Niko Papademetriou

Just has to.

And if you have a bunch of people that are ones, it's hard to add those up and have them equal more than the sum.

You need something that equals more than the sum of the parts.

Otherwise, you're just building some linear company.

And that's not really the key to long-term value and successful growth for an organization.

I think it's easy to look at scalability in the very tangible ways.

Okay, I have X number of transactions or volume through my cloud services today, and I'd like to make sure that I can, that my current architecture and tech stack can achieve Y. Okay, you run testing against it, you turn up the knob by 50% or 300%, and you see how the system works.

We look at scalability far beyond the sort of constraint of what's in front of you today.

We look at the technologies that we're using, the architecture that we have.

We try to see around the corner as best we can.

We're not geniuses, we're not all seeing, we're not all knowing, but we really try to look around the corner.

and get ahead of legacy debt and technical debt.

And a lot of those things aren't just in your code base.

They can be in the technologies that you've chosen to build your company on, and they can be on the cloud services and the actual distribution of how your system works.

And so you have to think about what's coming next and you have to think at scale of 10 and 50X where you are because sometimes you can hit it big, you can be successful and suddenly you find yourself there.

And if you weren't thinking about those things before you get there, you're in trouble.

Another critical piece of scalability is security.

And a lot of people don't even think that stability and security are in the same sentence or same paragraph.

But my goodness, they are.

And if you're not thinking about security through the lens of scalability and you're a tech company, you're in big trouble.