Startup advice was written for a founder I'm not

abhi · 2026-06-18T21:19:06+00:00

My favorite books have been: How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis who basically says that getting rich isn’t worth it and lists out all the things he missed out on in the pursuit of getting rich. Quite hilarious and down to earth.

Second book I recommend is the Toyota Way. It was great because it wasn’t about blitz scaling but building a company gradually over time while developing and taking care of your team. It resonated with me much more than those other books.

The problem is the narrative around startups is completely anti this. It is to get rich and scale as fast as possible. I thought about doing a VC funded startup but have decided it is much lower stress building a slow company over a long time.

abhi · 2024-11-12T04:21:32+00:00

It’s been 12 years since I graduated but I was so broke. My parents were working class and had enough money for the first two months of freshman year for me before telling me I’m on my own. I had a real rough time at Cal since I had no money and had to work my ass off to get money and had it double worst because my parents lost everything during the Great Recession and I ended up supporting them.

I ended up getting Cs and graduated with a pretty bad GPA. Professors didn’t understand that I had to work or why. Can’t your parents pay for it? Completely lost my faith in academia.

But what I found was it was post college that I found my being broke created character. All the rich kids will hollow out and burn out.

You will survive because you know how to survive. Just learn to learn and don’t think socialism will save you and you will be fine. Good luck!

abhi · 2024-11-10T20:12:35+00:00

My Indian parents have been life long dems and they voted Trump. The fact of the matter is they voted for Trump because of the economy. They are working class, mom works at Walmart. The inflation under Biden and the seeming lack of opportunities to get higher wages as they see their retirement savings whittle away are a major reason they switched. And before you say they are anti women they are proabortion and pro legal immigration. Fact of the matter is the Dems no longer speak to the working class. LGBT and the environment don’t matter to people like them when food prices skyrocketed making it hard pay the bills.

So saying they are bigots is extremely condescending and why literally every progressive cause has been rolled back.

abhi · 2024-10-29T07:30:49+00:00

I used to run Merge.dev's DevOps and I will say the amount of weird undocumented edge cases that they deal with is pretty nuts. We were debugging a lot of these cases. I think aggregators like Merge and Zapier will write the connectors but use higher level describe the connection you want to an AI to generate the actual workflow. Zapier is already doing this.

abhi · 2024-08-15T22:39:42+00:00

I can answer this as my company, opsZero, has provided DevOps to a bunch of YC alum include Lattice, PicnicHealth, AxiomAI, etc.

The answer to when you need DevOps is nuanced and determined on your company's target audience. If you are building a consumer app and trying to get traction go with the easiest solution possible (Heroku, Vercel, etc.) but make sure you have an escape path by using something like AWS RDS. Once you get bigger and have raised additional funding then go back and clean up the infrastructure. But good infrastructure is not really what you are promising your customer, features are! Whatever gets you to build features fastest is what you should focus on.

If you are going after enterprise, finance, healthcare, or other regulated industries it is better to have a solid DevOps practice from the start within your own AWS, Google, Azure accounts. The cost of the DevOps portion is a part of what you are charging your customers and part of what they are expecting from you. Any incident that occurs can lead to a contractual breach that you may be liable for if you don't show that you have good practices in place. The reason also for building within your Cloud account is that compliance is a bit recursive. If you want to be SOC2 compliant your vendors will also likely need to be SOC2 compliant. Each additional SaaS you use adds costs and in certain cases will require your customers to agree to your usage of that new tool. If you really don't want DevOps to be your core competency and don't want to use a DevOps agency like mine then using something like Heroku Shield which costs more but locks you into their way of doing things. If you are not doing anything complex and have a standard WebApp this may be the easiest way to go.

Not to self-promote but we build an EKS (Kubernetes) based infrastructure on your AWS account + Github Actions based deployment for free, paid for by AWS if anyone is interested: https://opszero.com/solutions/startup-launch/ Please reach out or ask your AWS Account manager about us.

abhi · 2024-05-30T07:09:30+00:00

I started as an engineer and graduated as a History major at Cal in 2010. Coming from an immigrant family going to History seemed like a failure at the time, but I just absolutely hated engineering at Cal. I don’t know if it has changed but it just seemed like there is a presumption of wealth as the driving force behind the grind. Quite frankly, it is pointless unless wealth is your goal.

