Build or buy: TaskRabbit rebuilt, Midi Health refused
Two founders, two opposite infrastructure calls. Leah Solivan paid for a full platform rebuild at TaskRabbit. Joanna Strober decided Midi Health's best engineering decision was the one it never made.
Every platform founder eventually hits the same wall. The thing you built to get started stops carrying the load, and you have to decide whether to rebuild it or rent someone else's.
Leah Solivan, who founded TaskRabbit, has described going through a full platform rebuild. On her account it was painful, and it saved the company.
Joanna Strober took the opposite decision at Midi Health. She has said the smartest move the company made was not building its own infrastructure at all.
The two calls are not in conflict. They are the same question answered from different positions.
A rebuild is worth its cost when the broken thing is the product itself — the marketplace mechanics, the matching, the core of what customers pay for. Nobody else will build that for you, and patching it indefinitely is the more expensive option.
Buying is the right call when the thing you need is plumbing that already exists. Engineering time spent recreating it is engineering time not spent on the part of the business that is actually yours.
The practical test for a founder facing the decision: would customers notice if this component were somebody else's? If the honest answer is no, the argument for building it is weaker than it feels at two in the morning.
Neither founder has published the cost of the decision, in money or in months. What both have said is that the choice arrived at a point where doing nothing was no longer available.