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Most founders spend 3 months hiring one engineer. Then they realize: Wrong fit. Wrong skills. Wrong mindset. Now they're stuck. Firing costs money. Severance. Benefits. Lost time. Here's what nobody tells you: Hiring in the US is expensive even when you get it wrong. Especially if you’re hiring in house in SFC or NYC, the cost goes 2X Speed matters more than you think.

A founder told me last week: "We need to rebuild our entire codebase." I asked why. "The foundation is weak." Here's the problem: Most startups don't have a foundation at all. They hire engineers who never built one. So they stack features on top of nothing. 6 months later everything breaks. Now they're rebuilding instead of growing. Foundation first. Features second.

Justin from Triangle told me: "I often joke about cloning you, Chan." Then he worked with Spartan. "It seems you have." Our hiring standards are high. The engineers consistently deliver outstanding work. Quickly. Here's the thing: Great people want to work with great people. If you hire the best engineer and tell them to work at a mediocre company, they quit. Our portfolio keeps our engineers. Google, Meta, Harvard, Stanford, MIT founders. That's how you retain talent.

I'm the CEO but I still can't let go of engineering. People tell me I should've moved into leadership years ago. They're probably right. But staying technical this long gave me something nobody else has. I've worked at 20+ startups. Built systems that went through 3 IPOs. Saw the same problems repeat hundreds of times. Now when a founder calls me? One conversation and I know exactly what they need. Not because I read about it. Because I've already built it 15 times. Sometimes staying in your zone too long becomes your unfair advantage.

Most startups burn through cash simply because they hire the wrong people. They find a big-tech engineers. Pay them +$200k. Realize they only know one thing. One tech stack. One part of the system. When you work with an agency at our caliber? We know every tech stack. Frontend, backend, infrastructure, AI. You get 17 years of startup experience. Battle-tested systems from 3 IPOs. All for half the cost of one senior engineer. That's the unfair advantage.

Your startup has 3 Ps: People. Product. Profit. Get them in the wrong order and you're dead. Most founders start with product. Build for 6 months. Then realize they need people to scale it. By then they're out of money. The right order: People first. Strong foundation second. Product builds itself after that. Profit follows.

Silicon Valley playbook: Raise VC money fast. Scale aggressively. Burn cash to grow. I bootstrapped. Zero funding. Profitable from month one. No investors to answer to. No pressure to 10x headcount. Built a $10M ARR company by just building something that actually works.

After my 3rd IPO, I got lazy. Started a "side project" just to avoid real work. 3 years later: 70 clients, $130M raised across our portfolio, 0 marketing spend. Here's how being lazy accidentally built a better business than grinding ever did:

I took a break after Bird went IPO. Thought I'd do some side projects. Relax a bit. Then my friends kept asking: "Can you build this for me?" "Can you help with that?" I didn't have 8 hands to work for 10 different people. So I flew to Vietnam. Met some engineers. Thought: they can do the work, I'll take a cut. That's how Spartan started. No grand vision. No master plan. Just a lazy engineer trying to help his friends. 3 years later we've worked with 70+ startups. Sometimes the best businesses start by accident.

The hardest part of startups? It's not the product. It's not the market. It's this: You have very little money. Very little time. And you need to scale things that don't scale. Big companies have gorgeous processes. You can't afford them. Big companies have 50 engineers. You have 3. Startups are hard because every decision is a tradeoff. Choose speed over perfection. Every time.

When your cold brew comes with a side of bot traffic, lol!

I went through 3 IPOs as an engineer. Bird. And two others before that. Each time I built the foundation from scratch. Backend. Infrastructure. Systems that scaled to millions of users. Now those same systems live at Spartan. Every startup we work with gets access to them. Infrastructure that would cost millions to build? They inherit it day one. That's what 17 years of staying technical gets you. Systems that actually work under pressure.

AI Agent automation deserves a better platform. Not another drag-and-drop toy. n8n works for demos. …but the future needs scale, reliability, and developer-first design.

Jane from Reviva told me: "I was concerned about remote engineers not having enough resources." Then our team adapted to their codebase in days. Exceeded her expectations. Now she calls our engineers part of her team. Asa from Heru said: "I don't know what Spartan is feeding their engineers, but they're ridiculously good and stupid fast." You want to know the secret? We hire people who think like founders. Not task completers.

