This conversation is with Noah Landow, who runs Macktez, a New York tech consulting firm, and has spent almost 30 years helping startups and nonprofits make technology decisions.
👉 Watch the full Tech for Founder Podcast episode with Noah Landow on YouTube:
Why this matters
A lot of technology decisions get made the same way now: find a tool, type in a credit card, and you're using it. Noah calls this the consumerification of IT — genuinely useful for a small, fast-moving team.
The tension shows up later. The same ease that lets a team sign up for five tools in an afternoon also makes it easy to lose track of what's connected to what.
None of this means the convenient choice was wrong at the time. It usually wasn't. It means the same decision can quietly stop being the right one as the company around it changes.
Key ideas from this conversation
A system built for 30 people doesn't automatically scale to 300.
Small decisions can affect systems nobody realized were connected.
Role-based admin accounts protect the organization from any one person.
The core insight
Even a decision that was great at this point in time might be less great as the landscape you're operating within changes.
Noah points to identity and access management as the clearest version of this: the tools and processes that work well for a 30-person team often need to be substantially rebuilt by the time that company reaches hundreds of people.
A simple founder lens
The tools that feel most convenient right now are usually the ones nobody stops to question.
Which of your current tools did you choose because they were fast to set up, rather than because you'd checked them against how you expect to be operating in two years?
A note for early-stage founders
If you're three or four people, this costs almost nothing to act on now: set up one or two administrative accounts — not tied to any single person's name — for your domain registrar, email, and other critical systems. It's far easier to build this now than to untangle it later.
Something to sit with
Some tech choices announce their cost right away. Others just wait, quietly, until the company has grown too large to notice they're still there.
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