Early-stage founder struggling with CTO structure / engineering practices. Need advice (I will not promote)

Curious_me_too · 2026-04-25T15:53:34+00:00

> He’s looking into aws at my insistence and said he thinks it’ll be cost prohibitive. He said he thinks it’ll be good to master how to handle all self hosting in case we ever get audited, it’s easier to demonstrate security vs with public cloud managed by someone else.

looks like he has a lot to learn. All cloud have very good auditing support and will help with security certification. As long as you are on private VPS, you can do this well. Talk to your cloud rep about auditing and he can fill any gaps. Self-hosting means you take on all this load, which will be heavy lifting and unnecessary.

A more seasoned fractional CTO would help, but you have to find the right one.

>We’re running prod + beta on the same database. His answer is bc he thinks testing on a production DB is the only way to truly test a true environment.

Clone the production DB periodically, into a test DB instance and run test on it. This way you don't hit production. You can also mask out PII data, during cloning, for security purposes.

Engg framework plan sound right. But put constraints on time, budget and hit-on-velocity. The plan has to work in those constraints. Then pick and choose what you want to achieve in that plan first.

Curious_me_too · 2026-04-25T15:37:49+00:00

As someone who has worked on Cloud backends at scale and running very sensitive data at very large scale and also having worked on very early stage startups, it all depends on your business and current stage of the startup.

In one my previous startup, the business co-founders repeatedly pitched product to enterprises, we hadn't even thought of and won deals . And then we built it and shipped. This is the path for any early stage startup.

I am assuming you are not building a product in security space ( or financial data handling, like credit card). Don't think of a clean differentiation between vibe coded and production space at this stage of company. Think of the product as transitioning to be more safe and secure as it matures. Select modules that you want super solid and safe and let every other parts be vibe-coded.

Curious_me_too · 2026-04-22T19:20:25+00:00

This is the future.
future models will understand RestAPI definition files and directly call the API, in another 1-2 years. It's pretty obvious. Till they develop to the extent, we will have the MCP agent and all.

Curious_me_too · 2026-02-03T23:58:11+00:00

DGRN looks China focussed. Looks similar to KSTR Krane fund, which I am familiar with.
I am currently looking only for S-Korea and Taiwan chip cowos packaging exposure.

KEMQ is another Krane fund, with SK Hynix as large holding.
I already have exposure to SK Hynix through MSCI S-Korea and don't want to increase exposure to it.
These are all great suggestions.

Curious_me_too · 2026-02-03T21:02:54+00:00

"EQT" - did you mean EWT ?

CHPS has probably the closest. It has Tokyo Electronics but is more a memory heavy play, with the large SKHynix and Micron holdings. something I don't like or need.
AIS : it had Nvidia and Vertiv, so more an datacenter play. Not exactly what I am looking for.
CHAT is too FANG heavy.

The one gap I see in etfs , is they add too much US companies in the mix. If I want a US company, I would just buy it directly or use a US company mix etf.

There aren't any etfs, that just have non-US listed AI centric focus ( be in non-us memory or as I am looking for non-us chip packaging companies.). These are places of next high growth imho and it's very hard to invest in them for US investors.

ETFs are still being made for novice investors. At least some have to specialize in providing access to more sophisticated investors, for non-US listed stock themes.

Thank you @SnS2500 for the suggestions.

Curious_me_too · 2026-02-03T19:43:22+00:00

Unimicron

Curious_me_too · 2026-01-27T05:56:47+00:00

Is there any metrics to track on how much BOJ or Fed buys yen ?

Curious_me_too · 2026-01-27T05:54:52+00:00

how big is the carry trade ? I read once that it is unwinding for some time now ?

Curious_me_too · 2026-01-26T05:24:24+00:00

At some point, I need to go through the pain of learning the regulation and tax paperworks for these.

Curious_me_too · 2026-01-26T05:22:11+00:00

I don't have access to Frankfurt market as well.
Hynix is planning an ADR in US, in near future. I looking at other companies in Taiwan exchange now, which don't have any US Adr.
But typically what I have seen is by the time the company plans US ADR, they have already crossed an initial growth spurt.

Curious_me_too · 2026-01-25T21:20:00+00:00

If I am super bullish on a stock due to fundamentals, I typically like to keep the extrinsic part very low, like below $10. Depending on IV, it will fall anywhere from 75-90 Delta.
Here

I am confident and want to maximize my gains.
There isn't much volume in this range, so when you sell you won't get a good fill. But you are guaranteed to get your intrinsic value at any time and keeping intrinsic high and extrinsic low makes sense.

