Lemieux: Early startups die from indigestion of ideas, not starvation
Jean-Michel Lemieux · Jean-Michel Lemieux: Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | E1129 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 20, 2024 · at 10:17
Jean-Michel Lemieux, former CTO of Shopify and VP Engineering at Atlassian, discusses why early-stage startups must narrow their customer focus and resist feature bloat.
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“I think in your first couple of years, absolutely. And I think whoever said this, I'm not sure where this comes from, but you know, companies are going to die from indigestion before they die of starvation. Which means that we all have way too many ideas in our brain, and our instinct is to give everyone everything, and it's really hard to say no. So you're absolutely true, right? So it's give people a couple of things that are really, really good, and then buy you time to figure out what the next things are.”
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