14 ms·

Enough

246 points by valentinebm 9y ago

real-hacker 9y ago
This is especially true for Chinese businesses, but for an entirely different reason. Once a business reaches a certain size, it doesn't belong to the founder anymore, it's becoming state-owned. The founder either ends up in prison or have to escape from the country. Business owners talk about "keeping it small and low-profile" all the time.
tawayyy 9y ago
I believe that this also applies, to a very long extend, to open source projects. Both the ones having companies with financial interests and even the ones without such a direct profitability interest. So, once a given OSS starts to be popular, suddenly, all the use cases must be covered, despite the fact that there are, often, obvious design tensions. What happens is: complexity, lack of focus, and ultimately even the risk of becoming irrelevant, since the original use case that made a given software successful is no longer the main target, so newer softwares just specializing on that use case will eventually win the favor of users.
- knewter 9y ago
  best modern example of this realization is krita. it was a so-so graphics editor. they focused on digital painting and it is leaps and bounds better because of the focus.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
notenoughdhh 9y ago
TLDR DHH publicly rationalizes his own mediocrity using various flawed arguments.
- s_kilk 9y ago
  > using various flawed arguments Care to offer some counter arguments?
  - notenoughdhh 9y ago
    His initial argument is that it's okay to be mediocre because continuous success is just a "paradigm." That much was already clear. His argument falls apart when he tries to justify having enough, since that contradicts his initial argument. If continuous success isn't written in stone, then neither is having enough. Nokia's anecdotal demise isn't a reason to not seek continuous success. In fact, one could use that same anecdote to argue that having enough leads to failure. Distance between a founder and the product isn't an argument for not seeking continuous success. Some people prefer that distance and consider separation of labor to be more efficient. It's clear that DHH has some bias against success. Given articles like this and his public bet that Facebook's share price would fail. It isn't based in logic though, just ideology.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      If continuous success isn't written in stone, then neither is having enough. Do you know what "contradict" means? Because that in no way contradicts his point that there are many paths, of which continuous growth is only one. Nokia's anecdotal demise isn't a reason to not seek continuous success. He didn't claim it was. Distance between a founder and the product isn't an argument for not seeking continuous success. Some people prefer that distance and consider separation of labor to be more efficient. Which is what he said. "Now some people clearly like that."
    - reitanqild 9y ago
      It's clear that DHH has some bias against success. Quite on the contrary I and many others think of him as extremely successful: Profitable since year 2 IIRC Have built nice products that you can pay for by money (instead of by privacy) Well known for a certain web framework that 100 000s of developers use and many love. I'd even go so far as to say he influenced (not shaped though) our entire industry by showing how web development should be done in a world filled with ugliness like: old enterprise Java, old Spring, old Asp.Net webforms, old PHP etc.
- wmeredith 9y ago
  If DHH reps mediocrity in your mind I'd love to see your list of those who you consider successful.
  - notenoughdhh 9y ago
    Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Drew Houston, Travis Kalanick... The list goes on.
    - pmlnr 9y ago
      Seriously? Gates, OK, I may agree with him, due to the amount of charity he's doing, but the rest? Elon Musk is still a big question mark (see Tesla vs tinkering), the others... Why not put Marissa Mayer on the list, she made a lof of money as well. I'd rather see a list of people like RMS, even though he's quite mad, he actually made the word a better place.
      - the_common_man 9y ago
        Gates killed many businesses and lives with his business tactics (including one I know). No amount of charity will replace the business owners life. I don't get all starry eyed with tales of people who made billions by doing questionable things and then giving it away as charity later.
        pmlnr 9y ago
        That is a completely fair and valid stand, and you're right.
- jnsaff2 9y ago
  A troll anonymously feels hurt that the universality of their goal of becoming the biggest asshole is being questioned.
  - notenoughdhh 9y ago
    Jnsaff feels hurt that their even more universal and mainstream goal of being irrelevant and mediocre is being questioned.
  - dang 9y ago
    Please don't react to a trollish comment by violating the site guidelines yourself. The damage done by an established user posting like this is actually worse. If you think a comment doesn't belong here, you can (assuming >30 karma) flag it by clicking on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'flag' at the top.
camtarn 9y ago
TL;DR - you don't have to chase exponential growth; there are other business models which might suit your business better. Perhaps a title change? It sounds awfully dramatic as it stands.
fredley 9y ago
