Company
Founder
- company
- founder
David Vartanian
I’m David Vartanian, founder of Beamer and a software engineer with twenty-two years of experience building and running products.
I’ve spent most of that time watching product companies pay costs they never put on a budget: coordination overhead, fragile integrations, and technical decisions that compound quietly until a feature that used to take a week takes a quarter. Nobody sends an invoice for those costs, so nobody fights to lower them.
Technical choices show up on the P&L whether finance tracks them or not. Beamer exists to measure and communicate the true cost of software engineering, so leaders can make informed decisions about it.
I work from scale by subtraction, removing what doesn’t earn its keep before the system gets heavier.
What I optimize for
I design for outcomes that stay true as a company grows:
- Subtraction: Remove what doesn’t add value before it becomes permanent overhead.
- Resilience: Systems that keep working because they have fewer moving parts to break.
- Understandability: Products that stay manageable as they gain customers and edge cases.
- Ownership: Decisions where the owner can see the future cost of what they’re building.
Speed without those four is just faster waste. If something adds overhead without a clear payoff, I remove it.
How this shows up in my work
The same philosophy shows up in different formats you can read, try, or hire for:
- The Engineering Tax is the book I’m writing and the article series I’m publishing as the ideas take shape. It’s the clearest statement of why engineering cost that goes unmeasured eats margin.
- Free tools like the complexity cost calculator and complexity snapshot put a number on engineering cost that standard dashboards don’t capture in one place.
- Consulting for product companies that want the subtraction applied to their product, systems, or pricing before growth makes the mess permanent.
How I work with people
When I work with founders or product teams, I challenge assumptions first, then put a cost on each option so the tradeoffs become comparable. I look for what can come out before anything new goes in, and I pressure-test whether the simpler path holds when the team is under stress.
The goal is to reduce noise so good decisions become obvious. When the true cost of engineering is on the table, builders stop fighting symptoms and focus on what actually moves the product forward.
If any of this matches what you’re dealing with, get in touch or start with The Engineering Tax series.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Access my digital business card at thesubtractionstrategist.com.