Someone should publish a series on such startups. Intuitively it seems there might be some. But I haven’t seen any articles naming names, describing details.

1) One SF wifi mgmt. software startup had a 50,000 LOC product with 250,000 lines of test code.

They seemed content, but obviously a lot of resources went into tests.

2) Many late startups in SF spent a lot of time and effort on perfecting CI/CD software (multiple years), or struggling with k8s in the early days (1 year to finish one service.)

3) Often post-founder programmers these days have a lot of process to overcome before shipping. I know one startup that hired dozens of programmers, but the founder (alone) still writes most of the code.

We can debate whether struggling with k8s and CI/CD would fit in the category. These are tooling not product but all part of the use of engineering resources. See the “choose boring technology” posts/articles.