Awesome People - Ep 100
Milestone Ep! Survey, early coinbase eng, forethought, databases
Hi founders and fellow VC Friends!
We made it to episode 100! Holy smokes! I’ll send a longer email in a few weeks about what’s next for this newsletter… I think it’s time to switch things up a bit 👀
In the meantime, can you please answer the question, “How disappointed would you be if this newsletter disappeared?” It takes 2 seconds and all you have to do is click a smiley or not-smiley face here. Thank you in advance 🥰
Now, back to regularly scheduled programming 👇
Each week we deliver one awesome person to your inbox. These are the people you need to know—the marketers, sales gurus, engineers, ops wizzes— who give your startup superpowers 🚀. The best part is, everyone is hireable!
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Meet Ales Katona, your part-time engineer 🛠
When I saw Ales apply to Awesome People, I was stoked! He was an early believer in blockchain technology and started working on Ethereum pre-launch. He built EtherWallet, one of the first graphical crypto wallets. Before you know it, he started working at Coinbase in February 2016. At Coinbase, he worked on everything from scaling the exchange database during the 2017 boom to building the blockchain data validation system. One little-known fact about Ales is that he is a beekeeping hobbyist 🐝
You can hire him part-time to solve hard technical problems in web3. He has a soft spot for Rust, Postgres, analytics, and bridging things to web3.
Want an intro to Ales? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
Ales was gracious enough to share 3 pro tips ✨
Don’t get sucked in by tech trends 📉
In the startup world, people love to follow hot trends. Unsurprisingly, this is also true in software engineering. It’s important to not get sucked in by trends and think through decisions. I guess I’m just saying, use your brain!
Before Coinbase, I worked at a small mobile startup. It had heavy analytics needs and employed NoSQL. NoSQL was the new hot database language at the time. NoSQL is useful in many situations, but it did not meet our analytics needs and caused problems as we scaled. It forced us into an expensive production migration that took months.
To meet these needs, I designed a PostgreSQL-based replacement that enabled the company to accept 1TB+ of data per month. PostgreSQL was the right solution because it’s a relational database and a good fit for analytics queries. The solution also allowed us to run optimized queries with sub-second response times for complex information queries.
Think ahead with your systems 💭
Often startups want to build, build, build. In the early days, this is important to validate PMF. But, as a result, people often rush past key systems decisions. As you try to scale, this often bites you in the ass. Tech debt accumulates, and problems rear their heads during critical periods of growth. Before you start scaling, it’s vital to pause and think through your architectural design.
When I started at Coinbase, we used PostgreSQL for the exchange system’s main database. PostgreSQL was adequate at first. It provided transactional safety for users' data. But as we scaled from 50k to 1 million users, it became evident that PostgreSQL was incapable of handling our volume. I spearheaded the solution for Coinbase to keep the database running through the 2017 Ethereum adoption period. I built a table partitioning scheme to parallelize access to segments of data in the database by utilizing multiple hard drives.
My solution split the database table to increase storage and speeds (also shown in the diagram below). This solution saved us critical downtime and negative public relations. However, if Coinbase had greater architectural foresight, this problem could have been avoided altogether.
Scale thoughtfully to transfer knowledge & reduce churn 🤓
Take growth slowly. Don’t overhire. Make sure that the team has enough time to transfer knowledge and accommodate new processes. Adding 5+ new members to a 5-person team is never a good idea. It stretches senior engineers too thin. They don't have time to keep the existing infrastructure running and onboard new hires. In my experience, the ratio should probably be kept somewhere around 2:1, in favor of the existing team.
When growth outpaces team knowledge, engineers churn. Projects get canceled, people get reassigned, and all the knowledge remains in the hands of the original senior engineers. The first thing to do when you begin scaling is to introduce a well-defined onboarding process. Young startups rarely have documentation, so start there.
Want an intro to Ales? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
As always, please let me know if you have any questions and if you want an intro to Ales!
Stay awesome,
Julia Lipton + Will Johnson (our amazing fellow who edited this newsletter)
Founder of Awesome People Ventures & Talent
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Awesome People Continued 🤩
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