This morning I talked at the 2012 Velocity Conference about some of the lessons we learned building the infrastructure for Typekit.
The talk was 90 minutes long and covered a lot of ground, some specific and some theoretical, so is hard to summarize. But there were two main points I wanted to make.
The first is that the important lesson to get from any startup scaling story is not the specific mistakes they made, but the process used to solve problems. Optimizing for change is more important than getting everything right first time.
The second is that it's easy to watch talks at a conference like Velocity and assume you have to build huge amounts of supporting infrastructure before you can launch. The reality is that, with a team of 2 or 3 you just don't have time, and that the actual minimum viable infrastructure is a lot simpler than many assume.
The full set of slides is online as a very long HTML page or a 8MB PDF file.
■