Vikrum Nijjar: Engineer #1 at Firebase and Founder of Gold Fig Labs (YC S19)
Some of things that caught my eye:<p>&gt; <i>We also knew Scala would help us attract good candidates, which it did.</i><p>Paul Graham wrote abt how one must <i>beat the averages</i> to be successful in a high risk world of startups [0].<p>&gt; <i>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.</i><p>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.<p>&gt; <i>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.</i><p>This is super nice! Steve Huffman once said adding chat on the frontpage drastically changed hipmunk&#x27;s understanding of the users of the site as the support was one-click away and they could act on user&#x27;s frustration the very minute they were inconvenienced.<p>&gt; <i>At one point, we had a tweet posted on our wall, “Please marry me, Firebase!”</i><p>As Paul Buchheit would say, in the early days of the startup, make things a 100 people would <i>love</i> than things that a 1000 might <i>like</i>. u&#x2F;rahulvohra had a great piece echoing similar sentiment abt <i>HCX</i> (high expectations customer) and how Superhuman found PMF by focusing on a smaller segment of their most demanding user base [1].<p>&gt; <i>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.</i><p>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.<p>&gt; <i>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.</i><p>This is one of the <i>right</i> 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&#x27;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&#x27;ve found a burning problem a set of users need solving, don&#x27;t change the users or the problem in search of PMF, change the solution.<p>&gt; <i>Extremely high-concentrated messaging, like Kevin Hale telling us to focus on the one thing that’s important to our company right now.</i><p>Focusing on one to three things to do really improves velocity and helps with <i>momentum</i>, keeps everyone motivated to build. Breaking milestones into small one or three tasks that can be accomplished every week, you&#x27;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].<p>&gt; <i>And Gustav telling us, “You should launch this thing and you should be embarrassed.”</i><p>This has all kinds of nuances and caveats. For instance, Emmett Shear talks abt how if you&#x27;re in the business of backing-up data (say, dropbox), you mustn&#x27;t launch something that loses customer data as that would be fatal. So, you might need to get creative: Dropbox&#x27;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.<p>&gt; <i>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><p>I met a YC alum recently and they said YC really changes your perspective on what&#x27;s possible. That they were asked to think in terms of <i>what&#x27;d your goals for the company and product be if you had unlimited capital</i>. And it really changed how they ran the company even though they didn&#x27;t have the capital at the time.<p>&gt; <i>...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.</i><p>And that&#x27;s a huge market. A lot of disruptive tech starts out looking like a toy&#x2F;niche [3].<p>Congratulations, Vikrum. All the best.<p>---<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;avg.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;avg.html</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firstround.com&#x2F;review&#x2F;how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firstround.com&#x2F;review&#x2F;how-superhuman-built-an-engine...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3555581" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3555581</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21315942" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21315942</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube-nocookie.com&#x2F;embed&#x2F;L325PVEvm7Q?t=20m50s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube-nocookie.com&#x2F;embed&#x2F;L325PVEvm7Q?t=20m50s</a>