How do you avoid premature scaling?

Kevin is the VP of Engineering at Abnormal Security, overseeing all aspects of growth and execution. In this class, Kevin describes the requirements for building a well-rounded and highly functional engineering team from both a technical and cultural perspective. Kevin spent time at eBay and Quantcast prior to becoming an early-stage engineer leader at TellApart, then a Director of Engineering at Twitter.

Kevin W: Yeah. I think this is one where again, I think the answer for how much is premature really changes based off of the life cycle of the company as well. I think,earlier on in a company's life cycle, you're probably thinking more. Weeks or months, maybe a kind of timeline with confidence of what the future looks like past that time duration.

And the later stage you get, you should be spending your time thinking in months, quarters, and years, As your company is durable and enduring over that time range. But what I've always thought through is that what I've seen generally speaking, most systems that you're building have to be fundamentally refactoring, that's throwing up.

Every time, you roughly two X scale along the way as well. And I find it completely fine to say that I have a solution only scales to roughly that amount of,upside or runway that actually have, I'm not looking for a solution. That's going to scale much more than [00:19:00] that. Especially early days in a startup when everything's changing and will be quite modular.

And a lot of things will be thrown away as you really. What the company is really gonna do what you're gonna sell. And what value you're bringing to your customers. So that's one thing I'd say, just think through how much time the ratio really trying to scale it into it. I don't try to overthink and have overly lofty goals for how much a system needs to scale.

I try to hold it to that kind of rule of thumb, a two X in a given time. And then the amount of time duration you need that runway buffer is going to change. You're probably thinking much more. Short-term just early on naturally. So when it comes. Over time. We'll start to go longer just at your company is more mature.

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