Most AI startups are lighting money on fire. They scale before they’re ready, hire before they need to, and mistake velocity for direction. The irony? Engineers build systems for everything except their own growth.
I recently spoke with Design News about why DevOps and AI startups are bleeding cash on premature scaling—and how to prevent it. Read the full piece here.
Here’s what nobody talks about: the best time to build your growth infrastructure is before you need it. Not when you’re drowning in customer requests. Not when your team is burning out. Before. I learned this the hard way, watching startups with brilliant tech implode because they optimized for growth instead of systems.
The conversation covered something I call “surgical scaling”—identifying the exact moment when investing in growth actually makes sense. Most founders miss this window entirely. They either scale too early and waste resources, or too late and lose market position. The difference comes down to understanding which metrics actually matter versus which ones just look good in board meetings.
We also discussed how AI automation changes the equation completely. When I built the frameworks at Pabs Marketing, the goal wasn’t just efficiency—it was creating systems that could scale without proportional cost increases. That’s the game-changer most engineers overlook. You don’t need more people. You need better processes.
The meditation practice came up too. When you’re deciding whether to 10x your team or 10x your systems, you need clarity, not anxiety. Some of my best scaling decisions came from stepping back, not pushing harder. That discipline—the ability to say “not yet”—is what separates sustainable growth from cash-burning chaos.
There’s a specific framework I shared for knowing when you’re actually ready to scale. It’s not about hitting arbitrary revenue targets or customer counts. It’s about having the infrastructure to handle 10x growth before you pursue it.
If you’ve ever wondered why some startups scale effortlessly while others collapse under their own growth, the complete breakdown walks through the exact signals that separate smart scaling from blind scaling.
Read the full article on Design News →
The companies that win aren’t the ones that scale fastest—they’re the ones that scale smartest.