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Comment by raffraffraff | Hacker News Reader

I would find it extremely odd if every tech VCs did't hire at least one extremely seasoned engineer with experience building soup-to-nuts infrastructures and products, particularly for successful startups that scaled successfully. It's not that I think VCs should be building shit like that, but before each round of funding they should be able to figure out if the startup is doing things in a scalable way. And part of being a VC is helping their investments grow.

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As an engineer, I used to think the same. From vicarious experience, I’ve learned that software execution is far down the list of reasons startups don’t work. The wrong market, the wrong approach to the market, or the wrong team approaching the market are all far more likely and harder to change. By comparison, a tech stack that won’t scale is much easier to fix on the fly.

Source: I lead engineering at a VC firm. We’re hiring data scientists and software engineers! https://drivecapital.com/join for more, email in profile.

There is a plethora of valuable companies that did not do things in scalable way and only later sorted that out. Even a popular essay around here called "Do things that don't scale"

If you an engineer at a VC, their jobs would be due dilligence to check how much of a startup is smoke and mirrors. Much of it is, so you want to know if it's 50% or 90%

Checking that their product is being built with Kafka or whatever is worthless - you cam throw money at that problem later and fix it.

I lead engineering at a VC firm, and while we do sometimes help in diligence, it’s a tiny portion of our time, <1%.

Your second paragraph is spot on, and I hinted at a similar idea in a sibling to your comment. Especially at series A and later, customers are an existence proof for the product not being vaporware.

So when we are involved in diligence, it’s usually near the end, and we’re getting to know the engineering leaders to see if we can help them speedrun a few iterations by sharing best practices or introducing them to other leaders in the portfolio who have been there and done that recently.

What if they're series F and are burning €1m per month on infrastructure because it's badly designed, and haven't yet turned a profit? Maybe VCs really do have billions to slosh around... Didn't a start-up go under recently for that very reason?

We typically invest at earlier stages, so I can't say firsthand what diligence looks like at series F. If you mean Fast, Gergely Orosz had a good writeup at https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-fast. Sounds like that was more attributable to hiring ahead of revenue than infrastructure spend.

That's the kind of thing you use consultants for.

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