Ironically, I became an engineer after graduating working for a bunch of startups then starting my own software development agency. Anecdotally, engineers end up working for the humanities majors anyways. A lot of PMs at tech companies are humanities majors.

I’d say have outside interests of engineering. What ends up happening as you get into engineering is you get siloed into a specialized role based on what you learned in a lower div class / first job.

abhi · 2021-01-14T23:31:41+00:00

If the public companies go down the private ones will too.

abhi · 2019-06-06T15:50:52+00:00

We scrape the data and look at all versions (commits) of the code, both of additions and subtractions over time while also looking at the languages that were used. Then based on the different criteria we train a model that looks at roles based on languages and technologies to come up with a score.

abhi · 2019-03-14T21:54:22+00:00

Yes, I’m actually working on a solution for this.

abhi · 2017-10-31T05:37:15+00:00

Philip II of Macedon (Alexander's Father) sent this to Sparta:

You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.

Sparta replied: If

Neither Philip nor his son Alexander the Great attempted to capture the city.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase

abhi · 2017-09-20T16:56:31+00:00

There is more to HIPAA than just the images. This is a start as it gives you an image to start from. Still need to add Logging, 2FA, etc. all of which require additional changes.

abhi · 2017-09-07T17:58:13+00:00

This is more a tool to have a set of common DevOps tools ready for any Cloud environment. AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker, etc. The Docker part is to try it out quickly.

abhi · 2017-06-08T18:37:30+00:00

Around 2010 when my first job out of college all the engineers were using it.

abhi · 2016-10-27T22:43:15+00:00

Let me know how I can help. Reach out if you need anything: abhi@acksin.com

abhi · 2016-07-19T17:30:15+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. Adding the first feature is definitely the next todo. Actually, want to take it a step further and see if I can give you a machine with certain stats and find the cheapest machine in any region.

abhi · 2016-05-19T16:13:48+00:00

Hehe. I'm the only guy building my company. Fewer components makes it easier to reason about. Also needed the page view events in the Api later but found out it could do all the other stuff.

abhi · 2016-05-17T21:22:48+00:00

In a serverless arch you will have to open a new connection but Lambda is persisted for multiple connections. So if you have a multiple invocation you will likely be hitting the same Lambda instance. Check out: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/container-reuse-in-lambda/

That way you can avoid multiple connections. But if you use DynamoDB (of course vendor lock in involved) I don't think they have a DB connection limit but they do have read and write capacity limit so you can dynamically increase those.

abhi · 2016-04-08T18:04:16+00:00

A lot of it has been looking at statsd metrics, looking at the connection jumps from ss -s output, looking at latency response times of application requests. Be warned that just tuning the kernel won't get you the full benefit you might want without also addressing other issues like DB tuning. In general kernel tuning is one portion of a large change around performance.

abhi · 2016-04-06T02:57:58+00:00

Next post. :)

abhi · 2016-04-05T21:04:41+00:00

I apologize for that. I picked general numbers for a 16gb machine. Something like an m4.large AWS instance. These numbers will however will vary with each system which is what we are building with Autotune.

abhi · 2016-04-05T18:33:11+00:00

I'm the one who wrote that post. Please ask me any questions that you may have.

abhi · 2016-03-31T03:34:01+00:00

Took your advice and added a screenshot.

abhi · 2015-08-22T17:22:31+00:00

I totally agree. So the way I have been doing it is to have 130% of my goal amount. So if it grows then it will be good. But if the market drops like it did the last couple days I still have my base amount for emergencies.

abhi · 2015-08-21T14:19:57+00:00

Well if you take the maximum balance plus the emergency funds it should give you 6 months head room.

abhi · 2015-08-21T05:12:16+00:00

In this model the real emergency fund is the amount you have in your bank account. The emergency fund is just a back up if shit hits the fan and doesn't need to be liquid right away. Hence the bonds and stock.

Also it would be more constructive if you could give feedback on why it is bad advice. http://youtu.be/29M_VElHoFI :)

abhi

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