Scaling Fast, my talk on lessons from tech startups

This talk from C3Fest summarizes the key lessons I've learned in the past ~15 years of working in tech startups. It's a high level overview of a new book I'm writing (60% done).

The talk came out great, if a little packed for 20min. Enjoy ❤️

For a 5pm last-talk-of-the-conference that's a pretty packed room.

Key points

With links to past articles because ideas take time to develop :)

• if the business isn't working, the rest doesn't matter
• how you scale the team impacts all else
• vertical over horizontal teams
• coordinating at the end is too late
• fast iteration cycles beat careful upfront design
• write boring code
• focus on architectural complexity
• data patterns beat code optimizations
• use vertical components (this one's a talk)
• separate deployment from delivery
• your code is not the goal, giving users new superpowers is

And here's one more cool pic from the talk.

As a side-note: this was my first time writing out the entire talk beforehand word for word. Tried a new app, iA Presenter, that turns your notes into a teleprompter.

The writing was useful and made the talk better. But I suck at using a teleprompter and the app way overestimates how fast I can read out loud so I had to improvise 😂

Cheers,
~Swizec