There was no way to fix it live, and the founder was the one left explaining it to his guests. He called us shortly after, and the ask was clear: a platform that would not stop again.

An auction system doesn't have a steady load: long stretches of almost nothing, then minutes where everyone acts at once. The previous platform ran on a fixed-size machine that couldn't grow at the peak of the evening. On top of that came the variety of mechanisms — twenty-seven different auction formats, each with its own rules for bids, closings, and edge cases.