This mindset applies to many things besides growth. For example, how much money (as an annual income) is enough for you? Have you ever sat down and reasoned it out? I see many people stuck chasing larger and larger payouts, to the extent it makes them unhappy or even unwell, who never stopped to consider how much money was enough.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  This is what I feel when I see people complain that developer salaries have an upper limit in the mid 100s. I mean, I kinda get it, but honestly $100k is more than enough for me, let alone $150k.
  - bjpbakker 9y ago
    I believe that to be not just about earning more money but also more appreciation. People might not be looking for just more money, but as they see their managers making double their salaries while taking credit for people's work, they want more money to feel more appreciated.
    - fredley 9y ago
      I think some people probably conflate the two without realising. You think your work is just as valuable to the company, if not more valuable than your manager's, and you could very well be right. However, value of your work is only one factor that determines your salary, there are other market forces in play, and it's hard to rationalise about such things.
      - cctan 9y ago
        But developers and engineers should take the matter into their own hands and don't just bury their head in the sand and let the 'business' people decides their benefits and compensations. It would serve them better if they can treat themselves as product and services providers in a free market. Band together and unite! Don't stab each other in the back for meager bones being thrown at you.
FrankyHollywood 9y ago
The whole piece is a bit verbose, but the writer has a point. A lot of people are never satisfied, and that doesn't make the world a better place. The irony is unsatisfaction is rewarded. You can earn millions of dollars with making the world less beautifull, by selling people bad loanes or artificially keeping medicine prices high. I don't know if people can learn to have enough, or 'the system' must enforce it a little bit.
- mooreds 9y ago
  "rewarded" by the market. Let's not confuse extrinsic reward ($$$) within intrinsic reward, which is living the life you want to live. The equating of money and utility (in the economic sense) happens very quickly in micro economics 101, and then you spend the rest of the class speaking about money. But that is just because utility is very hard to track or reason about. Plenty of folks living good lives without being flashy about it.
- notenoughdhh 9y ago
  Satisfaction or non-satisfaction is totally orthogonal to whether the world is a "better" place or not. Lots of examples of people who were never satisfied who made the world a better place, e.g. Steve Jobs.
- petercooper 9y ago
  A lot of people are never satisfied, and that doesn't make the world a better place. A lack of satisfaction can also materialize in positive ways that do improve the world. This drive is innately human and is what led us to agriculture, medicine, technology, and to wherever else we're going to go.
  - FrankyHollywood 9y ago
    Thats true offcourse, dis-satisfaction can also be very positive. Anyone knows the word for 'never having enough money, land or power and aquiring it at the cost of others'?
forgottenacc57 9y ago
DHH's writing sort of radiates a sense of superiority.
- tybit 9y ago
  Yeah, he has a decent point but someone commissioning custom super cars isn't in the best position to make it.
  - tawayyy 9y ago
    Doesn't this make his point stronger? Even with a company that does not want to grow indefinitely, he can still afford super cars. Reality is that unicorns only benefit VCs. Most founders should not take any VC money and try to bootstrap and get, like, N million dollars businesses, not to try to achieve billion dollar businesses. The former is 1000x times simpler.
    - davidivadavid 9y ago
      It doesn't make his point stronger because his company is already comparatively huge if you look at most startups who supposedly fall prey to the "growth at all costs" mentality. His point is moot because a lot of startups will agree with him when they reach the scale of Basecamp. They're not there yet, so they need to think about growth. Meanwhile, companies who are huge and going after more growth don't give a fuck about what DHH writes. It feels like there's a pretty significant message/audience mismatch.
  - davidivadavid 9y ago
    That's also what I find most irksome about DHH. "Hey guys, don't get too rich please — just look at me and my millionaire lifestyle and enjoy."
- shadowhunter 9y ago
  I'd have a sense of superiority too if I was that good looking and smart
- 9y ago
norswap 9y ago
In the same vein by the same author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695356
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ludicast 9y ago
"My personal preference is to only be a general if it can be in the Roman tradition of charging in with the first wave." - great line
austenallred 9y ago
Am I the only person sick of DHH and the 37 Signals people writing the same article 800 times? We get it. You don't have to raise VC or grow exponentially to have a great company. They have seriously written the same thing hundreds of times in hundreds of different ways, and it's barely even a contrarian view anymore. I hear as many people saying, "I wish more people would talk about how you don't have to raise VC" as I do people talking about raising VC these days.
- korussian 9y ago
  Since DHH started writing, there have been 800 generations of starry-eyed startup people with unexamined motivations. He can do his thing and there's more than enough regard for the value of it.
