ABOUT DAVID CRAWSHAW

David Crawshaw (@davidcrawshaw) is co-founder and CTO of Tailscale. Previously he was a staff engineer at Google, where he specialized in petabyte-scale logs processing. He implemented TCP/IP networking for Fuchsia, as well as ported the Go language platform to iOS and Android.

"If you're a pre-seed startup in the Bay Area and you are trying to ship something to your first few customers and you ship with 40-something languages, then you've made a mistake, but it's not necessarily true that a large company has made that mistake. For larger companies with more total requirements, I think the big question is can you construct environments where you can experiment without all of these requirements?”

<cite>- David Crawshaw    </cite>

Join us at ELC Annual 2023!

ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies.

Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco

For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023

SHOW NOTES:

• David’s background at Google & the transition to founding Tailscale (1:51)
• Early-day challenges at Tailscale w/ prototyping (4:03)
• How Tailscale discovered & employed rapid prototyping during its early days (6:41)
• Paradigm shifts around the product-building process & feedback loop (8:37)
• Recommendations for those new to rapid prototyping (11:20)
• Shifting your org’s culture toward accelerated iteration cycles w/ arbitrary limits (13:36)
• Frameworks for getting to a faster prototype (16:52)
• How to work w/ design & product throughout rapid prototyping process (19:26)
• Navigating the tension between doing things quickly vs. working well (21:51)
• Where large companies try to rapid prototype & things go wrong (26:29)
• Trains vs. EVs in the Bay area – a metaphor for rapid iteration (28:46)
• Bringing that metaphor to software development (31:37)
• David’s perspective on widespread adoption of OpenAI (34:31)
• Rapid fire questions (39:19)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - In this exhilarating novel from Gabrielle Zevin, two friends--often in love, but never lovers--come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/