Today’s my last day at Carta, where I got the chance to serve as their CTO for the past two years. I’ve learned so much working there, and I wanted to end my chapter there by collecting my thoughts on what I learned. (I am heading somewhere, and will share news in a week or two after firming up the communication plan with my new team there.) The most important things I learned at Carta were:| lethain.com
In 2020, you could credibly argue that ZIRP explains the world, but that’s an impossible argument to make in 2024 when zero-interest rate policy is only a fond memory. Instead, we’re seeing a number of companies designed for rapid expansion learning to adapt to a world that expects immediate free cash flow rather than accepting the sweet promise of discounted future cash flow. This chapter wants to tackle that problem head-on, taking the role of an engineering organization attempting to n...| lethain.com
Early on in your company’s lifetime, you’ll form the seed of your infrastructure organization: a small team of four to eight engineers. Maybe you’ll call it the infrastructure team. It’s very easy to route infrastructure requests, because they all go to that one team. Later on, things are easy as well. You have seventy engineers spread across eight to ten mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive teams with names like Storage, Traffic, and Compute. You’ll pull up the organizati...| Infrastructure Engineering
TODO: Find better vocabulary to distinguish between “leadership team” in your org (that you manage) and “leadership team” that you’re a member of or report to I once walked into an annual headcount planning session to learn that the other engineering managers in the room had already decided together how they would reallocate the senior members from the infrastructure organization that I supported to the teams that they ran. This was, they assured me, optimal for their roadmaps.| Infrastructure Engineering