Build Like You'll Be Audited

We’ve never raised money. But we build like we’ll be audited tomorrow.

Not because someone told us to. Not because a VC put us on a deadline. And definitely not because it looks good in a deck.

We do it because it’s how we sleep at night.

I’ve seen what happens when companies scale on speed alone. Fast commits. No traceability. APIs that return “200 OK” while silently breaking business logic underneath.

One team I worked with shipped a backend patch that passed QA and went live. A client flagged a data inconsistency two weeks later. There were no logs, no error state, no permission record, just blind spots and assumptions. We spent days investigating… and still couldn’t explain what happened.

That’s not infrastructure. That’s theater.

We didn’t want that.

So early on, we decided: Every decision in our systems should leave a trail. Every override, every policy check, every “yes” or “no” should be explainable by anyone, weeks later.

We log permission escalations. We track state transitions. We don’t skip review just because it’s internal.

Not because we’re paranoid. Because we’re building systems we would trust even if someone else wrote them.

There’s this idea that only “serious” companies, those with boards, investors, or regulators, need that kind of discipline.

I think that’s backwards.

By the time someone needs to ask if your system is safe, you’ve already lost their trust.

So no, we haven’t raised. And maybe we never will.

But we build like the call is coming anyway.

Because someone - a client, a user, a team member, or maybe just our future selves, will eventually ask:

“Why did this happen?” 
“Can we prove it?” 
“Can we trust it again?”        

And when they do, we’ll have the answer ready.

Build like trust matters. Even when no one’s watching.

Technology can be messy. Complex, frustrating, and often overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be.

We’ve spent 20 years helping founders and teams turn technical chaos into clarity. With the right people, principles, and tools, technology becomes a multiplier, not a blocker.

The Algorithm helps startups scale with software that actually works. If you're building something serious, we’d love to hear from you.