From Staff Platform Engineer to a 16z Founder: What I Wish I'd Known

Gonzalo Maldonado presented "From Staff Platform Engineer to a 16z Founder: What I Wish I’d Known", sharing insights from his journey as a platform engineer to a startup founder.

Key Lessons:

• Platform Thinking Evolution: Transform internal tools into scalable platform businesses by adapting engineering roles into customer personas and SLAs into investor-grade metrics.
• Technical Product Strategy: Develop a concise Product Requirements Document (PRD) that outlines personas, platform boundaries, and adoption paths.
• Operational Excellence: Implement trust layers like SLOs and error budgets to enhance velocity and create self-service architectures to reduce dependency and eliminate ticket queues.
• Proving Platform Value: Adopt a 30-60-90 rollout strategy, focusing on metrics such as lead time and platform NPS to demonstrate growth and value.

Takeaways and Tools:

• Practical templates, including Platform PRD frameworks, SLA/SLO starter packs, and phased adoption playbooks.
• Emphasized the importance of building a strong network for knowledge sharing and finding answers quickly.
• Entrepreneurs should avoid raising money without clear purpose and strive for sustainable growth paths.
• Stress on legal preparedness and early engagement of lawyers to avert complex legal issues later.

The session emphasized the necessity of embedding operational excellence into scaling plans and validated the approach with real-life examples and strategic insights from his own startup experiences.

This is the end of the AI-generated content.

The Technical Leadership Challenge: Every successful engineering team faces the same inflection point: transforming beloved internal tools into a legitimate platform business. As a staff platform engineer, I built systems my team couldn't live without; but turning the products my team loved into something everyone loves is an art not a science. Let me share the journey to a16z Speedrun so you can navigate your own path.

What You'll Learn: This session shares the real lessons from my journey from staff engineer to a16z-backed founder, focusing on what actually worked (and what spectacularly didn't):

• Platform thinking evolution: Transform toolchains into roadmaps, engineering roles into customer personas, and SLAs into investor-grade metrics that tell a compelling growth story
• Technical product strategy: Write a one-page Platform PRD that defines personas, boundaries, and "paved roads" for sustainable adoption
• Operational excellence at scale: Install trust layers (SLOs, error budgets) that enable velocity rather than gate it, plus self-service architecture that eliminates ticket queues forever
• Proving platform value: Use a mostly proven 30-60-90 rollout framework with four critical metrics—lead time, change-fail rate, time-to-first-value, and platform NPS

Actionable Takeaways: You'll leave with battle-tested templates: Platform PRD framework, persona/JTBD worksheets, SLA/SLO starter pack, paved-road deprecation policies, self-service implementation checklist, phased adoption playbook, and a board-ready metrics dashboard that translates engineering impact into business value.