- ryanbrunner 9y ago
  I mean, how many others are there? I think there was a pretty strong undercurrent, even to the point of it being the dominant narrative back when Basecamp was getting started in the mid 2000's, but since 2010 or so, most of the startup world has focused on the venture-backed "rocketship" approach. Yeah, it's usually not hard to predict what DHH's stance on growth vs. sustainability is going to be, and yes, he's prolific, but it's worthwhile to have opinions that go against the prevailing consensus, even if you don't agree with them.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Am I the only person sick of DHH and the 37 Signals people writing the same article 800 times? Well, for one, nobody forced anyone to read it. Second, you should at least be even more sick of the 50,000 other sources shouting and blogging the opposite message all the time. At least DHH brings a tiny balance to this.
  - shubhamjain 9y ago
    VC talk can be overbearing at times but I haven't seen anyone harping on how raising money is superior to bootstrapping. DHH, on the other hand, keeps on lambasting the VC industry without much helpful advice. It's not the contrarian view that is exasperating, it's his parochial attitude that venture capital hasn't done any good. He strikes as a person who would use Uber everyday without acknowledging that without VC capital the company couldn't have existed.
edanm 9y ago
Of course everyone is free to choose what they want to do with their own business. And I have personally also chosen non-standard paths of smaller growth (e.g., I started a software consultancy instead of a VC-backed company). However, there are a few concrete reasons why companies, especially software companies (as opposed to e.g. restaurants), tend towards growth: 1. Some companies will require some amount of growth to be profitable. Not necessarily VC style growth, but you really might need a 100-employee company. 2. If you're not growing, you're not facing new challenges. This might or might not bother you as the founder of the company, but people tend to like dealing with new challenges in their work, whether it be technical challenges or business challenges. 3. Relatedly, if you want to work with smart, ambitious people, you need to have growth to provide them with interesting challenges. A McDonald's can afford to rehire employees every year, but it's harder for software companies. 4. Even if your employees don't care about technical challenges, they probably still care about compensation and their career ladder. It's all well and good that you as the owner are making lots of money, but your employees need a realistic path to making more and having a better job title too, otherwise you can't retain the best employees. 5. Of course, the simplest reason is named in the article - because of zero marginal distribution costs and network effects in software, large players eventually tend to dominate many fields. Even if you build a CRM perfectly fit for a niche industry, there's a good chance many customers will eventually jump to something like salesforce, both because of marketing, and because of features/network effects (more integrations, etc). Again, not saying DHH is wrong, just that these are structural reasons why software companies (and similar) tend towards growth.
- notahacker 9y ago
  Not sure how true (2) and (3) are: you can face new challenges every day in the tiniest consultancy ever, and have all sorts of fun learning about new niches to organically expand into that would make no sense for a VC backed company to waste their time dominating. Sure, it's not going to mollify the CTO who's not satisfied if he's not scaling a service to a million concurrent users or the VP Sales who feels underemployed if he's not running an army of junior salespeople, but if your goal was an organically-grown medium-sized business you probably didn't need their skillset anyway. And some of the roles that scaling up creates requirements for are repetitive drudge work...
benjaminwootton 9y ago
It takes ambition and drive to get to the successful point of "enough". Once you are there, these traits don't just turn off. They probably amplify because you have line of sight to bolder ambitions.
ryanmarsh 9y ago
Why do DHH's ramblings still make it to the front page of HN?
yanilkr 9y ago
How would you talk to a teenager who thinks "C" grade is good enough? It's all relative. As an adult you can see the flaw in that teenager's mindset. The beliefs behind your paradigm are important too. If you think one can achieve "growth" only by adding positive value to others, growth is not a bad thing. How is it possible to grow when there is no potential to grow? It would take some "crazies" to try to grow something that everyone else thinks this is it. We know that some people in history beat the prevailing expectations in sports, art and personal wealth. I understand the conversation here is about when to stop or when should one realize that the idea has reached its potential? I was at a startup pitching event where a founder was pitching a profitable "presentation software" company. The judge asked "How many billion dollar presentation software companies do you know?". "Enough" conversation becomes important in software products because if smart people do not understand what is good, better and best they take more risks that only end up ruining the product.
paulddraper 9y ago
Suggested alternate title: > When is business growth "enough"?
anotherevan 9y ago
“Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.” — Edward Abbey

