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Comment by cmacaskill | Hacker News Reader

Doug Leone, the head of Sequoia, said during a Stanford keynote "if your first two engineers aren't A+, you're screwed, you will never recover."

Steve used to say that great engineers are 10x the average and there are a few who are 100x and crucial to hard projects. He did everything he could to find them.

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And there is an opposite anecdote. Twitter was horribly architected early on, wasn't scalable. and was always displaying the "fail whale". They got users, kept the VC's happy, made money and rearchitected the entire system.

You'd be surprised how many companies survived without great engineers but with great salesmen.

And that's partly why Twitter is a 34 billion dollar company while Facebook, their primary competitor, is a 619 billion dollar company.

And it still ranks #174 in market cap. In relationship to Facebook it may not be successful, but in relationship to all of the startups by people who had "great ideas" but could not execute on the business side, it's doing well.

If it wasn’t for a particular reality-show-star-turned-President using it as his primary means of communication, Twitter would be dying by now.

Facebook wasn't exactly a performance king either. Their PHP codebase became a liability, leading them to create the HipHop compiler, HipHopVM, Hack, and other tools specifically for dealing with PHP and MySQL. Internally their first chat client had performance problems as well, leading them to rewrite it. They also no only had performance problems (and battery drain issues!) with their mobile interfaces, but also in controlled experiments intentionally broke pages to test their users' resulting behavior.

So I don't think I would ascribe the valuation difference to beginning engineering chops.

Facebook didn't crash all the time when people tried to use it, which was a major competitive advantage over Friendster, at the time.

Friendster was too consumed with being led by a womanizing partier IIRC, which set the tone there... (this is anecdotal hear-say-info, so I could be wrong)... but as I recall it, they were too concerned with partying at the time to pay attention to what they were on the precipice of.

Facebook engineering started as hacks, but they aggressively recruited top talent as soon as it got funding to grow past Zuck.

According to Adam D'Angelo (first CTO of Facebook, obviously a biased source) Facebook was able to implement features much faster than MySpace, which was a major competitive advantage for them. "I remember talking to an engineer who worked at MySpace who told me about how they had this huge list of regular expressions to try to prevent cross site scripting attacks, and whenever there was a new one they would make a new regex to try to fix it, rather than sanitizing html the right way."[0]

[0]: https://www.quora.com/Does-a-good-engineering-culture-matter...

I highly doubt that. It's way more likely that Facebook's business model is better.

It’s easier to change your business model when you’re not drowning in technical debt.

I wouldn't say that Twitter survived; I would say that whether or not Twitter survives is right censored.

I don't understand what "right censored" means.

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