> In your restaurant, would it make sense for your chef to spend their first six months on building a stove? No, that doesn’t make a lot of sense - your chef should instead be preparing food and supervising other people in the kitchen. Buy the stove, don’t build it yourself.
By that logic - why even have staff in the first place? Pay for a catering service, don't make the food yourself.
> This may sound obvious. Yet, at VC-backed software startups, I see software engineers spending months on building “internal tooling” without shipping an actual product.
That may or may not make sense; but more importantly - it's independent of whether or not there's VC money. In fact, VC's may want to supervise you to make sure you're only working on getting something to market.
By that logic - why even have staff in the first place? Pay for a catering service, don't make the food yourself.
> This may sound obvious. Yet, at VC-backed software startups, I see software engineers spending months on building “internal tooling” without shipping an actual product.
That may or may not make sense; but more importantly - it's independent of whether or not there's VC money. In fact, VC's may want to supervise you to make sure you're only working on getting something to market.