246 points by valentinebm 9y ago

This is especially true for Chinese businesses, but for an entirely different reason. Once a business reaches a certain size, it doesn't belong to the founder anymore, it's becoming state-owned. The founder either ends up in prison or have to escape from the country. Business owners talk about "keeping it small and low-profile" all the time.

tawayyy 9y ago

I believe that this also applies, to a very long extend, to open source projects. Both the ones having companies with financial interests and even the ones without such a direct profitability interest. So, once a given OSS starts to be popular, suddenly, all the use cases must be covered, despite the fact that there are, often, obvious design tensions. What happens is: complexity, lack of focus, and ultimately even the risk of becoming irrelevant, since the original use case that made a given software successful is no longer the main target, so newer softwares just specializing on that use case will eventually win the favor of users.

knewter 9y ago
best modern example of this realization is krita. it was a so-so graphics editor. they focused on digital painting and it is leaps and bounds better because of the focus.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

notenoughdhh 9y ago

TLDR DHH publicly rationalizes his own mediocrity using various flawed arguments.

s_kilk 9y ago
> using various flawed arguments Care to offer some counter arguments?
- notenoughdhh 9y ago
  His initial argument is that it's okay to be mediocre because continuous success is just a "paradigm." That much was already clear. His argument falls apart when he tries to justify having enough, since that contradicts his initial argument. If continuous success isn't written in stone, then neither is having enough. Nokia's anecdotal demise isn't a reason to not seek continuous success. In fact, one could use that same anecdote to argue that having enough leads to failure. Distance between a founder and the product isn't an argument for not seeking continuous success. Some people prefer that distance and consider separation of labor to be more efficient. It's clear that DHH has some bias against success. Given articles like this and his public bet that Facebook's share price would fail. It isn't based in logic though, just ideology.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    If continuous success isn't written in stone, then neither is having enough. Do you know what "contradict" means? Because that in no way contradicts his point that there are many paths, of which continuous growth is only one. Nokia's anecdotal demise isn't a reason to not seek continuous success. He didn't claim it was. Distance between a founder and the product isn't an argument for not seeking continuous success. Some people prefer that distance and consider separation of labor to be more efficient. Which is what he said. "Now some people clearly like that."
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    It's clear that DHH has some bias against success. Quite on the contrary I and many others think of him as extremely successful: Profitable since year 2 IIRC Have built nice products that you can pay for by money (instead of by privacy) Well known for a certain web framework that 100 000s of developers use and many love. I'd even go so far as to say he influenced (not shaped though) our entire industry by showing how web development should be done in a world filled with ugliness like: old enterprise Java, old Spring, old Asp.Net webforms, old PHP etc.
wmeredith 9y ago
If DHH reps mediocrity in your mind I'd love to see your list of those who you consider successful.
- notenoughdhh 9y ago
  Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Drew Houston, Travis Kalanick... The list goes on.
  - pmlnr 9y ago
    Seriously? Gates, OK, I may agree with him, due to the amount of charity he's doing, but the rest? Elon Musk is still a big question mark (see Tesla vs tinkering), the others... Why not put Marissa Mayer on the list, she made a lof of money as well. I'd rather see a list of people like RMS, even though he's quite mad, he actually made the word a better place.
    - the_common_man 9y ago
      Gates killed many businesses and lives with his business tactics (including one I know). No amount of charity will replace the business owners life. I don't get all starry eyed with tales of people who made billions by doing questionable things and then giving it away as charity later.
      - pmlnr 9y ago
        That is a completely fair and valid stand, and you're right.
jnsaff2 9y ago
A troll anonymously feels hurt that the universality of their goal of becoming the biggest asshole is being questioned.
- notenoughdhh 9y ago
  Jnsaff feels hurt that their even more universal and mainstream goal of being irrelevant and mediocre is being questioned.
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't react to a trollish comment by violating the site guidelines yourself. The damage done by an established user posting like this is actually worse. If you think a comment doesn't belong here, you can (assuming >30 karma) flag it by clicking on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'flag' at the top.

camtarn 9y ago

TL;DR - you don't have to chase exponential growth; there are other business models which might suit your business better. Perhaps a title change? It sounds awfully dramatic as it stands.