Vibe coding tip: Treat every claim as suspect. If it says “feature done” or “tests passed,” assume 50/50. Always ask “Are you sure?”. Make it prove it: diff, commands, test logs, 30-sec manual check. Do this after every change, not at the end!

People ask why I'm switching to products. Here's the truth: In consulting, you're bottlenecked by hiring. We interview 150 people a month. 2% pass. Even then, some still underperform after joining. You need months to know if someone's actually good. This cycle never ends. Products scale differently. Build once, sell forever. That's the move.

The 3 P's of business: People, Product, Profit. In consulting, all 3 are the same thing. Your product? People. Your profit? More people. Sounds simple until you realize: Top 1% talent is rare. Bad hires still happen. Now I build products as well.

My startup got 1,200 signups in 3 days. I thought I'd made it. Then I asked people to pay $5 for early access. Almost everyone ghosted. Turns out 1,200 curious people isn't the same as 10 people with a real problem. Signups are important but they don't prove demand.. Only money proved demand.

I'm a software engineer. I know nothing about marketing or product. But I'm learning fast. After working at 20 startups and helping 70 clients, I realized something. Marketing and product aren't art. They're science. You collect data, find patterns, and execute. Same process, different domain.

Most people overthink their first version. They polish. They perfect. They plan. Meanwhile? They never launch. Here's the truth: Your first version will need work anyway. Launch it. Get feedback. Make it better. Perfection kills more startups than bad ideas.

Consulting businesses have a dirty secret. Hire too fast? Quality drops. Hire too slow? You can't grow. We interview 150 people monthly. Only 2% make it. Even then, some underperform after joining. You need months to really know if they're good. This is why most consulting businesses never scale like products do.

The number one barrier to starting? You. You're overthinking. You're overcomplicating. You're over-everything. Just pick something and go. The clarity comes from doing. Not from planning.

Most people think speed means working faster. Nope. Speed comes from knowing what to skip. I've built systems at companies like Uber and Bird. I know which steps matter. And which ones are a complete waste of time. Stop copying what everyone does. Start learning what actually works.

I grew my consulting business 200%.. Then 100%. Then 80%. Sounds cool, right? But I noticed something: No matter how many clients we got, we hit a ceiling. Why? Because to make more money, I needed more people. And finding great people doesn't scale. So after 3 years, I made a decision. Build products instead. Leverage what we're already good at.

I built a software consulting business to $10M ARR in 3 years. Then growth started to slow down. The problem? You can't scale talent like you scale code. So I made a bet that changed everything:

I built a $10M ARR company by accident. Zero marketing. Zero ads. Zero hustle. I did the opposite of everything Silicon Valley taught me in 17 years. VCs started asking: "How is this even possible?" Here's what happened:

Your idea doesn't matter until strangers act on it. A client spent 6 months building before launch. Crickets. Another client spent $2k on a landing page test. 800 signups. Funding secured. The brutal truth: Strangers clicking "Join Waitlist." is the validation. Not friends hyping you up. Not co-founders debating features. Build the test, not the product.

I thought validation meant getting people excited. It doesn't. We tried helping people learn to code with better resources. Hundreds signed up. Almost nobody finished. Then we switched to a 4-week challenge. Required a refundable deposit. Required weekly deliverables. Fewer signups. Way more completions. The deposit filtered for urgency. Validation isn't about excitement. It's about who shows up when it costs them something.

After 3 years of consulting, I launched 3 products: An AI co-founder for idea validation. A simple payment platform for indie hackers. An LLM platform for mobile engineers. Why? Because consulting doesn't scale like products do. I'm leveraging my ability to build great software. But now I can serve thousands instead of dozens.

I worked at Bird before it went public. Built systems that handled millions of users. Those systems? Every startup I work with gets them now. Infrastructure that costs millions? They get it day one. But here's the problem: I can only work with so many clients. That's why I'm building products. It's the same systems.. But more scale.

Most people ask: "Should I start?" Wrong question. Better question: "Can I handle being the underdog?" Because that's what you'll be. For a long time. If you need certainty, this isn't for you. If you thrive on the challenge? You already know the answer.