[aforwardslash]

> They literally had hundreds of servers Woow. I remember when you could write the number of servers for India with few binary digits :)

I was familiarized with Foodpanda in the early days, and their first months with dev in Berlin. I was also quite familiarized with Rocket (worked there for a while on their core platforms - both ecommerce and marketplace), and while my opinion about their design (on ecommerce) is far from good,their code and procedures were at a level of maturity far more advanced than Foodpanda.

That is not necessarily a bad thing, in startups of this kind you need to be able to refocus priorities and quickly test new markets. With this comes pressure to implement changes and twisting the product to fit a different goal thought on the initial design. In the end, you usually work a PoC as a product for some years until you have a complete grasp of where your business fits. Some challenges may look unexpected (such as the street naming and numbering somewhere in South America, maybe Colombia?), some challenges can be a bit more predictable (such as an appropriate redis configuration), but these growth pains are expected. One way I've seen working quite well to avoid that feeling of "drifting around" product teams have during this trial periods is to have clear, in-person communication from the top down, and include the product teams in the refocus process, so everyone is on the same page, and the business can decide also based on other factors such as cost of implementation and time to market. And I've seen this on a Rocket venture :)