fredley 9y ago

This mindset applies to many things besides growth. For example, how much money (as an annual income) is enough for you? Have you ever sat down and reasoned it out? I see many people stuck chasing larger and larger payouts, to the extent it makes them unhappy or even unwell, who never stopped to consider how much money was enough.

sotojuan 9y ago
This is what I feel when I see people complain that developer salaries have an upper limit in the mid 100s. I mean, I kinda get it, but honestly $100k is more than enough for me, let alone $150k.
- bjpbakker 9y ago
  I believe that to be not just about earning more money but also more appreciation. People might not be looking for just more money, but as they see their managers making double their salaries while taking credit for people's work, they want more money to feel more appreciated.
  - fredley 9y ago
    I think some people probably conflate the two without realising. You think your work is just as valuable to the company, if not more valuable than your manager's, and you could very well be right. However, value of your work is only one factor that determines your salary, there are other market forces in play, and it's hard to rationalise about such things.
    - cctan 9y ago
      But developers and engineers should take the matter into their own hands and don't just bury their head in the sand and let the 'business' people decides their benefits and compensations. It would serve them better if they can treat themselves as product and services providers in a free market. Band together and unite! Don't stab each other in the back for meager bones being thrown at you.

FrankyHollywood 9y ago

The whole piece is a bit verbose, but the writer has a point. A lot of people are never satisfied, and that doesn't make the world a better place. The irony is unsatisfaction is rewarded. You can earn millions of dollars with making the world less beautifull, by selling people bad loanes or artificially keeping medicine prices high. I don't know if people can learn to have enough, or 'the system' must enforce it a little bit.

mooreds 9y ago
"rewarded" by the market. Let's not confuse extrinsic reward ($$$) within intrinsic reward, which is living the life you want to live. The equating of money and utility (in the economic sense) happens very quickly in micro economics 101, and then you spend the rest of the class speaking about money. But that is just because utility is very hard to track or reason about. Plenty of folks living good lives without being flashy about it.
notenoughdhh 9y ago
Satisfaction or non-satisfaction is totally orthogonal to whether the world is a "better" place or not. Lots of examples of people who were never satisfied who made the world a better place, e.g. Steve Jobs.
petercooper 9y ago
A lot of people are never satisfied, and that doesn't make the world a better place. A lack of satisfaction can also materialize in positive ways that do improve the world. This drive is innately human and is what led us to agriculture, medicine, technology, and to wherever else we're going to go.
- FrankyHollywood 9y ago
  Thats true offcourse, dis-satisfaction can also be very positive. Anyone knows the word for 'never having enough money, land or power and aquiring it at the cost of others'?

forgottenacc57 9y ago

DHH's writing sort of radiates a sense of superiority.

tybit 9y ago
Yeah, he has a decent point but someone commissioning custom super cars isn't in the best position to make it.
- tawayyy 9y ago
  Doesn't this make his point stronger? Even with a company that does not want to grow indefinitely, he can still afford super cars. Reality is that unicorns only benefit VCs. Most founders should not take any VC money and try to bootstrap and get, like, N million dollars businesses, not to try to achieve billion dollar businesses. The former is 1000x times simpler.
  - davidivadavid 9y ago
    It doesn't make his point stronger because his company is already comparatively huge if you look at most startups who supposedly fall prey to the "growth at all costs" mentality. His point is moot because a lot of startups will agree with him when they reach the scale of Basecamp. They're not there yet, so they need to think about growth. Meanwhile, companies who are huge and going after more growth don't give a fuck about what DHH writes. It feels like there's a pretty significant message/audience mismatch.
- davidivadavid 9y ago
  That's also what I find most irksome about DHH. "Hey guys, don't get too rich please — just look at me and my millionaire lifestyle and enjoy."
shadowhunter 9y ago
I'd have a sense of superiority too if I was that good looking and smart
9y ago

norswap 9y ago

In the same vein by the same author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695356

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ludicast 9y ago

"My personal preference is to only be a general if it can be in the Roman tradition of charging in with the first wave." - great line

austenallred 9y ago

Am I the only person sick of DHH and the 37 Signals people writing the same article 800 times? We get it. You don't have to raise VC or grow exponentially to have a great company. They have seriously written the same thing hundreds of times in hundreds of different ways, and it's barely even a contrarian view anymore. I hear as many people saying, "I wish more people would talk about how you don't have to raise VC" as I do people talking about raising VC these days.

