Hello! First off, I wanted to say thank you for interviewing me and sharing the Chairman Mom vision. I've been thinking about our conversation this morning, and a couple things stuck with me.

One, you really need a dedicated technical leader, and I'm sad that it's not me, because I think I could do a great job. In my experience, a project like this will grow so rapidly that the initial design decisions (like the language it's written in) are not as important as the engineering principles that the decisions are based on, and those are language-agnostic.

Additionally, the codebase right now is small enough that someone unfamiliar with the language wouldn't have an issue picking it up and adding features. Any reasonable engineer could take a look at it and build a feature in an afternoon without necessarily knowing a lot about react - the documentation is good and apparently the codebase is good too - everything in engineering is about remixing the same basic patterns to do something special.

Two, and I suspect this is the actual reason you decided not to go with me, is that I don't have a lot of management experience, and you want someone that does. I get wanting that "proven track record", but that kind of person is not the same person that can design and build an amazing website in a couple months. Those are two completely separate jobs and you can't excel at both of them at the same time - you can do two crappy jobs simultaneously, but I've never seen anyone do both well.

In my experience, you don't need the great manager until you actually have people to manage, and that's how every engineering team I've been on is structured - there's an architect and there's a CTO, and they're engineers #1 and #2.


That turned out way longer than I expected, sorry. I'm not upset or anything, I'm honestly not sure I still want the job, I just wanted to offer some unsolicited advice and I hope you find the person that you're looking for.

Thanks again,
Rebecca