What you should know as a founder of a software company
How many TechCrunch articles can you find where an acquiring company says &quot;the software we&#x27;re buying doesn&#x27;t really work, but it sure looks good!&quot;?<p>I just left a job where the founder (who didn&#x27;t have any software background) deeply ingrained himself with this philosophy and wound making life a living hell for engineering.<p>While building a full-stack prototype, we slapped bootstrap 4 on the front end because who has time to roll CSS when the project is months behind schedule?<p>The founder with no sofware experience decided that bootstrap was terrible and that he&#x27;d roll an entirely custom app style. So he went into the codebase on a weekend and ripped out all the views&#x2F;controllers&#x2F;assets and replaced them with his own, which massively broke the test suite on Monday morning (which of course he didn&#x27;t know how to operate or fix.) After a couple of other &quot;executive audibles&quot; like this, I took the next good offer and ran.<p>It&#x27;s weird to see &#x27;visual design&#x27; as a mainstay of an article titled &#x27;What you should know as a founder of a software company&#x27;, as if managing a team and building solid engineering fundamentals and culture are either assumed or unimportant.