korussian 9y ago
Since DHH started writing, there have been 800 generations of starry-eyed startup people with unexamined motivations. He can do his thing and there's more than enough regard for the value of it.
ryanbrunner 9y ago
I mean, how many others are there? I think there was a pretty strong undercurrent, even to the point of it being the dominant narrative back when Basecamp was getting started in the mid 2000's, but since 2010 or so, most of the startup world has focused on the venture-backed "rocketship" approach. Yeah, it's usually not hard to predict what DHH's stance on growth vs. sustainability is going to be, and yes, he's prolific, but it's worthwhile to have opinions that go against the prevailing consensus, even if you don't agree with them.
coldtea 9y ago
>Am I the only person sick of DHH and the 37 Signals people writing the same article 800 times? Well, for one, nobody forced anyone to read it. Second, you should at least be even more sick of the 50,000 other sources shouting and blogging the opposite message all the time. At least DHH brings a tiny balance to this.
- shubhamjain 9y ago
  VC talk can be overbearing at times but I haven't seen anyone harping on how raising money is superior to bootstrapping. DHH, on the other hand, keeps on lambasting the VC industry without much helpful advice. It's not the contrarian view that is exasperating, it's his parochial attitude that venture capital hasn't done any good. He strikes as a person who would use Uber everyday without acknowledging that without VC capital the company couldn't have existed.

edanm 9y ago

Of course everyone is free to choose what they want to do with their own business. And I have personally also chosen non-standard paths of smaller growth (e.g., I started a software consultancy instead of a VC-backed company). However, there are a few concrete reasons why companies, especially software companies (as opposed to e.g. restaurants), tend towards growth: 1. Some companies will require some amount of growth to be profitable. Not necessarily VC style growth, but you really might need a 100-employee company. 2. If you're not growing, you're not facing new challenges. This might or might not bother you as the founder of the company, but people tend to like dealing with new challenges in their work, whether it be technical challenges or business challenges. 3. Relatedly, if you want to work with smart, ambitious people, you need to have growth to provide them with interesting challenges. A McDonald's can afford to rehire employees every year, but it's harder for software companies. 4. Even if your employees don't care about technical challenges, they probably still care about compensation and their career ladder. It's all well and good that you as the owner are making lots of money, but your employees need a realistic path to making more and having a better job title too, otherwise you can't retain the best employees. 5. Of course, the simplest reason is named in the article - because of zero marginal distribution costs and network effects in software, large players eventually tend to dominate many fields. Even if you build a CRM perfectly fit for a niche industry, there's a good chance many customers will eventually jump to something like salesforce, both because of marketing, and because of features/network effects (more integrations, etc). Again, not saying DHH is wrong, just that these are structural reasons why software companies (and similar) tend towards growth.

notahacker 9y ago
Not sure how true (2) and (3) are: you can face new challenges every day in the tiniest consultancy ever, and have all sorts of fun learning about new niches to organically expand into that would make no sense for a VC backed company to waste their time dominating. Sure, it's not going to mollify the CTO who's not satisfied if he's not scaling a service to a million concurrent users or the VP Sales who feels underemployed if he's not running an army of junior salespeople, but if your goal was an organically-grown medium-sized business you probably didn't need their skillset anyway. And some of the roles that scaling up creates requirements for are repetitive drudge work...

benjaminwootton 9y ago

It takes ambition and drive to get to the successful point of "enough". Once you are there, these traits don't just turn off. They probably amplify because you have line of sight to bolder ambitions.

ryanmarsh 9y ago

Why do DHH's ramblings still make it to the front page of HN?

yanilkr 9y ago

How would you talk to a teenager who thinks "C" grade is good enough? It's all relative. As an adult you can see the flaw in that teenager's mindset. The beliefs behind your paradigm are important too. If you think one can achieve "growth" only by adding positive value to others, growth is not a bad thing. How is it possible to grow when there is no potential to grow? It would take some "crazies" to try to grow something that everyone else thinks this is it. We know that some people in history beat the prevailing expectations in sports, art and personal wealth. I understand the conversation here is about when to stop or when should one realize that the idea has reached its potential? I was at a startup pitching event where a founder was pitching a profitable "presentation software" company. The judge asked "How many billion dollar presentation software companies do you know?". "Enough" conversation becomes important in software products because if smart people do not understand what is good, better and best they take more risks that only end up ruining the product.

paulddraper 9y ago

Suggested alternate title: > When is business growth "enough"?

anotherevan 9y ago

“Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.” — Edward Abbey