“In my experience, over half the time you ship something with five things wrong with it, people complain about one or two of those things, but they almost never complain about all of them. And then they complain about something that you would have never expected.

You could have fixed those five things and you would have made two of those complaints go away, but you would have never solved the thing that you hadn’t seen. You can then use the time you saved fixing the things that they do actually care about.”

“One analogy that has really struck me this year with our team is that building a product is like pushing a boulder. You spend all this time pushing the boulder uphill and it’s so hard and it’s so much work. But when you catch on in the market, suddenly you’re running downhill after the boulder, running as fast as you can to keep up.”

“Even though there might have been a lot of discussions before, once you agree on a decision, you have to commit to it and stay connected as an executive team.”

“You have to ask yourself, how unique is this problem? And to the extent that it’s unique, how important is it to solve the problem well? What are the solutions that are going to really give your company a competitive edge vs. what are the ones that are important, but aren’t the ones that you want to put a lot of innovation energy into?”

“I’d have nightmares about showing up with my co-founder at a VC event and all the technical questions were directed to her instead of me. I didn’t realize how much of my identity was bound up in being seen as a highly competent technical person.”

“You can’t innovate on everything, or you’ll spend all your time on bullshit, constantly ironing out tiny little details. You have to use the tried and true as much as possible so the things you build yourself can become real core differentiators.”

“No smart, ambitious engineer wants to be told exactly what to do. They want agency and decision making.”

“There are a lot of different ways people learn. Some like to read a book, others like to be taught by somebody else. I like to learn by doing.”

Dessy Daskalov is the co-founder and CTO of Nudge, a Toronto-based startup building a digital communications platform for deskless and frontline employees. Nudge provides employees with the information and tools they need to stay connected at work and reach organizational goals.

In our First Line of Code series, Commit co-founder Beier Cai talks to prominent tech founders and leaders building the next generation of companies, to hear about their career journeys and lessons learned from their early days.