Feb 16, 2022 · 25m · y-combinator
Things That Don't Scale, The Software Edition – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel · Y Combinator
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Y Combinator partners Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell explore how iconic technology companies used dirty software hacks, hardware workarounds, and unscalable practices to survive early growth. They argue that startup founders should prioritize shipping functional products and fixing real problems over premature technical perfection.
Statements from this episode (13)
Seibel: First version of Gmail was built inside Google Groups UI
“The first version of Gmail, he basically figured out how to put his email into this Google Groups UI.”
Caldwell: Gmail almost wasn't released due to hardware concerns at Google
“It was hard for him to get Google to release it because they were afraid it was going to take up too much hardware, and so there was all these issues where there's a good, there was a decent chance I think it never would have been released.”
Caldwell: Gmail invite system was forced by server limits, not growth hacking
“They physically did not have enough servers. So they had to build an invite system. There was not an option to not, but basically there was no option other than building an invite system. It was not like genius PM growth hacking.”
Caldwell: Early Facebook scaled by duplicating separate code and databases per school
“The way they scaled Facebook was to have a completely separate PHP instance running for every school that they copy and pasted the code to. They would have a separate MySQL server for every school, and they would have like a memcache instance for every school.”
Caldwell: Facebook took years to build a unified global users table
“It actually took them years to build a global users table, as I recall and avoid this hack.”
Seibel: Justin.tv used a manual button to turn overloaded pages static
“So we actually had a button that could make any page on Justin TV a static page. All those features would stop working. Your name wouldn't appear, the view count wouldn't update, like, literally a static page that loaded our video player, and You couldn't touc…”
Caldwell: Friendster ran expensive MySQL calculations for 2-degree connections on login
“Every time you would log in, it would calculate how many people were two degrees of separation from you. And it would fire off on MySQL thread where you would log in, it would look at your friends and it would calculate your friends and friends and show you a …”
Seibel: Justin.tv secretly delayed celebrity streams to scale video servers
“So what happened now in this setup is that some celebrity would start streaming, they would think they were live, no one was seeing their stream, while we were propagating their stream to all the video servers that are needed, and then suddenly the stream woul…”
Caldwell: imeem streamed audio by transcoding music into Flash video files
“Rather than rolling our own tools, that was music specific, we just took all of the open source video stuff and hacked the other video code that we had. So that every music file played on iMeme was actually a video file. It was a .FLV back in the day. And it w…”
Seibel: Twitch blocked video to force an ISP into free peering
“What we did is that after 10 minutes of people watching free, free live video, we just put up a big thing that blocked the video that said, your ISP is not doing a free peering relationship with us, so we can no longer serve you video. If you'd like to call to…”
Seibel: Twitch translated its entire product for free via crowdsourcing
“We basically, Got translation for a whole product for free.”
Caldwell: Google ran on a stale search index for months around 2001
“There was some point where for maybe three months, maybe four months, I don't remember the exact details. There was no new index of Google. They had stale results. So anyone, any user of Google, they didn't know that, you know, the user didn't know this, but a…”