Startup Phase

Mission

Back then, we didn’t call it chaos.

We called it “freedom.”

No red tape. No ceremonies. No managers breathing down our necks.

We wore multiple hats.

Scratch that — we were the hat rack.

One day I’m writing APIs. The next I’m firefighting a prod issue in infrastructure I didn’t build, don’t understand, and never touched before.

But we shipped. Constantly.

New features. New ideas. Hotfixes on Friday night.

We moved fast. Broke things. Said we’d fix it later.

Sometimes we even did.

No retros, no planning, no handoffs — just faith. Tribal knowledge ruled the day. The onboarding doc was a Slack search and a shrug.

Looking back, it wasn’t brave.

It was unsustainable.

People burned out.

People left.

And every time someone walked away, they took half the product’s logic with them.

I didn’t see it then. I thought churn was just how tech worked.

Now I know: when people leave and there’s no documentation, no process, and no shared understanding — you don’t just lose a teammate. You lose the map.