[htormey]

“ Investors need to start asking more probing questions about how organizations develop and deploy applications. Perhaps if the money becomes contingent, people will start to give a shit about the engineering quality”

Why? Most companies fail due to a lack of product market fit not because they picked the wrong software stack. Hence investors time is better spent on company outcomes and not micromanaging whether the backend team is building using Java or Rust or whatever’s trendy.

[nthj]

I see this idea often, and it feels somewhat shortsighted for me. Company outcomes are primarily determined by product-market fit, yes, and: the tighter your feature release feedback loop, the more product-market-fit experiments you can run before you’re out of runway.

Many technology and process choices are just style and preference, absolutely. Others have a material impact on the effort and time to ship a feature. (I’ll leave examples as an exercise to the reader; I imagine any example I used could turn into discussion of “ah you’re doing $FOO wrong.” I suspect this tendency entangles with why these choices seemingly frequently impact business outcomes, from my perspective.)

[htormey]

Well I imagine it’s a function of the stage of companies the VC’s are investing in.

If you are an early stage investor and you are writing lots of checks to cast a wide net do you really have the time to do that level of due diligence? Presumably a quality founding team and a decent demo is enough to tick that box.

If you are a series A or above investor, does it really do anything to provide this advise after the fact?

I image that the assumption is that if the company is successful you can afford to bring in more seasoned people to fix things. At least that’s what I’ve seen on my travels in the Bay Area.