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Discussion on: I am a YC alumnus & 3X VC-funded founder-CTO. AMA!

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Arpit Mohan

Really good questions! Thanks for asking.

Please refer to my comment here on the role of a CTO changing as per company scale.

Finding product market fit is the holy grail of starting up. As an engineer, in the early days, I would suggest that you design for change instead of scale or code-cleanliness. Even if you are copy-pasting code, that's fine as long as you can quickly pivot the product based on business needs. This generally goes against everything that we are taught, but unless you have found the product-market fit, don't listen to Uncle Bob and his clean code mantras :)

Each founder is different in their approach to building startups. Personally, I'm more of a doer than a thinker/researcher. There's definitely a lot of value in research before you build. I generally operate better once I have a prototype/MVP that I can demo to people and garner feedback. These days, I'm relying more on no-code / low-code solutions to prototype ideas before actually writing Java/Python code to bring that idea to life.