About Startup Engineering
Startup Engineering Newsletter shares AI-First Insights for Startup Builders. It is about building products in the startup context – where speed, constraints, and impact matter most. This newsletter tackles the real engineering challenges startups face, with an AI-first approach: integrating AI into your products and leveraging AI to accelerate your internal development. Get practical insights from the trenches of startup product engineering.
What to expect from this Newsletter
Startup Engineering Fundamentals: Navigating the full product lifecycle in resource-constrained startup environments – from discovery to deployment
AI Engineering Realities: Building production AI applications with foundation models like OpenAI and Claude – accuracy tuning, cost optimization, and scaling challenges
AI-Powered Development: Multiplying your team’s velocity with AI tools like Cursor AI and GitHub Copilot to ship enterprise-grade features with lean teams
Technical Leadership: Making architecture decisions, mentoring engineers, and aligning cross-functional teams based on 8+ years leading startup engineering
What NOT to expect from this Newsletter
This newsletter does not cover topics like Startup Funding, Non-Engineering aspect of Startup, topics best handled by experts in those fields, such as core ML Engineering, AI model pre-training, or developing models from scratch.
Who can benefit from this Newsletter
Startup Founders: Building your first AI product or transitioning your startup to AI-first? Get insights from someone who’s founded a SaaS startup and scaled it from 0 to 6 Crores INR while navigating technology waves
Startup Engineering Leaders: Leading technical teams through AI transformation? Learn architecture decisions, team mentorship strategies, and how to balance innovation with delivery from 8+ years of technical leadership
Startup Engineers: Implementing LLMs in production? Discover practical techniques for model accuracy tuning, cost optimization, rate limiting, and scaling AI systems that handle millions of requests
Solopreneurs: Building with a small team or alone? Learn how to leverage AI tools for internal development to ship faster and compete with larger teams
About Me
I’m Selva Ganapathy, a Principal Architect with over 18 years of experience building enterprise-grade products across every major technology wave. I’ve lived through the evolution from network security infrastructure to Gen AI-powered SaaS solutions. As a founder of a logistics SaaS startup for 5 years and currently leading AI engineering at Mintmesh, I bring both founder empathy and technical depth.
I don’t just read about AI engineering – I practice it daily, mentoring teams through Gen AI transitions, optimizing LLM costs, architecting fault-tolerant systems, and solving the messy problems that don’t make it into the documentation. I also live the AI-first development approach, using tools like Cursor AI and GitHub Copilot to multiply engineering productivity and help lean teams punch above their weight.
