Mitesh Shah

Get to know me

As a kid, I played with Legos a lot. At first, I built the picture. Then, I built what I could picture. Eventually I wanted to build things that I didn't have the pieces for. And that's where it began.

Solve the problem by building your own pieces.

I've been a builder ever since. I couldn't afford the Lego motors, so I soldered cheap model motors into the housings. I wanted a PlayStation steering wheel, so I broke apart a controller and built one out of styrofoam and cardboard with the original circuitry intact. I fixed a VCR. Wrote songs in Logo beep. Made games. Made apps. Now I bring bigger ideas to life through startups. And I feel like I'm just getting started.

Snap together the right pieces, and we can build anything we want — the right teams, the right software, the right products, and even the right robots.

How I work

Small teams. Simple stacks. Surface area you can hold in your head.

The work I'm proudest of has come from groups tight enough that one person can hold the whole product in their head, and stacks simple enough that the whole architecture fits there too. People mistake this for a constraint. It's the opposite. Simplicity is what makes ambitious work possible.

Every tool, every framework, every additional person has to earn its place. Not by what it'd look like at Netflix scale. Not by what's in fashion this quarter. The bar is: does this help us make the thing?

The hardest one to defend in big organizations is the one I'm most right about: trust over process. Process is what you reach for when you don't trust anyone in the room. With the right people, you don't need much of it. With the wrong people, no amount of it will save you. And it's even easier to trust when the team is shipping actual product instead of closing tickets.

Why it works

Big teams have a quiet failure mode. Coordination scales geometrically. Meetings and ceremony eat the runway. Each person looks busy and productive. The organization atrophies.

A small group with the right stack will outpace a committee of forty. Almost always.

In the AI era, this is even more true. The bottleneck isn't building speed. It's decision quality. And decision quality lives in small groups thinking clearly together.

That's the whole game.

The operating system

Generally true. Not universal. Each product and startup makes its own intentional choices.

  1. 00

    AI-first from here on out.

    Think with AI. Do with AI. Build with AI.

  2. 01

    Sketch it out.

    Build a prototype with AI in v0 or Replit instead of a doc or slide deck. It answers questions up front. Kills bad ideas earlier. Strengthens great ones until your teammates are thrilled to build them.

  3. 02

    TypeScript / JavaScript everywhere.

    Frontend, backend, even native. Seamless prototyping. Code reuse across boundaries.

  4. 03

    Intentional frugality.

    Not chasing token leaderboards. Not opening 10 agent windows at once. Not hiring 5 engineers at once.

  5. 04

    Assume rewrites are cheap when needed.

    Need a native Swift app? Cutting-edge Apple SDKs? Platform-grade transitions? First we answer why. By Series B, the native team is affordable.

  6. 05

    5 people × 10 hours ≠ 10 people × 5 hours.

    Same person-hours on paper. One ships. The other ships nothing.

  7. 06

    Less ceremony.

    Minimize recurring meetings. Match “talk about work” with at least as much “do the work.” Agile and Scrum? While you're at it, throw the whole thing out.

Some preferred tools and technologies

Next.js

Front-end and back-end in one mental model. Three boxes on the architecture diagram collapse into one.

React

The component model. Universal, predictable, and every tool — human or AI — already knows it.

Tailwind

Stop naming things. Style where you write the markup.

Supabase

Postgres, auth, storage, realtime. One service, four problems solved. Still just Postgres underneath.

Expo

React Native without the native pain. iOS and Android from one codebase, one toolchain.

TanStack Start

Type-safe full-stack with sharper routing. The right call when Next isn't.

Vercel

git push is the deploy. The infrastructure layer that disappears.

Linear

The project tool that respects your time. Built for shipping, not ticket archaeology.

Claude

The thoughtful AI. Pair-programmer for code and prose, with judgment to spare.

OpenAI

The other half of the modern AI toolbox. Reach for them where their strengths line up.

Cursor

An AI-first IDE. The whole thing was designed around it, not retrofitted to fit it in.

Want to chat more?