Balance is more important than frugality. Know where to spend and where to cut costs. I've been in more than a few small companies that took penny-pinching to extremes.

You can't architect a complex application stack with a couple of interns and a newbie developer with no oversight. We'd pay below-market salaries for senior engineers and architects, because "a programmer is a programmer", and we'd lose them.

We'd refuse to pay $150 to have our DevOps guy get his AWS certification because "he may get a better job and leave"... which he eventually did anyway.

Yet the same company was burning $4,000 a month on AWS services that were severely under-utilized, because the DevOps guy left and no one knew how to optimize our AWS usage.

None of these products eventually succeeded. One of the two companies above shut down years ago after a multi-year schedule slip that resulted in the private equity funding drying up. The last time I looked, the other company has been struggling with cash flow problems for the better part of a decade, barely making ends meet, slashing salaries and jobs several times, pushing the better devs to greener pastures.

A few other companies I worked for had sound leadership and a clear vision. Not being a unicorn or a FAANG means we paid above market average salaries and empowered our engineers to make decisions (and mistakes!) to retain great talent and build cool stuff, which we shipped and sold. We invested in growing our people while keeping other overheads (such as unused conference rooms, wasteful pantry supplies, AWS expenses, etc.) low.