ways. Then they fixed it as they scaled. Over-optimizing early has probably killed far more projects and companies than the opposite.