Deciding what to do about technical debt can be as thorny as tackling any other kind of debt. Spending substantial amounts of time and money to rebuild or clean up old code can be difficult to justify or explain, particularly to less technical co-founders or investors who are just focused on getting something out the door. At the same time, paying down technical debt can save you loads of pain in the long run.

“In my less guarded moments, I refer to myself as a bureaucrat. Because bureaucracy is actually a very software-like scaling model. It’s not necessarily a bad word. Bad bureaucracy is bad and good bureaucracy is good.”

“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.”