Things That Don't Scale, The Software Edition – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel

TL;DR

The video argues that nearly all successful software startups, including Gmail, Facebook, Twitch, iMeem, and Google, began by shipping deliberately non‑scalable hacks (e.g., copy‑pasted code per university, static pages for traffic spikes, audio-as-video files, stale search indexes) rather than building scalable infrastructure upfront.

Key insights

• Paul Buchheit’s “9010 solution” (90% benefit for 10% work) is the philosophy behind most non‑scalable hacks; Gmail itself started as a hack using Google Groups’ UI to read email.
• Facebook’s early scaling “hack” was to run a completely separate PHP instance and MySQL database per university, with URLs like `harvard.thefacebook.com`; a global users table took years to build.
• Twitch survived 20x traffic peaks (vs. typical 2–4x) by having a button to render any page as a static HTML page that cached the video player and chat (separate systems), and by pre‑propagating stream