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Ironically, AngelList posted a slideshow the other day about how they don't use tests because they increase development time and make it hard to be agile. They instead iterate quickly, pushing out new versions and fixing rapidly as things come up.

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If you can test everything manually with confidence that every incremental change breaks nothing you've ever thought about prior to the present, I suggest you work on more complicated things. Otherwise, you're mistaken.

The irony is that AngelList allegedly generates funding for real engineering teams.

Well, AirBnB is a good example of a startup where the real value - and challenge - was in its novel business model, NOT in the engineering challenges of creating their webpage - which is very nice, but they might have succeeded with a Craigslist-like page for all I know if they solved the problem of creating a marketplace.

So I agree with the general idea behind what AngelList is saying. If the startup value proposition is based on solving a "hard " engineering problem, OTOH, it's not such a good idea... but it seems that most problems startups tackle are NOT engineering problems.

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