The investor is not a patron
April 10th, 2024 • Eduard Míka
Every investment transaction is essentially a bet on the person of the founder and their vision. There is usually nothing else in a startup.
Reflex Capital → Blog → Two Dimensions of Tech Scalability
Every investor, and we are not an exception, is interested in the scalability of business. And because many companies are built on technology, it involves scalability of technology.
In conferences, you hear about systems scalability – how to build a website to handle millions of visitors; how to store petabytes of data and search them; how to pass a hundred thousand messages per second thru your Kafka cluster.
These topics are sexy for geeks, me included. And they are necessary from a certain point. But that’s just one dimension of scalability and I dare say the easier one to handle. That’s because it’s already fairly well established field and there is a ton of material and tools to help you. Cloud platforms removed the necessity to build datacenters. Thanks to tools like Kubernetes it’s easier than ever to run auto-scaling apps. Traditional relational databases are able to handle unbelievable workloads these days.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying these things are easy, but it’s easier to tackle than the second dimension of scalability and that is scalability of your tech team.
It’s great that your product was developed by your genius of a co-founder and it’s the most efficient piece of code on the planet. But how about when you actually do get that investment and you’ll need to hire ten more developers to work on it? Suddenly, things other than your search algorithm being 10 milliseconds faster than your competition begin to matter more.
Is your code understandable and readable? How long does it take for a newcomer to deploy their first task to production? Is your system divided into logical modules or microservices, so more people can work on it? Do you have a fully automated build and deploy process? Does the build include a test run? Do you monitor and measure all important business and technical metrics so you can immediately react when deployment goes wrong?
These are the questions we consider when evaluating scalability of technology. It’s not just about those thousands of requests.
April 10th, 2024 • Eduard Míka
Every investment transaction is essentially a bet on the person of the founder and their vision. There is usually nothing else in a startup.
December 22nd, 2023 • Zdena Macháčková
At the end of October 2023, a strike for women’s equality took place in Iceland. Iceland is considered a world leader in gender equality. In this year’s World Economic Forum rankings, the island is ranked highest for the 14th consecutive year, yet Icelandic women are striking because they earn significantly less than men.
November 14th, 2022 • Zdena Macháčková
In October Bushman completed one of the bank’s regular quarterly reviews. Things are heating up, consumer demand is down, people are getting cautious about spending on surplus goods, banks are raising rates and fortifying themselves. The consumer market is either holding on by the skin of its teeth or is already down on last year.
August 3rd, 2022 • Ondřej Fryc
I didn’t get it before either. I had an investor, a co-shareholder, a partner in my company. I put everything I had to the company. All my time, all my money. I pledged my house, gave up my salary. But in hard times, it was not enough. I went to my investor, and I expected them to provide some much-needed money, because he had the cash. And he surely wants to save his previous investment, right?