The first conversation is usually polite. Timelines. Platforms. Ballpark numbers. The second conversation is more revealing. Founders start asking questions that sound less like hiring and more like risk assessment. What happens after launch? Who owns decisions when something breaks? How hard will it be to change this in a year? In Austin’s competitive startup environment, founders have...

The first time I felt something was off, I didn’t see an error. I felt it. It was late afternoon, the office mostly empty, the kind of quiet where even small inconsistencies feel louder. I tapped a screen I’d worked on dozens of times before. The animation stuttered, then corrected itself, as if the app had second-guessed its own response. In isolation, the view was...