Startup Technology - Technical Founder Advice

YC Partner Jared Friedman joins founders Lillian Chou (COO, Second Measure), Diana Hu (CTO, Escher Reality), Calvin French-Owen (CTO, Segment) and Ralph Gootee (CTO, PlanGrid), to talk about what can go right and wrong building technology.

[jjteoh]

tip from personal experience(after working in two tech startup): always get at least a senior engineer in your team at early stage, its ok to have ducktape code, but you got to have someone in your development team that can minimize the code debt (things that you need to refactor later in order to enhance performance or to scale up), else you most likely to rewrite the whole thing when your business scale.

[Allen]

"No one's going to pay you for having excellent test coverage." Love it.

[demetriusmichael]

The jeans company for all those startups is who you really need to interview.

[syedaminx]

Just wanted to thank you guys for making this information free and publicly accessible :)

[ParthPatel-oqoe]

I loved this talk! As being a technical founder this was some really good advice.

[danielsp]

Segment is something so useful. Hard to believe it took so long for them to find PMF! Congrats!

[BillDybas]

This was some great advice! Successful products are build by healthy, productive teams who have just the right amount of process in place to help them ship and iterate often. The general consensus is to hack things together until you've found product-market fit and then introduce quality-focused practices to 1.) add robustness to your product and 2.) help communicate and manage the growing complexity of your codebase.

[nicafaustinoVC]

Love the comment ‘we don’t have the challenge of a non-technical co-founder’ 👊😉

[bilza]

As a technical founder they all look advanced and technical

[habibmkhan]

Thank you YC for uploading YouTube content, it makes a huge positive impact! Keep it up 😃

[MohammedAtifSami]

As seen in the video it was literally enlightening, you can see the panelist glowing by enlightenment. :) Not sure why there was a light, it was really interesting to see how these guys are running fantastic products without a need of an articulated process or a regime to achieve that, maybe less is more.

[teeIck]

showing an accurate and deep understanding; great perceptive. Thank you for all the insightful information. 💡

[SajadJalilian]

Thank you guys for sharing your knowledge and experience, this was awesome 🌱🍀

[peiditube]

Some more questions:
1) If there are multiple technical co-founders, how much overlap in code knowledge should there be? i.e. if one co-founder temporarily has less work, should he just take a break and recharge for a week or start learning new systems and adding code to something a co-founder has built?
2) Related to #1, if 1/4 of the technical people in the team only likes to build independent modules, and has an aversion to updating or debugging on other people's code, is that fine to ignore or something which needs to be fixed?
2) Thoughts on native vs non-native for mobile apps?
3) Design is extremely important for my company, but I am skeptical to hire a designer instead of outsourcing because the team is super technical and there might not be a cultural fit. Any advice here?

[nicholsonalexander]

Thank you guys so much for the great content!

[TheTechPapi]

Wow. What an amazing Panel and convo. Thanks for sharing

[waymanharris]

I love this level of honesty!!! Good job! #2020

[wahmed]

Thanks for sharing all your experiences. :)

[heratyian]

“I would have built it in a cross platform framework” is exactly what someone who has never worked with a cross platform framework would say lol

[GoodVibes-qsiu]

I find this interesting. All CTOs have similar dress code. Except the segment guy.