Every morning, Stukent's first CTO Mike "Turbo" Farmer would burst into the warehouse-turned-office shouting "TURBO!" – bringing energy and fun to a startup racing against impossible deadlines. As the sole technical leader, Mike powered through Christmas coding sessions to rebuild Stukent's entire platform, ultimately helping create software that would impact students at over 300 universities. Through stories of late-night debugging sessions, heated strategy meetings, and the pressure of being the company's only engineer, Mike breaks down what it really takes to build mission-critical educational software from scratch. The conversation explores the delicate balance of technical decisions in a non-technical founding team, the importance of stock option understanding for early employees, and how celebrating small wins helped the team push through their toughest challenges. For founders looking to build strong technical partnerships and engineers considering joining early-stage startups, this episode offers invaluable insights into the human side of startup engineering leadership.