Current co is small. We are putting in the safeguards from Day 1. Well, okay technically like day 120, the first few months were a mad dash to MVP. But now that we have some breathing room, yeah, we put a lot of emphasis on preventing outages, detecting and diagnosing outages promptly, documenting them, doing the whole 5-why's thing, and preventing them in the future. We didn't have to, we could have kept mad dashing and growth hacking. But very fortunately, we have a great culture here (founders have lots of hindsight from past startups).
It's like a seed for crystal growth. Small company is exactly the best time to implement these things, because other employees will try to match the cultural norms and habits.
Well, I started at the small company I'm currently at around day 7300, where "source control" consisted of asking the one person who was in charge of all source code for a copy of the files you needed to work on, and then giving the updated files back. He'd write down the "checked out" files on a whiteboard to ensure that two people couldn't work on the same file at the same time.
The fact that I've gotten it to the point of using git with automated build and deployment is a small miracle in itself. Not everybody gets to start from a clean slate.
It's like a seed for crystal growth. Small company is exactly the best time to implement these things, because other employees will try to match the cultural norms and habits.