People tend to balance between being pragmatic and cutting edge, how do you pick the right stack to build your early product in?

Kevin is the VP of Engineering at Abnormal Security, overseeing all aspects of growth and execution. In this class, he walks through the steps required to create and support a SaaS product from an engineering perspective, with a particular focus on what aspects to prioritize in the early days of your product. 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. the way I think about that is you really need to make sure that you're solving stage appropriate problems at all times in your startup.

And this one is also one of those as well. Are you picking a tech stack that's going to scale for the enduring time of what you hope your company will survive to be in the longterm? Or are you building something that's stage appropriately today? And, I generally try to think about this for a 12 month kind of lens.

What can I build that I think is future-proofed enough that is tailor fit for my problems for the next 12 months kind of time span. And I think very early on those decisions will look different than what you do as your company evolves, matures and succeeds and thrives over time. So for me, very early on, for example, the things I try to think about is,how much my technical [00:02:00] decisions will impact who I can bring.

I'm probably not going to try to pick the most eco Terrick program language upfront, even if it's the most technically beautiful or, scalable solution. Long-term if it really constrains who is actually eligible to join my team. And secondly, I think practices, which is super important early, too, right?

You want to make sure that your code base and technology decisions are I think as much as possible kind of commodity things that people recognize and are able to iterate and work in very quickly. And of course these things will change over time again, as your company scales and evils.

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