Gaurav Misra: preference

Transcript context

…Okay. The other question I imagine people would be wondering is how do you work on longer-term projects that take many weeks? There's also infrastructure, I guess, back-end stuff. So maybe answer those questions. How do you think about long-term stuff and then how do you deal with back-end stuff that isn't a feature that anyone would care for? Yep. Usually, we'll dedicate time to that separately. For example, usually Q4 for us is infrastructure quarter. We just go and build all the infrastructure. Q4 is generally, we've already delivered a ton of products and stuff. We're feeling pretty good about the rest of the year. Things are winding down. Obviously, holidays and stuff coming up. And so we spend all that time paying the technical debt. I actually think there's a unique thing to think here about technical debt in general. And as a startup, your job is to take on technical debt because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company. Bigger companies don't take on technical debt, they pay it usually right away. Or they're paying back technical debt from the days when they were a startup, and they took on a lot of it. I mean Snaps, I used to work at Snap and there was a lot of examples of that over there, and I'm sure it happens at every other company. And we think about it as like, well, is this a problem we need to solve today or is this a problem that the 50th engineer or the hundredth engineer or the 500th engineer can solve? And if it is a problem that a future engineer can solve, we should use that future engineer now. Essentially, that's what we're doing. And we're saying we're going to push this to somebody in the future. And by the way, if the company fails, that engineer will never be hired and all this won't matter anyways. So it's like financial debt in many ways. Financial debt is taken on to create leverage. It can be a good thing like if you're buying a house, you take on debt and you can buy something probably more than you can afford without taking on debt. And it's the same thing. You can create products that you wouldn't be able to build with a small team that you have by taking on strategic technical debt. It's very positive actually. Wow, this is such a cool idea. And where my mind goes is that future engineer may be an AI agent engineer.…

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