Startup system design round wanted 'what would you actually ship this week' not a whiteboard architecture diagram

Prepped for weeks using the standard big-tech system design format — load balancers, sharding, the works. Startup interview instead asked me to scope an MVP for a feature with a two-person team and a week, and kept steering me away every time I reached for the fancy stuff. Took me a bit to realize they wanted pragmatic tradeoffs, not textbook scale. Worth asking upfront what stage company you're interviewing with before you prep, the two rounds are almost different skills.