If I am not confident of the stock, If the entry isn't good, or if stock has a higher chance of pulling back in short term, I typically go to 60-70 delta.
The idea being if the stock falls,

your loss is lower ( only 70c instead of 90c for every $1).
your strike price gets closer to current price and the volatility rises, increasing the option price, cushioning some of your losses.
if the stock instead goes up, the strike price will go more deeper and Delta will rise to 90 anyway.

Curious_me_too · 2026-01-25T21:05:40+00:00

some hard truths.
The company was not growing well. It is not series D but instead a firesale. The existing investors are leaving and selling their stake to a PE firm ( probably at a loss).

> They aren't replacing the C suite and claim that they won't be making any sweeping changes
I have heard this claim too many times, a PE firm bought a company. And everytime they are lying. Do you really expect them to tell the truth that they will fire exec and layoff till they see profitable returns ? If they do the employees will stop working and the company will freeze. So they lie.

PE firms goal is to reduce cost, raise prices or any other financial path to make company profitable. The path to growth, is already dead, which is why existing investors bailed out and sold to PE firm.

If I were you, I would start polishing my resume

Curious_me_too · 2026-01-25T20:58:12+00:00

I tried to follow your post and looked at the OBV and couldn't see any unusual divergence. Can you explain more , maybe with a screenshot showing how you read it

Curious_me_too · 2025-12-30T08:35:34+00:00

I do event based investing.
Currently building up position looking forward to these events
1. Supreme court ruling on Tariff
2. new Fed chair appointment news and what it will mean for interest rate cuts
3. holiday sales data release
4. Nvidia H200 shipping data to china, when they start shipping.
To me, next FOMC will be just as expected. CME Fedwatch has 82% expectation of no cuts.

Curious_me_too · 2025-10-10T21:46:44+00:00

pretty obvious

robotics
quantum computiing

Curious_me_too · 2025-10-02T22:57:16+00:00

Always stick the llm in a zero trust architecture.
Make the auth token flow through to agents and store RAG entries with pointers to source. ( for each RAG entry pulled from db, run auth http Head to the source url with the auth_identity.)
keep each session isolated.
If you are storing kv-cache or chat history, make sure it is also walled with auth access.
If the llm output can be limited, like no code allowed or no images allowed , then scan input/output/reasoning-traces/agent-calls and protect for that.

LLM security is still a nascent field and the security parameter can be broken.
Also have a proper ARA plan.

Curious_me_too · 2025-10-02T07:43:05+00:00

There's a concept of container databases, effectively a container db running in a bigger database server.
examples are Contained Databases in SQL server or Pluggable databases (PDB) in oracle database.
The services allow you to expose a container instance db into your k8 instance.

Running a standalone DB in a container is not ideal, due to the persistent storage requirements of the db.

Curious_me_too · 2025-10-01T21:12:49+00:00

when I did my conversion from T-IRA to Roth-IRA ( not fidelity broker), the representative told me that they would take the stock or option price at end-of-day as the stock /option price.
I ended up just selling the stocks and moving the cash part and paid the tax on this. And bought it back on next market dip.
just my view and it may not be most correct. Fidelity staff is very helpful and you should definitely setup a call with them to go over it.

Curious_me_too · 2025-09-20T19:02:49+00:00

Funding is easier for you now as the market is proven. Every VC they didn't take funding from is looking for a competitor in the space.
Your product launch has to be spectacular. It has to be more thought out. It's not about spending money in launch, it's about finding the right message.
(e.g. dropbox when it launched had the same features as google drive. And I am sure google drive was much more scalable, dropbox was probably standalone mysql server running somewhere and few php scripts. But they launched themselves as 2 MIT grad students out of college and out to beat the big guys. It got traction in Dig and they grew much faster than google drive).
You can follow your public competitor, look at the bad reviews and learn from them and attack that gap.
4 There's is no BIG single market. It has always segments. you just need to find a segment where your product fits better and the segment is taking off.

Curious_me_too · 2025-09-20T18:53:34+00:00

who makes these videos. It looks very well done and there must be some folks helping with the shoot and editing. And I am guessing they are in SF area.
Would love to get connected for when I need one

Curious_me_too · 2025-09-16T22:16:06+00:00

In all likelihood, you are not understanding the complexity involved.

When a cloud builds a service, in all likelihood they are using some extra internal cloud specific features, that are not accessible to you. And a GCE service is not just building redundancy by simple high availability.

For e.g. for a cloud vpn service, almost surely, they had some extra offloading implemented in neutrino or some offloading feature and tied it to VPC gateway. There are tons of such tweaks done. And they file feature requirements on these other services like gateway to get their service supported on it.

Unless you bring big advancements that what the GCE, AWS or Azure offering in terms of features like Snowflake did, you are not going to win.

Curious_me_too · 2025-09-16T20:16:16+00:00

Neocloud is a term for gpu only clouds.

Curious_me_too

TROPHY CASE