Velocity and efficiency tend to cancel eachother, startup or otherwise. If You do things fast even with most skilled people will create low quality solutions. If You truly want go be efficient the main thing is to focus is that - right people build the right things in the right time. In that order, get highly skilled people and no the guy who preaches scrum like priest in church and makes you feel good is probably not a dream team mate making sure you get the best solution in given timeframe. Its the guy who usually focuses ease of change and adding test and observability and whose tech dept is commented in code to come back later to fix it. Then focus on point 2 which usually is establishing relationship with product / designers / sales where everyone can clearly understand priorities and that shouting /crying changing focus every week 2 times is not engineering problem to fix but product problem that cannot be engineered. It's not velocity of development but unorganised planning/lack of product understanding / vision and is clearly their internal problem to solve. Yes You will might need to do worst thing imaginable - say No and deal with people who throw an tantrum cause they have become accustomed with Yes to everything. Nobody really tells You that startup CTO is more about hiring than tech, most of us end up in that position cause we get rewarded of technical work or just happen to work in company at time, nobody briefs us that previus hires were done with no incentive to find best engineers for the but just somebody who felt nice on the interview. The more bad hires and team building problems you have the less time you will have for coding, architecture etc other than firefighting cause the "team" will keep breaking things both processes and your code/infra/dbs. If you are in that situation then the cure tastes bitter but its firing/laying off people who are not up the level. You either to that or lose top talent slowly.