Comment by pigcat
20 hours ago
My friend is the first dev hire at a startup where they prematurely overengineered for scalability. The technical founders had recently exited a previous startup and their rationale was that it makes a future acquisition easier, since a potential acquirer will weigh scalability in their evaluation of the code (and maybe even conflate it with quality). In fact it was a regret from their first startup that they hadn't baked in scalability earlier. I remain skeptical of the decision, but curious if there's any truth to the fact that acquirers weigh scalability in their scorecard?
Sure, if the acquirer thinks the product is going to sell a lot.
A relatively common plan (it doesn't always work) for large enterprise software companies is to buy a product and then use their very large sales force to sell it into all their existing customers. If thats the plan, you have to make sure the product will work with all the increased usage.
I'd still suggest it's far better to optimize for building the right product - the "is this going to scale" problem is one of the nicest problems you can face.