#startup-culture

#startup-culture

In part two of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company 's oral history of YouTube, we look at how the company's rapid ascent after its 2005 founding led to multiple challenges, from bandwidth costs to unhappy copyright holders. This prompted the startup to consider selling itself, and on October 9, 2006, Google announced that it would be buying it, for $1.65 billion. That deal came with the promise that the web giant would help YouTube scale up even further without micromanaging it. Eventually, the balance they struck between integration and independence paid off. But when YouTube was still a tiny, plucky startup, nobody was looking that far ahead.

Released on streaming today, the new Hulu biopic directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg ("Unpregnant") - which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival - begins Wolfe Herd's story as she's fresh out of college and attending a tech networking party in Los Angeles. It ends with her becoming the head of Bumble and the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire. James plays the lead with a perfect mix of naivety and girlboss cunning, showing Wolfe Herd's attempts to navigate through the boys' club of startup culture, becoming a pariah along the way and ultimately triumphing.

At Amazon, I was on the Amazon Q Developer team, building their AI coding assistant. You'd think being at the center of Amazon's AI developer tools would be exciting, but it was actually deeply frustrating. It was apparent to anyone outside the Amazon bubble that we were losing the AI game badly. The leadership was constantly playing catch-up because there was very little true product vision. They kept saying they wanted to move like a startup, but then had the risk tolerance of IBM.

I love work. I love working late nights, hacking on things. This week I didn't go to sleep before midnight once. And yet... I also love my wife and kids. I love long walks, contemplating life over good coffee, and deep, meaningful conversations. None of this would be possible if my life was defined by 12 hour days, six days a week. More importantly, a successful company is not a sprint, it's a marathon.

My goal wasn't to create a 30-page matrix filled with boxes and jargon. I wanted to create something actionable, flexible, and grounded in reality.

I’ve been a software engineer for 25-ish years. My current company is called Warp, which is an AI-powered developer tool that reimagines the command line terminal.

Calvin French-Owen described OpenAI's rapid growth, stating that the company expanded from 1,000 to 3,000 employees in just one year, prompting significant chaos in communication and structure.

"It's that 'if I take care of you, you'll take care of us' kind of mentality," Abdul said.

Dr. David H. Rosmarin will lead a session at TechCrunch All Stage 2025 on transforming anxiety from a liability into a strategic advantage for startup founders.

"I've always been a student of the game. We're constantly shuffling and on our feet."

Tech conferences have become modern revival meetings. Founders take the stage to share their "moment of revelation," conveniently forgetting the three years of mundane iteration that preceded it.

As a backend engineer, you will develop the platform layer of our AI-powered product and work with a small, talented team.

I was managing a 500-person team, working on amazing tooling for developers... but I was working in a work environment that did not make me happy.