Event: “How I learned to stop worrying and scale the simple way” with Pawel Hajdan

This talk is tailored for early-stage non-technical founders concerned about scaling their startups.

Pawel Hajdan is an Ex-Google Fractional Tech Lead, with over a decade of experience in the industry. Experienced high growth of Google Chrome, from a small team to thousands of engineers and hundreds patches per day, and launched services to production at Google Cloud’s scale. Pawel champions the principles of straightforward, reliable engineering, and fosters a rational and productive culture.

“Building Scalable Solutions. Entrepreneurs must design products that scale efficiently. As the user base grows, the technology stack needs to handle increased traffic, which requires substantial planning and investment. They are not sure where to start.”​

Key points:

1) Product-Market Fit is top priority: focus on building a product people love, rather than prematurely optimizing for scale. Smaller, simpler codebase deployed in a straightforward way is easier to change. I found it time and time again a better strategy than trying to predict the future and over-engineering.

2) Modern tech stacks are incredibly powerful. For example, StackOverflow is a globally popular site running on a comparatively small infrastructure and straightforward architecture.

3) Team dynamics are underrated. Growth, whether it’s number of users or size of the team, will put strain on the team and working relationships. Without training and preparation, it’s hard to keep the interactions rational and productive under pressure.

In summary: by focusing on core product value; using a modern, simple tech stack; and ongoing leadership training and support, founders can navigate growth with more confidence, less worry, and better results.
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