"My intuition would be that functional startups are visibly functional; they feel awesome." It is a lot more complicated than that. The term "sausage factory"

"My intuition would be that functional startups are visibly functional; they feel awesome." It is a lot more complicated than that. The term "sausage factory" usually applies - http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sausage%20factory http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sausage%20fac.... Even very successful startups can feel very dysfunctional in the heat of the moment. First, when you grow fast and do things that have never been done before, lots of things break. Second, very often management may be absolutely brilliant about some matters, but have giant gaping holes in other areas. A CTO may have figured out a breakthrough in machine learning, but have no idea how to run an engineering organization. A CEO may be able to sell sand to a Sheik, but have no idea how to do proper accounting. As a company matures, it figures out a way to augment the leadership and compensate for weaknesses of the CEO or founder. But there are always growing pains early on, as a startup has not yet identified and fixed said holes. You really should be evaluating a startup by the high notes that it is hitting, not by the amount of dysfunction. So it should feel awesome at least some of the time. But the startup may very well feel dysfunctional most of the time. That is ok, the dysfunction can be fixed later, but if there is no market or technical breakthrough, then the startup is probably not going to do well. OP, the questions to consider are: do you have a product that people love (ie, they use all the time and recommend it to others)? If yes, is this a sample of people that is representative a bigger market opportunity? Does your CTO seem reasonable enough that if you demonstrate the value of tests and a build process, he'll allow you to allot time to fix things?