> The interview is your chance to show you know the topics and when to apply them, not the time to argue that the startup shouldn’t care about such matters.

A good way to answer these, I think, is some version of ”We probably won’t run into these issues at the scale we’re talking about, but when we run into A, B, C problems, we can try X, Y, Z solutions.”

This shows that you’re making a conscious tradeoff and know when the more complex solutions apply. Extra points if you can explain specifically how you’ll put measures in place to know when A, B, C happened and how you would engineer the system such that adding X, Y, Z is easy.

Also it looks amazing if you’re aware that vertical scaling can buy you a lot of time for comparably little money these days. Servers get up to 128 CPUs with 64TB of RAM on one machine :)

Right, and you might be small in $year but presumably you expect to grow and they don’t want to replace the team because they can’t think how to operate in any other circumstances.